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Lesson Info

Customizing your Workspace & Keyboard Shortcuts

Now you know what the interface is called, all the different parts of it, you might be thinking, "Well, I don't really like that bit there or that bit there. Or I'd really like to move this tool to a more prominent place, and so on." Which is great cause you can do all of that. Pretty much anything you see in Capture One is customizable. So, this goes from the position of things, how they behave, the certain keyboard shortcuts that you might use. And we can also make setups, or workspaces as we call it, so that it's more familiar to you as well. So, if you're used to something being in a particular place from your current software, then we can pretty much easily mimic that in Capture One as well. So, I show you how to customize each of the various areas that we spoke about. So, that's the tools in Tool Tabs, the viewer. You can even customize the viewer, funnily enough, and the browser and the toolbar as well. So, there is an infinite amount of things that you can do to the interface. ...

There is no perfect interface or such in terms of what I would like to use, what Jim would like to use, for example. If we go away or if I sent ten people away, and I said, "Define or design the perfect workspace for Capture One." You would get ten completely different things back. It's almost impossible to design a universal workspace, which makes perfect sense then that you can design your own. And it's something that you'll probably find that evolves over time as well. You'll create your workspace and think, "You know what, I'm just gonna tweak this a bit." And then you can keep refining it, fine tuning it, making different workspaces for different tasks as well, until you build the workspace that actually works for you. For example, if you never use a particular tool, then just get rid of it. You don't wanna be scrolling past a tool or seeing that tool if you're never gonna use it. For example, if you never do black and white photography, why have a black and white tool? Get rid of it and such. So, let's look at how to do that. Over in our first zone, or area if you like, which was the tools in Tool Tabs. Each tool, Tool Tab, sorry, contains these various different tools. You'll find that around Capture One right-clicking opens up lots of sub-menus or sub-context menus, and this is one of those occasions. So, if we right-click on any of the Tool Tabs, we have two sections, Add Tool or Add Tool Tab. So, let's first of all, I'm just gonna reset to Default. Window, Workspace, Default. This takes you back to the default Capture One workspace as you will see it when it first opens up on install. Let's have at the second Tool Tab which is all about tethered capture. So you'll probably find that if you never do tethered capture, shooting directly into Capture One, there's not point having this Tool Tab here wasting valuable space in your screen. So, right-click. We can say Remove Tool Tab, and simply say, "Get rid of Capture." Are you sure you want to remove the tab? Absolutely. That tab's now gone. Freed you up some more space. The position of these various Tool Tab kind goes in a workflow, left to right. We've got the first one which talks about organizing the library which we'll come to. Lens corrections, color exposure, and so on. Now, if you think I would rather be dealing with exposure before color, which is actually how I work, then if you hover over any of these Tool Tabs, see if I can delicately zoom in before it disappears, you can see we've got the Help bubble which has press your Apple key, and then drag to reorder. If you're on PC, hover over the same thing and I think it will be the Alt key or Option key to do the same operation. So, now if I hold my Apple key down on the keyboard, drag this over here, I can now place my Exposure Tool Tab at the top. Now, for each of the Tool Tabs, if you decide, "You know what, I'd really like to have a white balance tool in this Tool Tab." I can right-click and say, Add Tool, find it in the list of all the various different tools, like so. And now, I've got a white balance tool here. And if I want to change this position, I can just move it up and down like so. You'll see here on my screen, we run quite a big resolution so it's easy for you to see watching the video or watching online. But if you run out of space, then there's nothing to stop you collapsing or opening up these various different tools to give you a better view as such. And you'll probably find, again, once your workspace evolves that the order that you place tools will tweak a little bit and you'll probably find some tools that you don't use a great deal. You might collapse those down, and so on. And then if you want to add anything else, you can do so. There's no restriction on what tool goes is what Tool Tab. If you want to add something completely sideways like let's see, we're in Exposures so let's add Black & White to Exposure. You could do if you wanted to. So, there's no restrictions. If you want to float a tool, you can bring it out anywhere on the screen, like so, and it becomes a floating tool. If you want to stick two tools together, you can just hover them close until you see the lights at the bottom, and then they stick together and become paired like so. Let's pop those back in there. I'm gonna go back to Default as I've messed around with everything greatly. Let's do that again. Let's say Remove Tool Tab, Capture. Let's move this one over here. Let's add a tool like White Balance. And you can see it's relatively quick to start organizing your workspace. If you find that all of these Tool Tabs completely