I’m proud to be a part of the Out of Chicago LIVE event that will take place from April 9 to 11, 2021, and today wanted to provide a sneak peek at part of what I’ll be talking about, and walk you briefly through some of the post-processing techniques that I’ll be demonstrating in Capture One Pro during my live session. My Live Session is entitled “Photography Nirvana Through Minimalist Introspection” and I’m going to talk about minimalist photography mostly illustrated with my Winter Photography from Hokkaido, Japan, and get into finding your style and learning to really love your photography. I’ve created a video that starts with a brief teaser about my talk, but then I provide a 20-minute demonstration of how I process two winter scenes in Capture One Pro version 21.1, and whether you will be joining us online for the Out of Chicago LIVE event from April 9 to 11, 2021, or not, I think you’ll get something out of the video. Check out details of the event at https://www.outofchicago.com/ and I really hope to see you there and would love it if you join my session on Photography Nirvana through Minimalist Introspection. Here’s the video. I hope you find it useful.
OK, so it’s been a couple of years, and coincidentally exactly 100 episodes, since I reviewed and created a tutorial to help you to create camera profiles for use in Capture One Pro using the Lumariver Profile Designer software, and with my new EOS R5 sitting around without a custom profile, I figured I’d make one, and I was pleased to see that a few changes made to the Lumariver software have made the profiles easier to create than ever before!
There are a number of ways to create these profiles, and I haven’t tried all of them, but the main thing to note here is that I followed Lumariver Manual instructions for Making Capture One ICC Profiles, and did NOT use the simpler workflow for reproduction. I went through the full steps, and in step 14 I used Alternative A to get the Capture One curve for my profile. The instructions from Lumariver are clear enough, but in my humble opinion could be a little clearer and better illustrated, so here goes with my version.
Preparing Your Photograph
First, you’ll need an X-Rite ColorChecker target. There are other targets that you can use, but I recommend X-Rite’s as they are what I use. You can use the ColorChecker Passport, but for my profile, I used the Digital ColorChecker SG that you can see in this photo, that I used to create my profile. Excuse the grubby outside air-conditioning unit that I placed the target on. I didn’t want to spend much time on this, so I didn’t cover it up or anything. I exposed the chart in Manual mode and ensured that I pulled back slightly from the setting that started the white patches blinking with exposure alerts, so the base image is as bright as it can be without starting to overexpose, just as I shoot all of my images.
Digital ColorChecker SG with Generic EOS R5 Camera Profile
For the sake of this process, note that I used the White Balance picker tool in Capture One Pro and selected one of the neutral gray cells on the target, and that set the custom white balance of the image to 5757 Kelvin and a Tint of -2.8. You can use this profile for a wide range of white balances, but to create it, we need to set that custom white balance in this way, and remember the kelvin value for later.
The next part of the process will make your image look crap for a while, but this is necessary, so let’s work through it. As you can see in the screenshot, under the Base Characteristics panel in Capture One Pro, you need to select No Color Correction from the Effects section of the ICC Profile pulldown. If you don’t see this option, click on the Show All option first. It’s also important here to select the Linear Response option from the Curve pulldown, below the ICC Profile pulldown. This is the part that will make your image look flat and much less colorful, so if it still looks OK, go back and check these last few steps.
No Color Profile from ICC Profile Pulldown
Export Variants
Then right-click the image that you just changed, and select Export, then Variants, from the shortcut menu that appears (right). You’ll then see a dialog box to select the settings, which need to be the TIFF format, 16 bit, and under ICC Profile select Embed camera profile. For the filename, to make the following steps easier, either change the name to Linear or append the word Linear to the filename as I have (below).
Exporting TIFF 16bit with Embedded Camera Profile
Create General-Purpose ICC Profile
After exporting your Linear copy of the image, go back to the Curve pulldown from the Base Characteristics panel, and this time select Auto, unless you usually select one of the other options, such as Film Standard. I just selected Auto, and then exported a second copy of the image repeating the previous step, but this time appended the words Auto_Curve to the filename so that I can easily identify it as we proceed.
Next, assuming you have already installed and licensed your copy of Lumariver Profile Designer, open it and select General-purpose ICC Profile, as you see in the next screenshot (right).
