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Basic Workflow Operations

Lesson 9 from: Quick Start to Capture One

David Grover

Basic Workflow Operations

Lesson 9 from: Quick Start to Capture One

David Grover

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Lesson Info

9. Basic Workflow Operations

Lesson Info

Basic Workflow Operations

So the first thing we look at is the basic kind of workflow stuff which is copy and apply. So take all our sum adjustments from one image and copy them to everything else. Or take just one single adjustment like sharpening or noise reduction and put that across to everything else as well. So let's use this set of identical, well, not identical, but images shot under the same situation as a good example to look at. So, first of all, let's just throw on some basic adjustments to this image. So let's just raise the exposure a touch and open up the shadows and control the highlights and don't worry, we'll cover all the greatness of the tools. So we've put some kind of adjustments on the first one. And then we want to translate this across to all the other images. So again, talking about terminology, this is what we call the primary variant. So it's the one with the thick, white border around it. So if I select everything else, let's shift select everything else, so we've got 37 images sele...

cted but you see the first one that I adjusted is the primary variant. So this is the one that we're gonna take our adjustments from and drop them onto the other images. Now, if I use my cursor keys, you see I can change the primary variant, like so, but still maintain that entire selection. The primary one is the one with the thick, white border. And we wanna copy and apply everything to those images. So, first of all, we can say copy up here, which is this up-down arrow. So if we float over here, you can see copy adjustments from the primary variant. There's that terminology again. So let's say copy, like so. And then all we need to do is say apply and then the adjustments gets zapped across like so. I'm gonna undo that and just so you know, undo is command Z, or control Z on your PC. So if I undo that, then you see it goes back to what we had before 'cause I wanna just highlight this curious little toggle up here. You'll see when I hover over apply, so you see when I hover over apply, a number pops up above it. And that tells me how many variants it's gonna affect. Now, generally, you're gonna want this turned on 'cause this simply means that operations will apply to everything. But if we turn it off, then you see when I float over it, the little number doesn't pop off. So you can see the help bubble toggles between edit primary and edit selected. Now, you might be thinking, why on Earth would I ever want to turn it off, for example? I'll just give you one example. If we're kind of moving through a group of images like this, and we've got them, let's select a few less. So let's select three for example, if they fit in my screen, and we get our labels back, like so. Let's say we wanna look at these images and we think, out of these, I wanna put a rating or a color tag. So let's say the best one out of these three is this one and let's say I'm gonna add it five stars. Give it five stars. If I tap five, look what happens. Everything gets five stars, which is what we don't want. So if we turn this off and I tap five, then it's only the primary which gets the five stars. At some point, this little button trips up everybody in Capture One 'cause you can easily accidentally knock it off and then what you might find is that you select a whole bunch of images to process and it only processes the first one, like what's going on? I've selected five images and I'm only getting one and then you end up processing them all individually. So there are cases for when it's good to turn this off like you saw with rating. But most of the time, it will stay on. So if you ever get this weird behavior of only something happening to one image, like a process or a star rating or whatever, then you've probably turned this off. 'kay, as I say, it trips up everybody who's used Capture One at some point. So let's do the same again. Let's select all of these images, that's 37, we can say copy and apply, like so, and then that will apply to everything else. If you prefer to use shortcuts, then you can say apply adjustments here, shift command V, copy, shift command C. Again, if you wanna change those shortcuts, there's no reason why you can't do that in the Shortcut Editor. But if I do shift command V now on my keyboard, then you see it applies the adjustments across. Now, let's say, I'm gonna undo that again, command Z. Let's say that you don't wanna copy everything, you just want to copy some and this is probably in the case if I just do a crop on the image like so, then I'm gonna copy that, but I don't want to apply the crop, because if I select all now and say apply, then I get the crop as well. Now cropping is sometimes a dynamic thing, very individual, you might not want to copy a crop across to everything else. So I'll undo that again and then now when we press copy, if we go to this tool tab in the menu, I'll just zoom in for you. This is the Adjustments tool tab and it contains a