Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Further experience with Capture One 10.2
#1
Now that I've worked on a larger set of images, there are many things I can say...

 

First, it turned out that starting with just a partial import of the Lightroom catalog was a good idea: in this way I could find a serious problem that would have appeared in my keyword workflow, it actually did some damage, but limited and repairable from a backup. Then I found a workaround.


The problem is that apparently LR and C1 can co-operate in respect to keywords, in the sense that C1 can be instructed to auto-sync metadata (it writes XMP as soon as you change something in it; LR doesn't work in a fully automated way, but it can nevertheless do the same thing).


In practice, there's a problem if you use hierarchical keywords. If e.g. you have a > b > c > d and tag a photo with 'd', LR considers that a single keyword (in XMP you see it e.g. as 'a|b|c|d'). When C1 imports it, it keeps the hierarchy, but also tags the photo with all the path elements; in other words, you have five keywords: a > b > c > d, but also a, b, c, d. This is quite a mess: some hierarchies I use (taxonomies for animals and plants, geotags) have keywords with the same name, but different places in hierarchy. With my initial setup, the "flattened" keywords made their way back to Ligthroom and created some damage. After recovering from a backup, I just disabled the feature of C1 that automatically writes keywords, and everything now is ok. This means that C1 cannot be used in any way with keywords - a minor annoyance for those related to IQ features, such as colour tags and ratings, that requires looking at the post-processed image in C1, then switch to LR, find that image in the browser and tag it. But in the end it's not hard as it might seem.

 

As a way for extra safety, I used git (a Source Control Management tool) to track all my XMP files, so I can eventually detect unwanted changes in single files and quickly revert them. Git will stay only for a while, just the time I learn to master C1 to avoid operator errors.


Given that, I proceeded to import my whole collection of photos (about 40.000) in the C1 catalog. I'm post-processing the photos since past October in C1, and keep the old ones in LR. I'm occasionally "promoting" some old photo managed by LR to C1, in particular for those that didn't turn out in their best shape, because perhaps C1 can do a better job (in many cases, it does).


Having the whole catalog imported I can say that, yes, C1 is much faster in the general usage - after some time, longer than one hour, it seems to slow down and restarting it has a good effect. But in some specific case it happened in LR too (in a worse way). Exporting images (seven sizes for each photo, for publishing on my website) is _way_ faster; and the good thing is that I can do that in a single command, while in LR I had to launch seven different tasks. What C1 misses is the "publish folder" feature of LR, that kept track of which images were edited after the latest export, so I need to track them manually (too bad C1 also misses an extra simple feature, that is the capability of filtering collections by editing date: I could at least see the photos edited in the past hour or past day).


Given that, after the first quick work with a few hours in Bellinzona, I went three days in Haute-Provence and returned with 3x900=2700 photos to post-process. 3x means that I always shoot in bursts, to maximise chances of getting an image without motion blur. Furthermore, on the higher mountains there were a strong wind, that often was shaking me while shooting (and more often moving the branches of trees), thus many subjects have produced up to 9-15 shots. This just to say that one of the first steps in my workflow is picking the sharpest image in a small set. In LR I did it with the compare editor, that allows to see a pair of images even at 1:1 and panning the zoomed window in sync, to search and evaluate the parts with the critical details. Working through a dozen of such images means to have 12 pair comparisons, keeping at each pass the best one. Sometimes with some extra job later, because some shots are of the same sharpness and I want to keep all of them for then picking on some other criterium (e.g. if there were moving parts, such as animals, keeping their best placement).


In C1 everything is simpler - and faster! I can bring together up to 11 photos and zooming/panning in sync all of them. This means that I can immediately see the blurred ones and trash them, and then zoom back to a whole view and pick the best of the remainders. Something in the zoom in/out commands seems to require some more strokes than in LR, but it can be I'm just missing some keyboard accelerator. In any case, yesterday I processed a first batch of 700 images (down to 150) in a few hours, and it was much faster than I'd have done in LR. BTW, for the pixel peeping to be quick in LR, you need to have 1:1 previews (otherwise you have to wait every time quite a few seconds for seeing the pixels). 1:1 previews are quite slow to be generated (and I have a two years old MacBook Pro, 16GB and everything on the internal SSD). Fortunately they can be generated in batch, and I just do something else during the process. On the other hand, C1 doesn't have 1:1 previews, because it doesn't need them: it's much faster in getting to 1:1 on the screen.


For what concerns colours, I can confirm that I like much more the C1 preset profiles for my cameras than those in LR - it seems I can work with them instead of using generated profiles out of the ColorChecker. This is particularly true for the blue in the sky, that I absolutely didn't liked in LR and was better, but still something required some hue fix, with my custom profiles.

 

I just applied a default preset of -33 to contrast, because it seems that the common taste is about more saturated and deeper black than I like.

 

I have still some doubts with yellow rendering - in some cases foliage still turns out more brownish that it should be, but at this point I have to set up a test also to verify it's not a personal thing of my brain. In any case, selective colour correction in C1 is so powerful that I think it could be possible to fix this problem with a single channel patch, embedded in a custom style, rather than requiring a completely different profile.

 

stoppingdown.net

 

Sony a6300, Sony a6000, Sony NEX-6, Sony E 10-18mm F4 OSS, Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* E 16-70mm F4 ZA OSS, Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS, Sigma 150-600mm Æ’/5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary, Samyang 12mm Æ’/2, Sigma 30mm F2.8 DN | A, Meyer Gorlitz Trioplan 100mm Æ’/2.8, Samyang 8mm Æ’/3.5 fish-eye II | Zenit Helios 44-2 58mm Æ’/2 
Plus some legacy Nikkor lenses.
#2
quite a summary...
 
