Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening
Lesson 16 from: Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10David Grover
Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening
Lesson 16 from: Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10David Grover
Lesson Info
16. Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening
Lessons
Introduction
08:11 2What's Possible with Capture One: Quick Edit
06:50 3Capture One Versions: Installation Basics
02:19 4Interface Introduction and Customization
27:16 5The Power of Keyboard Shortcuts
09:27 6Image Management Basics
10:38 7Organization Best Practices
09:53 8Building your First Catalog
19:47Image File Management Automation
06:42 10Advanced Catalog Organization
17:41 11How to Add Meta Data
12:42 12Searching and Filtering Techniques
11:31 13Further Catalog Strategies
07:09 14Basic Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques
15:31 15Advanced Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques
20:54 16Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening
09:29 17How to Correct for Perspective
12:35 18Basic Tool Behavior
11:04 19Tool Basics Part 1
22:44 20Tool Basics Part 2
06:34 21Converting to Black and White and Adding Grain
10:13 22How to Apply Image Adjustments Globally
08:02 23Sharpening and Noise Reduction
09:58 24How to Create and Save Styles and Presets
07:40 25Why Should You Shoot Tethered?
02:26 26How to Set-Up Your Tethered Hardware
02:15 27How To Set Up A Tethered Photoshoot Project
11:07 28Basic Session Workflow Organizing And Making Selects
21:45 29Basic Session Workflow Exporting
05:44 30Advanced Session Workflow
15:00 31Creating Selections With Smart Albums
06:20 32Advanced Exporting
09:03 33Saving Session Templates
03:14 34Collaborating On Set With Capture Pilot
17:45 35Using The Color Editor Basic Color Adjustment
15:26 36Skin Tone Adjustments
09:30 37Color Grading Using The Color Balance Tool
12:54 38Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color
08:11 39Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients
12:31 40Advanced Local Adjustments using Masks
17:15 41Dodging and Burning in Capture One
11:30 42Creating Local Adjustments with the Color Editor
07:15 43How to Use Local Adjustment Masks for Color Editing
03:43 44How to Remove Objects in your Image
09:07 45Image Processing Demo: Local Adjustments
05:57 46Exporting with File>Export
08:07 47Export Strategies and Proofing Previews with Process Recipes
11:49 48How to Export for Social Media
05:11 49More Clever Tricks with Capture One Pro 10
05:57 50Final Q&A
13:11Lesson Info
Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening
So composition, this is very sort of straightforward, but it's good to know kind of how it works in Capture One because there is a few differences to what you kind of might be used to. So image like this, a little bit wonky, so we need to rotate. So most compositional stuff is found in the this tool tab, which is known as Know what? I can't remember his name. Lens tool tab. So that contains sort of lens corrections, and rotation, crop, keystone, collections, and all that sort of stuff. So we have some choices here if you wanna straighten an image. We have some cursor tools that deal with sort of rotation. So if we click and hold on a cursor tool, you see some of the cursor tools have a little arrow next in them. That means they perform more than one function. So as you saw with the Loupe tool, we could do Loupe. We could do Pick Focus Point. With the Straighten tool we've got Straighten, Rotate Freehand, Rotate Left, Rotate Right. So the Straighten tool is pretty simple. If we know wha...