don't make any sense to you, then there's nothing to stop you creating a brand new custom Tool Tab as well. So, if we say custom Tool Tab. Let's call this David's Tools, like so. And you can choose your own icon. Let's have a star, and say Add Tab. Then you get a brand new empty tab which you can start populating with whatever tool you wish. Again, there's no restrictions whatsoever. And if we wanna remove that, let's just remove David's Tools like so. So, super, super simple. When we come to the viewer, yes, you can customize that as well. It might sound strange but there's quite a lot you can do to the view to change the way it's presented to you. The first thing you'll see is that we've got these three curious icons at the top. We've got some metadata along the bottom as well. And we also have the background color which we can change on the interface as well. So, first of all what do these three curious icons do? Again, if we hover over them, it says Multi View, Primary View, and Proof Margin. So, by default this will be on Multi View, which simply means if I was to say Shift select four captures like so, then they will be shown, all of them will be shown in the viewer at the same time. And this is great if your trying to pick a good shot. For example, if we're looking at these four images and think, which one out of these four is a good shot. And then I want to add a color tag or a star rating or something like that. If we turn off Multi View to Single View, then it only shows us the Primary. So, this is a good bit of Capture One terminology to get used to, is that we refer to the images as variants. So, you might see this terminology variant pop up every now and then in Capture One. So, a variant is simply and image. The reason why we call it a variant is that we can duplicate images to make virtual copies which we call variants. So, you'd have variant one, variant two, variant three, variant four. So, we might like to have a color version, a black and white version, and then perhaps a third one where we do a different color grade or something like that. So, if you see variant in Capture One, that simply means image and such. So, just to show you an example. We've got New Variant, like so. So, if I made a new variant then I'd get two of this guy, like so. And you can see they're labeled number one and number two. But let's just Shift select four images. Again, for example, if Primary View is on then we only see the singular image even though we have the others selected. If I toggle to Multi, you can see them all. And then the last option, which is something I really, really personally appreciate in Capture One, and I know, so do many other people, is this one called Proof View. And you see when I tap that on and off it just gives you a little bit of extra space around the image like so. Which is great if you're trying to view the image kind of as almost a picture, then I find it's just nicer to have a little bit of space around it. And then finally, we've got the metadata information at the bottom, which I sometimes find distracting. If I'm just adjusting images, I don't really need to know what ISO or shutter speed or aperture it came to. So, you'll find in the View menu there's a useful thing called Hide Viewer Labels. And that just gets rid of that viewer label so we have no information and nice clean interface. And then the last part, we can do with the viewer. If we go to Preferences. And I have to remember where it is. I believe it's in ... That's a good question, Image I would think. Oh, Appearance, that makes sense. That's what I was looking for. We have two sliders here which allow you to make the proof margin bigger like so. By default, the standard margin just gives you a little three pixel air around it. And then which you can, of course, edit as well. And then the proof margin you can put to whatever you wish to give you that nice space. And while we're in this Appearance preference, you'll also see, if we go to the color option here that we can change how we want the background to look. And a lot of people I work with and photographers I've spoken to prefer to work with the white background. Believes it gives their eyes a better opportunity to judge exposure. So, if you prefer white, then you can just change it up there as well. Pretty much everything that you can do with the viewer you can see there. So, it's Multi View, Primary View, Proof View. And then if you wanna hide those Viewer Labels, then it's the view mentioned here. You'll notice a shortcut, which we'll get to as well. So, looking over at the browser you can see by default it's sitting over here on the right hand side, and the reason for that is that it gives you the most image real estate in the center of the screen. If we have a film script running along the bottom it does reduce the amount of real estate we have for the image. So, putting it to the side makes sense, especially if you have a bigger monitor than what we're working with here. You can change the dividers too. And you'll see as it gets bigger we get more images pop up like so. So, even a workspace like this where you have lots of thumbnails, and then a smaller viewer can also work. And then we can collapse it right back like so. You'll also see in the View menu under the, let's find it, under browser section here. We've got the ability if you want to place the browser below, if you're used to it running like a film strip. So, we pop the browser down below, turn on Filmstrip Mode, which is that icon. I'll just zoom in so you can see it. I fully appreciate if you're used to a filmstrip it takes awhile to convert to scrolling up and down as opposed to left and right. But if we turn on