Culling and rating your photographs in Capture One Pro 20

In this article, we’ll take a look at culling through your photographs and organizing them using a new feature in Capture One Pro 20 (CO20). For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term culling, it refers to going through your photographs from a shoot or session and assigning a value. In this case, that value is a star rating from 1-5.

Once you’ve completed the culling, you can then easily filter the star rated images (from 1-5) and begin your editing. In CO20 there is a new feature that helps speed the process. The way it works is that once you’ve assigned a rating, ether star or color, it automatically moves you to the next image. To use this feature, change to the Library tab.

You’ll want to make sure the Viewer is not checked in the View menu (see below).

To activate this automatic feature, go to the Select menu and click on Select Next When and choose Star Rated. You can also have it do the same thing using Color Tagged. You only have to do this once. To turn it off, uncheck it.

With this feature now active, you can start assigning a star rating to each photograph in the Library view. Star ratings are assigned by pressing a number on the keyboard from 1-5 where 5 is the highest rating. You can also clear the star rating by pressing the number zero. Once you assign a rating, CO20 will automatically move to the next photograph in the view. Cool! This will make it fast and easy to rate your photographs.

Once you have your photos rated, you can then select which rated group to view by clicking on the number of stars in the Rating section. In this instance, I’m seeing four photographs that I rated with 5 stars.

Here’s a screenshot of the rating section in the Library tab so you can see it in context. Once you select a star rating, CO20 will only display those images with that rating in the Library. To remove the filter, click on the colored circle.

So there you go, a fast easy way to cull, rate and view your photographs!

Be sure to check out this new version. You’ll find a 30-day free trial to Capture One Pro 20 here.