very important tool called the Adjustments Clipboard. So as soon as I press copy, it ticks all the boxes in that particular image. So you see, we had exposure, we had shadow recovery, we had highlight recovery, and we had a crop. Now, if we don't wanna copy that across to another image, then we simply turn it off. And now when I say apply back up here, it does the adjustments but not the cropping itself. We did a copy and apply but we remove one thing. So let's just undo that. Show you that again. So we just say copy, notice straight away, everything gets ticked in that box. Then we can uncheck crop, for example, then say apply, like so. And that could be for anything. If, for example, we've five star rated, let's say, turn that off, let's say this guy had a five star rating, and we said copy, then if we scroll down, by default Ratings aren't copied as such. Just worth noting when we say copy and we scroll down, that the Rating isn't copied in that respect 'cause we know generally we don't wanna copy and apply ratings like so. But, as I said, you can use that for any particular option that you want to remove. Let's say you had one of them where the exposure went way off the charts or whatever, then you could avoid your exposure correction then doing an individual exposure correction for that one. So that's copy all or copy some, but what about if you just wanted to copy one single item? So let's use the example of crop and rotation, 'cause that's easy to visualize. I just make these a bit bigger and let's take the top two rows, like so. So let's say we wanna get the crop from here to the other images but we don't want to influence any of the other adjustments so we wanna leave whatever else is there intact. So you'll see down here on crop, remember when we spoke about the basic tool behavior, one of the buttons was a copy and apply. So if I click that, it knows that I've changed the crop, and if I say apply, then it will put it across to those other images, just the crop. If I reset, now I can reset for all of them, like so. Let's also do, let's just tweak rotation, for example. Oh, wrong way. Let's, for a second, let's just use the straighten tool and straighten it like so. Let's select the first six. And then do the same thing. If we click on the copy and apply, then we can say apply, then it will do the rotation to everything else like so. Now, you can speed that up, let's just do command Z to undo. You'll notice that when I click on this, it's checked rotation automatically because it knows rotation is modified on this image. So it's the only thing we've changed, is rotation. I haven't done orientation. I haven't flipped it and so on. So Capture One's gonna assume that if I want to copy that adjustment across to anything else, it's not gonna be orientation and flip because they haven't changed. So we can say apply like so. Now, if we wanna be even faster, to avoid one click, time is money and so on, if we hold our shift key down and click the copy and apply, then it does it straight away, so it suppresses that dialogue. And you'll see if we hover over it, it says hold shift to apply immediately. Now, sometimes you might not want to do everything, so if we went to metadata for example, if I do a shift click on here, you see it copied the star rating across. So, if, for example, I just wanted to copy my, we've got Zach's name there, so let's put in description, Headshots. And now if I do shift and this, it's gonna do the star rating to everything, which we don't want. But if I click on this and say take away the rating and just do the description, apply. Now if we go to this shot, you can see Headshots is applied but it didn't copy over the star rating as such. So generally, you can probably safely assume that a shift click is gonna work 'cause we don't really need to see that dialogue but with the metadata, for example, it's probably is going to be something you'll wanna uncheck 'cause we don't wanna put the same star rating on everything, the same color tag on everything. If you've just been through for half an hour and laboriously color tagged everything that you wanted to do. So copy all, copy some, or copy one. That's the way to look at it. So these two for copy all and some in conjunction with the Adjustments Clipboard and the little up-down arrow itself to just do a single adjustment like so.

Ratings and Reviews

Juan Sebastián Echeverri
 

This class is a great introduction to Capture One. David covers the CO environment including the basics of tools, tool tabs, toolbar, cursor tools, action buttons, the viewer, and the browser. It includes some useful shortcuts and best practices for an efficient workflow.

Dan Donovan
 

A comprehensive overview of Capture One. David does a FANTASTIC job of getting you started with Capture One!

user-940746
 

David is extremely well versed in CaptureOne Pro and he has the ability to share his knowledge in a way that is easy to follow and understand. My time in the audience was well spent, increasing my knowledge of CaptureOne basics. I would particularly recommend this class to anyone who is relatively new to CaptureOne or who is considering making CaptureOne part of their photo editing process.

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