Filmstrip Mode, you've got that filmstrip option like you potentially could be used to before like so. Or we can place that browser back right, like so. Along the top, in our toolbar as such. Oh, before I come back to that, I just should mention that, and let's just make this a bit bigger, we can also change how the browser is presented on the right hand side. So, for example, if you just wanted image details we can do so, Filmstrip Mode or a Grid. Remember in Grid Mode, it will add more images in rows as we make that space bigger. If we're in Filmstrip Mode, then it will only ever be a single section of images like so. And we can also, choose how we want to sort the contents of the thumbnails too. By default, it's on Name. But if you prefer Rating once you've rated some images or Color Tag once you tagged some images, then you can change that there as well. And also, there's a little search bar where you can, for example, if I tap in just a file number then it will filter down to that particular number. There's also the Zoom option here where we can decide how big or small you want your thumbnails to be. Again, you might think it's not necessarily possible to be able to customize the browser area but there's all kinds of options in there to make it more homely to you as such. Along the top, as I said, this is a toolbar. So, this contains these various different action buttons that do something when you press them, for example. If we right-click anywhere on the toolbar, right-click or Control click, we can again say, Customize Toolbar. And this allows you to pick any of the action icons. For example, if I wanted to put Exposure Warning over here, I can just drag it into that spot. So, if you find that you're mousing kind of over to the right when you're doing something on the left, then there's nothing to stop you just moving that to a different spot. If you make a mess of it and wanna start again, you can just drag the default selection back up into the toolbar as well. And that will save as part of your workspace as well. Last thing to think about is saving your workspace, or second to last thing to think about. So, if we go to Window, Workspace, it's really important that once you've put all that hard effort into creating your workspace that you save it. Cause otherwise you won't be able to retrieve it if you make changes like I did earlier where I move things around. I can easily go back to my personal workspace like so. And to save a workspace, it's just simply, so, Workspace, call this My New Workspace, oh, Wrokspace, Workspace. And then you can always get back to it from the Workspace menu as such. If you wanna delete them just choose Delete Workspace. And you'll see here my workspace is gradually evolved. I'm on version three of my workspace now, and I tend to like Very Dark as my view, like so. Now, you might have seen as I've been browsing around the various menus that we have various different shortcuts as well. And there are tons of shortcuts. I think there's probably close to 400 shortcuts in total on Capture One. If you can remember all of them, that would be pretty impressive. But if you can remember a few, and there's probably six or seven that's worth remembering to help you move nice and fast around Capture One, and make your job a bit easier. Just so you know I'm gonna move this keyboard out the way. And we look at customizing shortcuts in a second. But the keyboard I'm using, in case anyone has seen it, this is a color-coded keyboard specifically for Capture One. Made by LogicKeyboard. They make all kinds of keyboards for all kinds of applications, not just Capture One. And it's color coded with tons of different shortcuts. And it makes finding shortcuts easier. I was a bit skeptical about these at first because I thought, "Well, I can just remember everything." But, yes, you can remember the ones you use frequently but the shortcuts that you use maybe less frequently are harder to remember. And having a little visual clue on a keyboard like so really, really helps. And they're available to buy from any Phase One partner. And it's just a simple Apple keyboard that's been printed with the various coding. It has a keyboard shortcut setup for it in Capture One which you can of course modify as well. So, if you wanna change any keyboard shortcut, and I'll tell you a couple which you're probably gonna wanna change yourself. So, if we go to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts, you'll find here that we've got Logic Keyboard US, UK, and German. So, if you pick any of those, depending on which Logic Keyboard you have, that will instantly load up the keyboard shortcut set that's designed for this keyboard. For example, this is is a UK spec keyboard so I'll pick that. And now all the shortcuts are changed to reflect this keyboard perfectly. You'll find when you first load Capture One that you're on the Default set. So, let's see what the Default shortcut set looks like. Now, I would recommend that you change a few of the defaults to make your life a bit easier. And the way that you can do that, you'll probably find if you go to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts and just use Logic Keyboard US or UK or DE depending where you are. That will make your job much easier. Or we can just redesign the default set. So, to give you a couple of pointers that you might want to change, which especially if you're coming from Lightroom or Aperture that are gonna make your job easier. So, by default, something really simple like hiding the viewer. So, hiding the viewer and showing the viewer. The default shortcut is a slightly complicated Option Command V, which is really difficult to do with one