In some aspects I still think, C1 was never aimed or planned as a DAM, it just so happened they patched some functions in.
 
You're right about restarting it can make the whole stuff more fluent, I think it just empties the "redo-memory"
 
I sometimes missed the possibility to clone only some edits to other originals, but there's a way to do it. The tiny arrow from down left to top right on top right corner of the tool palet can do so. In the browser tab you can select the source picture, then select the target pictures, click on the double arrow and decide which edit you like to clone to the others.
 
And the library functions are stepchild of Phase One, there's no other way to see that. I still have to repair one library. It was my fault it went south with it, but the repair actions are troublesome.
 
 

There's version 11 coming soon but in that library part you can't hope for improvements. If there was a better way together with Media Pro, I'll bite the price - but the demo I tried was shockingly unrefined.
#3
Quote: 

<div>I sometimes missed the possibility to clone only some edits to other originals, but there's a way to do it. The tiny arrow from down left to top right on top right corner of the tool palet can do so. In the browser tab you can select the source picture, then select the target pictures, click on the double arrow and decide which edit you like to clone to the others.
</div>
 

After hitting Ctrl Shift C, one of the tool tabs will show you which edited settings are copied to the memory and ready to be pasted onto other originals. You can click checkboxes to disable some of those, like crop and rotation, before using Ctrl Shift V.

 

Remind me tomorrow in a less sleepy hour if you need me to point that out Smile. Also tell me if I'm completely off, I'm actually semi-drunk and sleeping right now.
#4
That's the command to copy adjustments, obican. At least 10.2.1 doesn't do anything else.

 

What I was talking about is this box:

 

[Image: i-JWwjZxZ.png]

...with the usual badly implemented translation  :unsure:

#5
Quote:In some aspects I still think, C1 was never aimed or planned as a DAM, it just so happened they patched some functions in.
True. It was not meant to be a DAM for most of its life, just a high quality raw converter. But with the rise of LR and Aperture, they had to react. Their first attempt was to buy Media Pro from MS and make it a companion product alongside C1 to capture the DAM part. But that approach never really worked. So that's when they started to add library functionality into C1 (with version 7, IIRC).
 
Quote:And the library functions are stepchild of Phase One, there's no other way to see that. I still have to repair one library. It was my fault it went south with it, but the repair actions are troublesome.
What happened?
Editor
opticallimits.com

#6
After importing files into Capture One, it is very difficult to find out wether these are in the catalogue or only linked into the catalogue, but physically remain in their folders on the hard drive.

 

In Aperture, as you know, you always have the option to import files from folders which are not in the library. Not so in Capture One. I thought I imported them into the catalogue an deleted the folders, but then had to activate the backup to get them back. Now I have 1123 RAW files in the folder (original backup from all files from a trip to Portugal), but only 670 made it into a final version and were keepers.

 

In Aperture, I just could select these keepers, click "merge into library" and the leftovers were to delete finally. In Capture One these kind of stuff never occured on a maybe exisiting roadmap.

 

A lot of badly and worse translated commands, dialogues, false or missing descriptions along with a non-existing manual in German doesn't really improve things.  :mellow:

 

I found a workflow to repair the library, but there's really no way to change external files into internal files.

 

Next crap: Try to export a project with albums in it as a new library together with the pictures. Open that library. Be surprised about an empty project with all albums, no pictures in them and the pictures as a bunch of files in the "photos" section. I simply have no idea about the purpose of such a sick process.

 

In Aperture, this is a good way to split and merge libraries and everything (usually) works silky smooth, but these Danes are not aware of what a DAM is meant to do. Would I miss much if I'd switch off the DAM part? No.

 

The smart albums are available, but with a dozen "but"s. Handling sucks, EXIF list is very short. It's a shorter list what they can do than what they can't - and knowing it's basically possible nearly hurts.

 

I had hopes for Affinity DAM, for Luminar, Lyn, Photomechanic - I cannot believe only Apple engineers can do a thing like Aperture. But the reality just grins and proves me totally wrong. These days nobody cares about a well made DAM. And before the LR fans chime in: I also know Adobe producst, be it Bridge or LR. They fall so short, they hardly feel some air during falling.

#7
Hm, that's slightly discouraging, I'm more or less settled on C1 as my primary choice for the future (partly due to lack of alternatives).

I often use the feature of exporting projects as new libraries in Aperture, so I'll need to have a close look at the issues you mention...
Editor
opticallimits.com

#8
The supporter recommended to work with sessions.

 

Later this evening I'll mail you a couple of informations about fixing a database - are you working on an English Mac OS or German? Because the issues with the poorly translated menus/dialogues really suck. Affinity usually is perfectly translated, terminology is consistent and it costs a fraction of C1.

#9
Hm, thanks, will have a look at sessions instead. Even though, the online documentation of C1 describes exporting and importing parts of a catalogue as a new catalogue exactly as it works in Aperture. At least that's how I understood it.

I'm on a German macOS switched to English Wink That cures most translation hiccups, since Apps start up in the language that is defined as primary language in macOS (if they offer it).
Editor
opticallimits.com

#10
I gave up with translations since my first experience with computers, ages ago. Everything on my computer speaks english.

stoppingdown.net

 

Sony a6300, Sony a6000, Sony NEX-6, Sony E 10-18mm F4 OSS, Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* E 16-70mm F4 ZA OSS, Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS, Sigma 150-600mm Æ’/5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary, Samyang 12mm Æ’/2, Sigma 30mm F2.8 DN | A, Meyer Gorlitz Trioplan 100mm Æ’/2.8, Samyang 8mm Æ’/3.5 fish-eye II | Zenit Helios 44-2 58mm Æ’/2 
Plus some legacy Nikkor lenses.
  


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread:
1 Guest(s)