After that, click on the Load Image button under the Target dialog that should already be selected when you start Lumariver. In the below screenshot it says Drop Image because I have already loaded the image when I captured this. You will just need to hit the Load Image button and select the Linear TIFF that we exported first of the two. Also, select the Illuminant which is closest to the White Balance that you made a mental note of earlier. My image was 5757 Kelvin, so I chose D55. Next, select your target from the pulldown that says X-Rite ColorChecker SG in my screenshot. Again, I’ve already selected this. After that, select Show Target Grid, and align the corners of the grid that will appear with the plus symbols in each corner of your ColorChecker, as you can see in my screenshot.
Lumariver Target Options
Now select the Tone Curve option in the bottom right of the Lumariver dialog, and select Load Base Curve, and load the second of the two images that you exported earlier, marked with Auto_Curve in my example. Then, under the Curve Mode pulldown, select Add to Base Curve, and then select Curve: Custom and press the Load Custom Curve button and a dialog will open. Leave that dialog open and go back to Capture One Pro, and go back to the Base Characteristics panel, and locate an image that still has your default camera profile selected, not the one that you used for this export because we changed that.
Locate Generic Capture One Pro Camera Profile
In my case, the Canon EOS R5 Generic profile was selected. Mouse over the profile that is applied to your images, and you should see a popup with the path to the Generic Capture One Pro profile that your camera has been using. Go to that folder, and locate the profile, then drag the file to the dialog that we left open in Lumariver earlier. This will move the dialog to your profiles folder and select the file that you just dragged, ready for you to import. Also, at this point, note the name of the profile file, or better still, select it and copy the filename to your computer’s clipboard for use in a few moments.
Once you have your Generic profile loaded, you are ready to hit the Render button. As you can see in the below screenshot, once Rendered, you should see a beautiful full-colored version of your original photograph, and this indicates that the process was successful. In previous versions, following the Manual as we just did never gave me a useable profile, and I had to select some other options to get that, but now it works right out of the box, which is great!
The Rendered Profile
Go to the ICC Export tab, and type or paste the filename that I asked you to copy to your clipboard a few moments ago. You just need the first part of the filename, up to the hyphen, which is CanonEOSR5 in my example, and then you want to add something descriptive after that. If you don’t use the same start of the filename as your camera’s generic profile, the new profile will not be listed with your Generic profile under the Base Characteristics ICC Profile pulldown. Any other filename will cause your profile to be listed under the Other section, and that makes it more difficult to locate later.
Export ICC Profile
Check your profile, and see if it is at least marginally better than the Capture One Pro Generic camera profile. The one that I just created is, so I am going to use it by default for my EOS R5 from now on. To make that happen, right-click the ellipses in the top right corner of the Base Characteristics panel, and select Save as Defaults for Canon EOS R5 or whatever your camera is called.
Save as Defaults for Camera
If you do that, from now on, all images that you import into Capture One Pro from the same camera will get this new camera profile assigned. If you prefer to just assign the profile yourself, skip the last step, and just select the profile from the pulldown manually when you want to apply it. To apply the new profile to images that were imported before you created this new profile, you just need to select them, and then select the new profile. If you made the new profile the default, you can also just select Apply Defaults.
Note too that the first part of the profile filename, used to identify it and group the profile correctly, is not included in the pulldown, because it is displayed under the camera’s profiles. This is why you still want to give it a meaningful name after the hyphen. Also, if you want to see your original target photo in full splendor, you’ll need to change the Linear Response curve back to Auto or whatever you use, as well as assigning the new camera profile.
Before / After
So that you can see the difference, here is a Before / After slider. Drag the vertical bar back and forth to reveal the Lumariver camera profile. It’s pretty obvious which it is but I have also labeled them, just in case.
Lumariver Camera Profile
Generic Camera Profile
If you are interested in grabbing a copy of Lumariver Profile Designer to create your own profiles, you’ll find it at http://www.lumariver.com and note that to create profiles for Capture One Pro as we’ve done in this tutorial, you will need at least the Pro Edition, and the Repro Edition also works for this. The Basic Edition does not work. That will only create DNG based camera profiles, but that should mean that it will be enough if you use Adobe Camera Raw based camera profiles. Also, if you need a ColorChecker target, you can get both the ColorChecker Passport and the Digital ColorChecker SG from our friends at B&H Photo or Amazon and if you use our affiliate links it helps to keep the lights on the content coming, as well as being very much appreciated.
