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Basic Tool Behavior

Lesson 18 from: Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10

David Grover

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Lesson Info

18. Basic Tool Behavior

Next Lesson: Tool Basics Part 1

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Introduction

08:11
2

What's Possible with Capture One: Quick Edit

06:50
3

Capture One Versions: Installation Basics

02:19
4

Interface Introduction and Customization

27:16
5

The Power of Keyboard Shortcuts

09:27
6

Image Management Basics

10:38
7

Organization Best Practices

09:53
8

Building your First Catalog

19:47
9

Image File Management Automation

06:42
10

Advanced Catalog Organization

17:41
11

How to Add Meta Data

12:42
12

Searching and Filtering Techniques

11:31
13

Further Catalog Strategies

07:09
14

Basic Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques

15:31
15

Advanced Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques

20:54
16

Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening

09:29
17

How to Correct for Perspective

12:35
18

Basic Tool Behavior

11:04
19

Tool Basics Part 1

22:44
20

Tool Basics Part 2

06:34
21

Converting to Black and White and Adding Grain

10:13
22

How to Apply Image Adjustments Globally

08:02
23

Sharpening and Noise Reduction

09:58
24

How to Create and Save Styles and Presets

07:40
25

Why Should You Shoot Tethered?

02:26
26

How to Set-Up Your Tethered Hardware

02:15
27

How To Set Up A Tethered Photoshoot Project

11:07
28

Basic Session Workflow Organizing And Making Selects

21:45
29

Basic Session Workflow Exporting

05:44
30

Advanced Session Workflow

15:00
31

Creating Selections With Smart Albums

06:20
32

Advanced Exporting

09:03
33

Saving Session Templates

03:14
34

Collaborating On Set With Capture Pilot

17:45
35

Using The Color Editor Basic Color Adjustment

15:26
36

Skin Tone Adjustments

09:30
37

Color Grading Using The Color Balance Tool

12:54
38

Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color

08:11
39

Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients

12:31
40

Advanced Local Adjustments using Masks

17:15
41

Dodging and Burning in Capture One

11:30
42

Creating Local Adjustments with the Color Editor

07:15
43

How to Use Local Adjustment Masks for Color Editing

03:43
44

How to Remove Objects in your Image

09:07
45

Image Processing Demo: Local Adjustments

05:57
46

Exporting with File>Export

08:07
47

Export Strategies and Proofing Previews with Process Recipes

11:49
48

How to Export for Social Media

05:11
49

More Clever Tricks with Capture One Pro 10

05:57
50

Final Q&A

13:11

Lesson Info

Basic Tool Behavior

I've moved into the color tool tab. Which is the one that kinda looks like three circles. You can see at the top left hand side of the screen. Purely just to make you aware of a tool called base characteristics. This one over here. You may never ever have to look at this tool. You may never change anything in it, but it's useful to know what it does. You'll see the first category: ICC Profile. That's the color profile that describes your camera. That's not something, again, you have to worry about. This is a profile that's made by Phase One at the Phase One HQ in Denmark. There's a very long process that goes into color profiling your camera. We don't just put it on a bench, take a picture of a target, press a button, and say it's done. We create around 700 shots per camera to actually build that profile. Even though it starts as a mathematical process, it's very much a hand-tuned profile that works very well for all kinds of photographic situations. Even though you can create a profil...