t our horizon is, we can simply draw along our horizon, whether that's horizontal or vertical, and then, when we let go, then it will rotate about that point and give us the straightened image. Now, when you're in the Crop tool, or the rotational tools, you will see the full image as it's being rotated, with its current crop boundary and the full image, as you can see. Now, in Capture One you don't have to apply a crop. So you don't have to press Enter, or anything. If I press Enter, (clicking) nothing happens. So whenever you're in the Crop tool, or any rotation tool, you see the entire image, and the non-cropped areas. As soon as you come away from the Crop tool, like just the basic pointer, the image will snap back up to full screen. So don't get frustrated tapping Enter: you don't need to apply a crop. As soon as you've cropped it, it's applied. With regards to cropping, if you press C on your keyboard, you see what happens there: we go straight to the Crop tool, and it shows me my crop boundaries, and then we can grab a corner, and just crop like so. Sort of old-fashioned cropping, where you adjust the crop. The image isn't moving around behind it. You'll see, if we float the cursor just to the corner, and we click, then we can actually do freehand rotation as well, just up and down. Don't need any modifier keys, that's simply just float the cursor to one of the corners and then you can do some freehand rotation like so. If you want to If you've decided this is a terrible crop and you wanna start all over again, rather than kind of trying to pick up a corner and changing it, if you think, you know what? I just wanna start again, new crop, hold your Shift key down, and that will disregard any existing crop. Then you can just draw straightaway. So Shift-click just disregards existing crop and lets you draw again. So that's sometimes faster than just picking up the corner. If you want to crop to any existing kind of aspect ratio, if you click and hold on the Crop tool you'll get some options in here, too. So Unconstrained is just freeform cropping. Original gives you the original aspect ratio of the sensor that it was shot on. Output we'll come back to, but that will allow you to crop to a specific process recipe, so when we get to exporting in a later lesson, if your process recipe is exporting to a certain number of pixels, X and Y, then the Crop tool can match that process recipe. So just hold that thought for a later lesson. We can crop square. If I've chosen Square, then we can just grab a corner, and then it will snap straightaway to a square crop like so. If we have specific aspect ratios, we can choose these here as well, and then the crop will snap to that. If you wanna make your own aspect ratio, you can just add the aspect ratio. A little dialog will pop up. You just have to name it. So if we wanna add 16:9, for example, then we could just say 16 by 9, say OK, and then that will give me a 16:9 ratio like so. Again, don't be too concerned with the output dimensions. That's something which we'll deal with with process recipes. So, really this is just all about the various different aspect ratios. But the golden rule is, don't forget, you don't have to press Enter to apply crop. If you want some kind of grids and guides going on in the middle, you'll see when I start cropping that it pops up the thirds for me on the grid, on the crop, rather. If we go into Preferences, into Crop, you'll see some additional options here of how to sort of preference that crop, basically. So we can show various different inserts. So if we did Golden Ratio, for example, then when I start cropping, we get the Golden Ratio popup like so. We could have Fibonacci Spiral and so on. So you've got all those different inlays that you can just set here as well. Other options Show During Drag Only, so that means I only see that guide pop up when I start moving the crop. You can turn it on all the time if you wish, when the grid and guides is on. So you see, Show When Grid and Guides is on, which is Whoops. Come back, Crop. Shift-click, which is this icon up in the top right-hand corner, grid and guides, like so. So that'll give you your crop insert, whatever you've chosen that, and guides, which you can also pick up and drag around as well. So let's just go back to Rectangular, and you see you've got the choice of how many lines you wanna have in the crop too. So it's very customizable, once more. Also, what you're seeing, the masking-out, that's a preference too. So if you wanted to totally obliterate it, you can, or you can just avoid having any sort of opacity whatsoever. So again, you can sort of decide exactly how you wanna see that non-cropped area. The labels, that's the dimension labels on the edges, so you can choose to hide those, or show them too. So just have a look at the crop preferences, and decide exactly how you think you might want to have that set up. I personally just pretty much have it to the defaults. We can go back to defaults, which means that when you're dragging you get the guides, and when you let go they disappear, so that works pretty good for me. If we move over to the Just check we didn't miss anything there. Nope. Let's just reset this crop. If we move over to the Crop, you've got pretty much exactly all the same adjustments here. So you can see the various different aspect ratios, it's exactly the same as picking up here, it's just a different place to find it. You'll also see you can pick up the Crop tool here, but it's very rare I personally ever click the Crop tool, cursor tool. I'm just using C to get the Crop tool, and V on the keyboard, which just takes me back to the normal pointer. So straightaway, I know if I wanna crop, I can just press C, or I can press R to get the Straighten tool, do that job, press V, and then we're back to where we were. Except I didn't do a very good job of straightening that, like so. So again, keyboard shortcuts, really useful for cropping, and straightening, and so on. So C for Crop, R for Straighten, V to get you back to the main pointer tool. In the Rotation & Flip tool down here, you can also have a slider, which allows you to drag to rotate as well, if you wanna do it that way. We can flip left and right like so. Sorry, rotate left and right 90 degrees, and then we can flip on the horizontal or vertical, too. I think, under Adjustments, you've also got pretty standard shortcuts for Rotate Left, and Rotate Right, so that's the square brackets command, right square bracket command, left square bracket, like so, which again, shortcut's much faster that having to access that in the tool itself, or up in the Adjustments menu. So these tools are probably actually very rarely accessed by myself, 'cause you don't often need to get to them unless you wanna do some flipping. You can do everything else with the cursor tools, and their shortcuts.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
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.
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!!
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.
Student Work
Related Classes
Fundamentals