hand. So, if we wanted to change that to something useful we would go to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts, create your own set. Let's call this David's New Set. You'll see that the listings here are the same as the listings at the menu bar at the top. So, I wanted to change Show/Hide Viewer. So, if we tap that we can use x to clear it. And then I can pick any keyboard shortcut I want to change that. So, you'll find on the LogicKeyboard, and you can do this on your own keyboards as well, is that I use the button that is directly below the Esc key, which on this one I think it's called a period this funny squiggle. And if I close this window down, we can now see that we can hide and show the viewer with a simple tap, like so. So, in Lightroom if you're used to pressing G, for example, to kind of get to Grid View, this is actually a good way to do it. The other keyboard shortcuts that you're probably gonna wanna know is Command B, or if you're on your PC everything is Control, which hides the browser, like so. Command T which hides the tools, like so. And then that simple show and hide viewer. By using those sort of three combinations that really helps you to dynamically change the interface depending what you're doing. The cursor keys that we spoke about, they all have shortcuts as well. So, if we just open up the Pan tool you can see it says H next to it. So, if we tap H that gives me the Pan tool, and also it allows me to cycle through the other options as well. If I press V that gives me the Pointer. And no surprising, C for Crop. So, if you can remember V for Pointer, C for Crop, H for Hand tool, then that's gonna help you move around Capture One. Again, Command or Control B to hide the browser, Command or Control T to hide the tools. And that handy little edit for showing and hiding the viewer. It's pretty much all you have to know. If you go to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts, and I'm just gonna go to Logic. So, this is the Logic set which I've extended upon as well cause I made a couple of additional things. So, remember earlier we spoke about showing the viewer labels. So, I've changed that to my Option period or Command period. So, that shows the labels, like so. And then I did Option or Alt key to turn the Proof view on and off. So, I can hide and show my viewer just by tapping my period key. I can show the labels by doing a Command period key. And I can change between proof and non-proof by doing the Option period key. So, that's just a few simple things that are good. Also, in the Logic set, something that you'll be probably used to in Lightroom and Aperture is entering Full Screen, which is just a simple F. So, if we press F, we get a nice Full Screen view up. You'll see two little arrows that pop up which give you auto show and hide of the tools, like so. And again, if in Full Screen you want the tools to come up, you can just do your Command T again, and up they pop like so. To get out of Full Screen, it's just a simple Esc. So, if you can learn just like those seven or eight shortcuts you're gonna dramatically improve the speed that you can move around Capture One as well. And I think also on the Logic set, which you can still use even if you don't have a Logic Keyboard. You can still load up the Logic set because it has a lot of those changes like the show and hide in the viewer already. So, if you can do that, then we also have S, for example, I'm sorry, D, which goes to 100% as you can see. Over here. And then D and S do Full Screen and Fit Screen. Nice and speedy like that as well. So, you don't have to go finding the menu option. Okay, any questions on customization keyboard shortcuts? Yes, sir, David. Could you talk to us a little bit, very briefly, I know we got a lot to cover today, about dual monitor customization. Yes. That's a good question. Thank you. Cause I forgot about that. So, if you go to Window you'll see you have a second part that says Viewer. If you tap that, that gives you another viewer. I just tuck it out of the way so you can see it. So, we've got our additional viewer here. And then if you like the main interface at the back. But the viewer you can also customize. So, if I was to do Command T whilst my viewer was active, I get all my tools back up. And I can right-click and add whatever tools I want this secondary viewer. So, if you are using two monitors, which a lot of us are, you can have one monitor with just image and pretty much nothing else, or just image and tools. And then on the second monitor you could put all your thumbnails like your browser for example. So, it's very easy to do that dual monitor set up. We can also unhide the toolbar, if I right-click. So, it's two completely customization, that's not a word, two completely customizable windows which you can change in any way that you like. And they're synced, you see if I change Exposure then it happens to both of the windows. So, Window, Viewer. Now, there is, if you want to try, there is actually a workspace called Dual Monitor, which will just pretty much layout what I said, which you can then tweak. And also, if you're coming from Lightroom and you're very much used to tools being on the right-hand side. Then if you choose the Migration workspace, then we actually switch it around to have Filmstrip at the bottom, tools, etc. on the right hand side, which we've tried to arrange in a more Lightroom-esque way. Obviously, the two applications are different in the way they work with the modes and without the modes in Capture One, but you might find if you're constantly mousing to the right hand side to find a tool, simply by putting tools on the right makes your job a little bit easier.