e at the push of a button this profile has to be all-around, so that it's good for landscape photography, it has a good skin-tone, it works nicely for product work, and so on. It's actually quite the skill to create these profiles. As I said, that's automatic, so if I just kind of move through some of the images, you'll see as we get to this one, it's switched to Nikon shot. Then we're at a Phase One camera and so on and so forth. Regardless of what camera you have, it will be automatically chosen here. This is not something you have to worry too much about. The second part is called curve. Let's just zoom into that a bit. This is if you like the default contrast curve that we apply to the image. If we don't apply anything to the image, it looks super, super flat. Very dingy, very low contrast. We give you some kind of curve that gives you a good start point for general photography. And if you don't change anything, it will be always set to auto. Now, auto, kind of strange, doesn't mean auto. It doesn't mean we're doing any automatic things. Auto means that it will use the curve that we used to create the profile. Generally, that is film standard. So it's standard kind of contrast curve that is a good all around start point for all kinds of photography. If we just open up... Let's just pick. A portrait, for example. If we go to extra shadow, see it just opens up the shadows a little bit more. Let's go back to auto and then extra shadow. This curve is a good choice if you just think you always wanna have a bit more shadow detail going on in your shots. High contrast kinda does the opposite and just gives you a higher contrast default. Film standard is 99% the same as auto. The reason why we have auto is that we have some special profiles for like art reproduction and so on which are created using different curves. But you can be pretty much rest assured with your cameras, it's always gonna be film standard. Then we have linear response which is the super, super flat version. Now, it looks kind of ugly if we just sort of pick up, let's just grab another shot and then we get linear response and it goes very flat, very low contrast. Potentially, you can kind of drag more out of the image if you start with linear response. But the caveat is that there is kind of less handholding by Capture One in the background. So you've got to keep an eye on your highlights, because you don't want to burn those out. And just be aware that you need to be a little bit careful with adjustments, whereas if we use something like auto then there is some care-taking in preserving highlights when we apply the contrast curve and so on. Just be a little bit mindful. But there's no harm in actually clicking through the curves and then just seeing, you know what, this image for example, if we went to this one, this image has a lot of shadow detail. Let's just start by opening up those shadows a bit more, for example. Generally, you don't have to worry about it too much. You'll also see the process engine which is in use. In this case, Capture One 10. The process engine is really the algorithms and the brains and all the stuff that we use to take the raw file and then bring that to you on screen, as such. If you're upgrading from like older versions of Capture One, let's say you were on Capture One 8 or Capture One 9, and you upgraded to 10 and you opened your catalog or sessions into Capture One 10, we do not automatically upgrade your images to the latest engine. What you'll see is there'll be a little upgrade button sitting alongside it. Which means it will then upgrade it from whatever engine it's on to the latest engine. The reason why we don't do it by default, is that it can affect the look of the image. Certainly, from like older version of Capture One, like version seven and version eight, we made quite extensive changes to the raw conversion engine which would mean when you upgrade it would kinda change the image a bit. And it's not down to us to change how your images look. It's your choice, so it's always a choice. But if you have like a hundred or ten thousand images you want to upgrade, you can simply select all of them and click the upgrade button and it would just do everything in one pass. Again, it's of course your choice. With that said, let's move on to basic tool behavior. Just bring up different collection of images. We're gonna go back to the first tool tab, which is kind of known as the exposure tool tab. Something I do, by default it doesn't actually have a white balance at all in the exposure tool tab, but kind of juggling with exposure and white balance is often something I do at the same time. So for me, I like to add the white balance tool into the exposure tool tab. You of course don't have to do that. You can happily stick with it in the color tab. Okay, so the first thing we need to look at is kind of the similarity between all the various different tools. Let's just bring up any old image, it doesn't matter. Let's drag it all out, so that we can see it. Tools in Capture One look like this. They have either one or more sliders. And they have a number of these small icons that sit on the top right hand corner. As you can probably guess when you drag a slider, you change the value of that slider. If you want to preview what a slider does, you can actually click on the name of it and it will give you a preview of that one particular slider. That is a before and after view, like so. Just click and hold on the name and you can see exactly what it's doing. If you want to reset the slider to zero, you can just double click on the slider and it will drop back to zero. Double-tap, like so, back to zero. [Coughs] If you want to reset everything in the tool, then it's this one here, let's zoom in again. It's the fourth one across, so the reset button. If I click that, then it takes everything back to zero. Let's just mess this up again. About by that much. If you wanna preview what the tool is doing, like a before and after, you'll see no on/off button on the tool itself. But if you option click the same reset button, then it will give you a before and after. A tool preview and that's the same for any tool, as well. Remember, all this stuff is common throughout all the tools. We can reset once more, like so. The first one, the question mark icon: Online Help. If you click that, and you're connected to the internet. That will take you to the help page to the particular thing that you're looking at in Capture One. In this case, it would just take you to the exposure tool. A is for auto. If we click that, Capture One will make some assumptions about the image and do an auto-adjustment for that particular tool only. If you want to do a global auto-adjust, then you're looking up here on the toolbar. And if we click and hold, you can say what you want to be is part of the auto-adjust. So I could have white balance, exposure, high dynamic range, and levels. If I clicked that, that would do auto everything. It does actually do a pretty nice job. Don't think of auto being sort of non-professional or whatever. It does do not really a bad job on many images, so it's worth a try. If you want to reset the entire image back to default, it's this one up here. Or as you might have seen me do earlier, just Command R to reset quite so. Take everything back to default. This little tiny one here, we come to afterwards, this copies and applies just single tool values. If you wanted to take the same exposure adjustment and throw that across a whole bunch of images then we can do that here for example. I'll show you a demo of that a little bit later. This one we saw reset, and this one was for saving presets of any particular tool. You can preview your presets. Let's just move this up here. We can preview your presets just by clicking through them like so. That gives you an instant preview, moves the sliders, so you can see what they're doing. You can save your own presets of course, and you can stack presets together, so that will just layer them on top of each other. That's common between all the tools. Just to recap: Press the name to preview, Double click to set to zero, press the, oops, come on, press the reset button to reset everything, and option click the reset button to preview what the tool is doing like so. A for auto, question mark for help, up down arrow for copy and apply, which we'll look at.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials

Capture One Discount Code
Wacom Discount Code
Tether Tools Discount Code

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workspace Layout Visual
Windows Keyboard Shortcuts
Mac Keyboard Shortcuts
Session Users Glossary of Terms
Catalog Users Glossary of Terms

Ratings and Reviews

Stef
 

This is a good overview of Capture One 10. The course is well structured and presented logically and progressively with clear and concise examples. The software is intricate and the amount of details presented will benefit from a second or third viewing, along with sufficient practice. David is an excellent teacher, slow enough to follow, fast enough to keep the listener's interest. I would agree with a previous reviewer that the shooting session was uninspired but the tethered demo was thoroughly useful nevertheless for someone to become an assistant, for instance. If you have ever used LR in this role, you will appreciate the power and stability of C1 for tethering. With regards to the comment about this class being non-creative; before you can run you have to walk and this course is all about understanding how to operate the software not about what you eventually want to do with it. Capture One is well designed, speedy and its homogeneous interface makes it easy to get to a result once you have a good knowledge of its layout and principles, compared for example with LR which is all over the place with modes, inconsistent and slow operations. Likewise, the C1 color editor is miles ahead of LR color functions, in simplicity and overall efficiency. This class is about mechanics for a reason; creativity is a parallel stream. It would have been beneficial to have a module highlighting major differences with LR for people migrating to Capture One as the word on the street is that C1 is hard. I would suggest to listen in to convince yourself of the contrary. All in all, I recommend this class; it is time well invested if you want to become more comfortable with Capture One and discover its potential.

user-b05602
 

The course is excellent and David does a nice job. However, I'm an advanced armature, not a professional. I had my own personal color darkroom, then Photoshop/Bridge, and NIK which I still use occasionally. My intention is to rely on Capture One which I purchased about 90 days ago. I would have appreciated a SIMPLE, here is how you load (Import) an image, "save" or "save as" and how to simply export an image (Variant). Yes those items are covered but, David has a tendency to casually and very quickly jump from Tool Tabs or Cursor Tools or the Tool Bar and then magically it's done and he has moved on. How did he do it. Based on David's training, I love the results I get with Capture One Pro. Yes, I know this is not Photoshop - it's much better. I never used Lightroom. I added variant to my vocabulary and I understand all the tools. I still struggle with the simple import, save, save as, and export of a image I worked on and cropped, then trying to consistently open that image as I see it in Capture One Pro. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I don't know why. I will continue to re-review the course materials and I will figure it out. I know there is something simple I missed as David navigated the various tools and pull downs. I recommend this class but it does little for the armature. Capture One Pro is second nature to him and he knows all the ins and outs. I would help me a lot if he just add a 5 minute intro, importing an image from a folder, just crop it, then export the variant and open it in Photoshop.

Maria Baptiste
 

I recently purchased Capture One because I needed a RAW converter that was more dependable and also more reliable when it came to shooting tethered. I also noticed that many of the photogs I follow really enjoy using Capture One and rave about its efficiency. After looking at a few YouTube videos I decided that I needed something more thorough and of course CreativeLive delivered. This is an excellent course and David Grover is a superb instructor. His in depth and thorough knowledge of the software is obvious but his manner of speaking and the simplicity with which he provides directions makes it easy to learn Capture One and lets you appreciate a sophisticated and expertly engineered software. If you're working with Capture One 11, layers is a little different than in version 10 but otherwise everything David discusses is the same. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and will continue to refer back to sections as needed. Thank you Creative Live and David Grover!!

Student Work

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