After another three weeks with my head stuck inside Apple’s Xcode developing environment, and then a few more days struggling with a new eCommerce system that I’ll talk a little about later, I decided to come up for air today and talk about my favorite image management and editing software, Capture One Pro, from Phase One. As a Capture One Brand Ambassador a number of years ago I was asked for a few paragraphs about why I love this software, but after using it for four years now, and with no sign of jumping ship anywhere else, I figured it was time to put down my definitive list of reasons for still being head over heels in love with Capture One Pro.
I also have an announcement about a great page that the Phase One team has put together, and the chance for you to win a Capture One Pro license, so please stay tuned for that at the end of this episode!
1 – Image Quality
First and foremost, the reason I love Capture One Pro is it’s outstanding image quality. When I first tested Capture One back in 2016 to see if I was interested in using it, I imported around 50 images into a catalog and processed them, and I was instantly amazed by the amount of detail that I saw in my images. The shot that really showed me what I’d been missing is the Japanese Red-Crowned Crane portrait that I used on the cover of my Making the Print ebook. I had processed it high-key in Lightroom originally, but I was simply not aware that there was that much detail in the feathers when I saw my original photo.
Red-Crowned Crane Shot Comparison
In fact, these are the two photos that I used on the cover for the original release and for my 2018 release when Craft & Vision closed their doors, and I actually toned down the detail a little in the new version, because I was so accustomed to the original image at this point. Still, though, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that the difference is significant. The moment I saw this, I realized that I had to spend more time looking at what Capture One Pro could do for my photography.
2 – Excellent Black and White Conversion
The next reason is that I am able to create quality black and white images without using a plugin or other software. I was never really happy with Lightroom’s black and white capabilities and had been using Silver Efex Pro which I really liked, but I didn’t like having to save my images as TIFF or PSD files, which we’ll also get to shortly. In Capture One Pro though, I am able to convert to black and white with the control that I want, and, in true form, the image quality that I have become accustomed to.
Black and White Conversion
The tonal range is excellent, and when necessary, I can easily create additional masks to modify things like the foreground rocks in this image with one mask and add a second mask to adjust the sky. Of course, generic adjustments to the entire image are still possible with the background layer. I’m going to put a video together showing more about this soon, but for now, if you are interested in seeing more about some of the masking and black and white conversion capabilities, check out the videos and other posts that I’ve already released on Capture One Pro here.
3 – Highly Customizable User Interface
I am also a huge fan of the highly customizable user interface of Capture One Pro. I don’t know if this should be visible by default in the latest version, because I generally continue to build on my originally saved Workspace, but as you can see from this screenshot, you can add Tool Tabs from the predefined tabs, or create your own Custom Tool Tab, and that gives you things like the Black and White tab that you can see in the previous screenshot, which I added and customized to my liking.
Highly Customizable User Interface
For example, the Black and White Tool Tab that comes with Capture One Pro contains the film grain tool, for adding artistic grain to images, but because I never use that, I simply remove it from the Tool Tab. I do use Layers a lot though, especially on my black and white photos, so I added that to my Black and White Tool Tab, along with the High Dynamic Range sliders, which I also use a lot.
4 – Most Edits Work on Layers
The other thing that I love is that pretty much all of the edits you can make to an image can be applied just to specific layers, including masks, as well as generically to the entire image. There are a few exceptions, such as the generic Black and White sliders because, at this level, you are telling Capture One Pro how to convert the entire image, although there is very granular color edibility that we’ll look at shortly.
Layer Adjustments
The Vignette tool also works on the entire image or the crop, depending on your selection, but as you can see from this screenshot, there is a paint-brush icon next to all of the other tool headers. This indicates that the adjustments that you make with that tool can be applied to layers. These icons become visible when you select a layer in the Layers tool.
5 – Advanced Color Editor
I also love to work in color, and Capture One Pro gives me complete control over the color in my images, via tools such as the Advanced Color Editor. Here I took a screenshot of the same image showing the original raw photo, but also showing the processed image with the mask that I created to enhance the blue in the ice, and the final processed image. You can move the vertical bar separating the two views as well. On the left side, I have three views, and on the right side, I have the final processed image.
Original Raw File
Processed Image
Showing Mask
Final Image
with
Enhanced Blues
I created the mask by selecting the color with the color picker from the Advanced Color Editor, and then right-clicking the ellipsis in the top-right of the Color Editor and then selected Create Masked Layer from Selection. This is a great way to select specific colors for finely tuned adjustments. Here are the three images as regular files too, so that you can see them in the Lightbox by clicking on the images.
Jewel on the Shore Original in Capture One Pro
Jewel on the Shore with Mask in Capture One Pro
Jewel on the Shore Processed in Capture One Pro
6 – Luminosity Mask
In the previous major update, Capture One was given one of the most useful features that I can recall for a few years, and that is Luminosity Masks. This enables us to select specific areas of the image based on a very fine-tunable luminosity range. I covered this in the following video that I release as episode 658.
7 – Keep My Images in Raw Format
As I mentioned earlier, removing my dependence on third-party plugins and programs meant that the vast majority of my images, and I’m talking pretty much 100%, are kept in their original raw image format. I also find that the editing tools, including cloning and healing, are good enough that I can avoid jumping into Photoshop or Affinity Photo to make larger changes for the vast majority of my images. Seriously, I save maybe one or two files each year in a format other than the original raw file, and this is huge for me. I really dislike having to round-trip to other software to work on my original image as keeping them in their original raw format gives us the ability to benefit from all future processing engine updates.
Phase One isn’t just sitting on their thumbs, they release a major update to Capture One Pro pretty much every year, and each time they upgrade, there is potential to see even better image quality in my photographs. If my images are stored as a TIFF or PSD, or any other third-party file format, I have to go back and redo any work that I did on my original because that was baked-in to my copy. Because all of the changes I make to my images are stored as instructions and mask files etc. when I never leave Capture One Pro, nothing has to be redone when the processing engine gets updated. I can usually simply press a button to update the image to the latest processing, and I’m done.
This also, of course, saves on disk space, as third-party file formats are generally much larger than the original raw files unless you are saving as JPEG, which should never be the case for the main archive version of your images anyway.
8 – Organization and Filtering Images
Although I initially wasn’t overly happy that I had to split my one huge Lightroom catalog into multiple yearly catalogs when I jumped ship to Capture One Pro, I have become accustomed to my current workflow, and feel very comfortable to move between my yearly catalogs, as well as accessing all of my Final selects in a master catalog, as I explained in my previous post.
When I need to find images, the filters section provides pretty much everything I need to find specific images, based on my star ratings, gear selection or searching for the keywords that I add to my images as I archive them, or any EXIF data, including that which I added myself to scanned film photographs.
Scanned Film Filtered by Custom EXIF
Note that in this screenshot, I’m showing medium format film that I tagged with Phil Harvey’s ExifTool and my own custom script that I use for walking through a folder of images tagging each as I go. There is no way that I’m aware of to enter data into the camera EXIF field with Capture One Pro alone, but it uses data that you add like any other camera.
9 – Workflow Speed
It’s also possible to customize the keyboard shortcuts for most of the commands in Capture One Pro. This helps us to tailor our workflow to our own needs and allows us to really streamline the workflow, which leads me to one of the largest benefits I’ve found after improved image quality, and that is the overall speed with which I’m now able to work through my images.
In the past I would leave my location workshops with at least a number of days of images unprocessed because I simply didn’t have time to process and select my images each day. Now though, I leave every tour with every day except the last completely processed. I go through and make tweaks to my selection before saving my final selects, but I’m generally caught up by the time the tour finishes.
As an example, one of the biggest time savers for me has been the ability to create a keyboard shortcut that copies all of the changes I’ve made to an image to the clipboard, and then apply them to future images with a second shortcut. I use SHIFT + COMMAND + C to copy my adjustments, and SHIFT + COMMAND + V to apply them to other images. As I go through similar images this saves me heaps of time, and as the image content changes requiring changes to my copied adjustments I simply update the copied adjustments and continuing pasting until it needs changing again.
10 – Tethered Shooting
The last thing that I wanted to mention is the ability to shoot tethered. I left this until last because I don’t do it often, but when I need to, I really enjoy having the ability to do this right there in Capture One Pro. When you first connect a supported camera, you get one dialog that asks if you’d like to register your camera with Capture One Pro and literally it’s just one click, and you get access to all of the controls that you see on the left side in the Capture Tool’s Live View Window here.
EOS R Live Tethering
As you can see, you can control most of the aspects of the camera right from the Live View window, including even making very fine adjustments to the focus, and, of course, releasing the shutter, so if you do focus stacking, this is a great way to work. I’ve also found it very useful when doing portrait work, as being able to see the images on the computer as we shoot makes for a very dynamic shoot, and once again, really speeds up the workflow.
Essentially, Capture One Pro is just that, a Professional image editing package that provides the tools and image quality required to satisfy even the most discerning professional photographer, but these benefits are available for anyone that forks out for a license.
Win a Capture One Pro License!
On that note though, as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I have a Capture One Pro license to give away and wanted to invite you to take a look at an amazing resource that the Capture One Pro creators have put together, called the 30 Day Challenge. I’m not going to ask you to watch every video, but do take a look and watch the videos on areas that you are interested in. If you are new to Capture One Pro, this really is an invaluable resource.
If this all whets your appetite enough to give Capture One Pro a try, please do download the fully functional 30 day trial version, with no credit card required, and take it for a spin yourself. I had been meaning to try Capture One for years, and finally set an afternoon aside to do it in the summer of 2016, and from that first photo that we looked at earlier, I was hooked. My photography is simply better and I enjoy my photography more now that I use Capture One Pro, and that is why I’m happy to recommend it to you.
To enter for your chance to win the license that I have, I would like you to do two things, in addition to downloading the trial, and that is to write one paragraph describing what you liked about Capture One Pro, and link to one photograph or blog post that you can share based on your experience. Please post these below in the comments, and make sure that you use a valid email address for your comment, so that I can contact you if I select you as the winner. Your mail address will not be visible to anyone else, and I will not share any of the email address with anyone, including the folks at Phase One, the makers of Capture One Pro. We aren’t harvesting addresses, we just want you to have fun, and get the most out of your photography.
The deadline for entries is May 25, 2020, and I’ll announce the winner shortly after that. Also, please only enter if you do not already own a current Capture One Pro license. Let’s give people that haven’t already got one a chance to win.
New Digital Products Store
New Store Screenshot
One last bit thing that I’d like to share with you is that I have just created a new digital products store via FastSpring, that enables me to offer downloadable products with a streamlined checkout process, in a multitude of currencies, while staying on top of worldwide sales taxes which is becoming a full-time job in itself.
At the moment you can buy my eBooks and Fine Art Border scripts, as well as my Viewfinder Mockup files, and a more streamlined monthly desktop wallpaper subscription with a 12 image Starter Pack. At the time of recording, I’ve had to use just basic links for the wallpaper subscription, but the actual checkout and delivery process is already much smoother.
If you are finding yourself stuck indoors self-isolating during these difficult times, hopefully, my eBooks will help you to fill some free time that you might have, so to celebrate the opening of my new digital products store, I’m offering a 30% discount off all of the currently available products below, until the end of May 3, 2020. Just use the code NEWSTORE30 when you checkout to claim your 30% discount! And if you know me, you’ll know that I don’t do sales very often, so don’t miss this chance if you have thought about picking up any of my digital products.
Although my general intention is to provide my digital products as popups throughout this website, you can also see all of the products together on FastSpring here and I’ll list them below as well: https://mbpkk.onfastspring.com/
As I finally catch up on tasks after completing my 2020 Japan Winter Tours, I have just organized the images from the three trips and took stock a little, and being as so many of us are spending time indoors at the moment, I figured I’d share some thoughts on the process, in the hope that it might help you with your workflow too. Now might be a good time to enjoy your photography introspectively, and taking a look at your organization can lead to a deeper appreciation of your work as well as making it easier to get to.
If you’ve been following how I work, you may recall that I keep all of my current year’s images on one SSD drive, which includes everything I’ve shot, and then copy all of my final selects into a second SSD drive. My entire year drive is called my Traveler, because it not only travels the world, but it travels nicely between my computers too, as I also keep my Capture One Pro catalogs on the drive, so I can just catch up where I left off simply by moving the drive between my computers. I won’t go into as much detail as my previous posts, such as episode 466, so check out that post if this isn’t just a top-up for you.
My Finals drive also travels everywhere with me, but that is where I store everything that I feel is worth showing people, and images that I will actively use going forward. From this year’s trips, I ended up with 96 images from my Hokkaido Landscape Tour that I’m really happy with. 77 of them were shot with my EOS R and 19 of them shot with my Rolleiflex medium format twin lens reflex camera. From the first of my Japan Winter Wildlife tours, I came back with 270 images that I am really happy with, and from my second Japan Winter Wildlife tour, I found myself with 179 images. The main reason for the reduction on the second tour was the warm winter affecting the behavior of the sea eagles. Although we did still get some great shots, it wasn’t as productive as the first tour.
During my tours I try to show the group what I’ve been getting from time to time, to hopefully inspire them, but also to encourage them to share their own work, as that really helps us to inspire each other as we travel together. To facilitate this, and to help me speed up my workflow, I create a Smart Album at the start of each tour, that will automatically gather all images of two stars or higher during the dates of the tours, so as I go through my images each day and make my selections, they automatically appear in this Smart Album. Here is a screenshot of the settings, and although this is in Capture One Pro, you can do something very similar in Lightroom.
Capture One Pro Smart Album
You can’t, unfortunately, select multiple Smart Albums at once, although you can create a new wider-ranging Smart Album, but I’ve just selected the albums individually and right-clicked the images in each album, and selected Export > Originals to copy them to a 2020 sub-folder on my Finals SSD. I usually specify to Prefer Sidecar XMP over Embedded Metadata in the Capture One Pro Preferences > Image dialog, as well as selecting Full Sync for the Auto Sync Sidecar XMP option. This, coupled with selecting the Include Adjustments checkbox during the Export of my Originals ensures that Capture One Pro includes all of the edits I’ve done to my images.
Export Originals
Capture One Pro Preferences Image Dialog
Capture One creates a few extra folders in the export directory to include some cache and settings files, including masks that I’ve drawn on images to make adjustments etc. When I open my Finals catalog, because this is the first time I’m copying images across for 2020, I initially have to Import my images at their current location, selecting the 2020 folder that was just created in my Finals folder on my Finals SSD. The important thing here is to ensure that the Include Existing Adjustments checkbox is turned on under the Adjustments section.
Capture One Pro Import Dialog
You can’t actually see the adjustments in your images in the import dialog, but once you have completed the import, all adjustments will be applied to the images and so we don’t have to redo any work that we did on the images on the original drive.
I actually recalled that I’d shot a few movie files while traveling as well, and so went back into my Traveler catalog to copy those over, and that reminded me that if you do have movies in your selection, you need to turn on the Include Movies option in the Export dialog, otherwise these will be ignored. I hadn’t even rated my movie files yet, so there were not included in my Smart Albums anyway, but that is something to keep in mind if you do shoot movies and use Capture One Pro.
Synchronizing Updates
That did give me the opportunity though to show you how updates are handled for the rest of the year, as I now have a 2020 folder in my Finals catalog, so all I have to do after copying any new work across is right-click my 2020 folder and select Synchronize. I find that it works better to select Show Importer on this dialog, as some changes to files have not been reflected when I haven’t done this in the past, although I haven’t checked recently to see if that is still a problem.
Synchronize Dialog
Once this process is complete, the beauty of my workflow is that I now have all of the current year’s work on one SSD, and I keep that with me at all times, until my cloud backup is completed, and we’ll touch on that shortly. In addition to the current year though, I also have one more drive that essentially has every image I’ve ever shot that I consider being worth a hoot. So with more than twenty years of my favorite shots in one catalog, I can get to images easily to send to people, for example, even if I’m traveling, or to use in demonstrations during my workshops or talks.
Brief Summary of Backup Process
As we came so close to this during the last paragraph, I’ve updated my Studio Backup workflow slide and included that here for your reference. To summarize, I shoot my images and initially store them in my Traveler SSD, and although it’s not on this slide, if I’m actually away from home, I do daily backups to a second drive, just in case anything happens to the first. I will then keep the Traveler in my pocket or a locker for the entire time.
Image Flow and Backup Workflow
When I get home from a trip, I plug the Traveler into my iMac Pro, and that kicks off a Chronosynch job I’ve created to synchronize my new images and updated Capture One Pro catalog to my Drobo. On my iMac I’m running Backblaze which then starts to transfer my new images and catalog into the cloud. This can take a while, and I have to choke the upload speed a little so as not to get my Internet connection crippled by my stingy provider, but even after a wildlife trip with thousands of images, within a few weeks of getting home my new work will be backed up in the cloud.
Being slightly paranoid, I actually have a second Drobo which I turn on occasionally and run another Chronosynch job to synchronize my first Drobo with my second. This is just to save me waiting for a cloud backup to be delivered from Backblaze should I ever have anything go wrong with my Drobo. The cloud backup is really my ultimate disaster recovery plan, should something happen to my entire house, taking out both Drobos. My entire back is currently around 17TB though, so downloading it over the Internet is not really an option. I’d have to pay for physical drives to be sent out to me.
I also backup my Finals SSD to the Drobo, including the Finals Capture One Pro catalog, as I make most of my final tweaks on there, and it also contains lots of Collections for things that I’ve done over the years, including my yearly Top Ten selections, which I love to go back through from time to time. I also use it to create temporary collections like this Want to Print collection.
Want to Print Collection
Printing Our Work
I’m not sure if I’ll have time to do this during the coming week, but I was thinking that I’d love to print some of the medium format work that I did during my Hokkaido Landscape tour in January. so I’ve just dropped twelve images into a Want to Print album. I might tweak the selection too, but there is something about the tactility of the format that makes me want to print at least a selection of images. I found it so interesting and calming to work with film after almost twenty years and also developing the film myself using the Lab-Box. There is something about deciding how to complete this analog work in the digital darkroom though that has me thinking a little harder than I have so far when printing digital work, so I’ll try to nail that down and talk about it once I’ve come to some conclusions.
Whether you shoot film or digital though, printing can be incredibly fulfilling, so I wanted to suggest that if you are staying safe and healthy during these times of crisis, and find yourself with some time at home to enjoy your photography, printing can be a great way to do that. It might be hard to source a new printer at the moment, but even if you have an inexpensive A4 inkjet printer hanging around, the results can be surprisingly good, so maybe give it a try.
I recently released a video that I created for the Phase One team, covering all of the new features in my raw image conversion and management software of choice, Capture One Pro.
I actually created the video around four months ago, when Capture One Pro 12 launched, but I have been pushed to find a week when I didn’t have something else that I wanted to share with you, so it’s been on the back-burner for a while.
The video is exactly 10 minutes because that’s all the time I was allowed, so some features are only touched on briefly, but we do take a deeper dive into some of my favorite new features such as Luma Range Masks, so I hope you find this useful. If you aren’t a Capture One Pro user, please take a look anyway, to see how we live on the dark side, and if you would like to see more, visit my Capture One Pro Tutorials page for a list of all videos I’ve released on Capture One to since I jumped ship from Lightroom in the summer of 2016.
As a reference, here is a Before/After of the main image that I processed in the video so that you can compare the sky after I worked on it with the new and incredibly powerful Luma Range Mask Tool. Grab the vertical bar in the middle of the image, th en you can move that left and right to see the difference between the two images. Especially notice how we are able to keep the lightest parts of the sky light as we darken down the rest.
Anyway, here is the video. Do hit that full screen button and I hope you enjoy it. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or suggestions for future videos.
New Features at a Glance
Also, for your reference, here is a breakdown of the key new features that I cover.
Completely updated Look and Feel
Now supports plugins!
Better Masking Tools!
The UI has been overhauled with new icons and a better but familiar layout, and Capture One Pro now uses a larger font for better viewing. It’s also now possible to search for Keyboard Shortcuts – Yes!
We walk through Luminosity Masking with the Luma Range Tool. Improved Linear Gradient Masks that can now be moved with COMMAND key, or made asymmetric by dragging with the ALT or Option key pressed. And we can now create Radial Gradient masks!
Copying of Adjustments is now more intelligent, as image specific adjustments like Spot Removal are now ignored by default, but can be turned on when necessary.
Capture One Pro now supports Plugins! JPEGmini are among the first, and this opens up all sorts of doors. I can’t wait to see what other developers create!
Fujifilm Film Simulation – if you are a Fujifilm camera user that’s probably useful for you.
Capture One Pro just goes from strength to strength, and I hope this walk-through helps you to understand the new features in version 12!
Download Capture One Pro
You can download Capture One Pro and try it without any limitations for a full 30 days. Be careful though, it only took me an afternoon to realize that I was about to change my photography forever!
