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Lesson Info

Basic Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques

What we're going to look at in this lesson is a few different things, so the first one: Selection and rating, so going through a whole bunch of images and culling that down to the final selects. There's so many different tools and tasks and techniques that you can use in Capture One. I'm going to show you everything and then you can decide which one is for you. Then, just to clear up a couple of extra things: Composition, so how to crop, rotate, straighten. All the basic stuff, flip and so on. And then finally perspective control. So adjusting perspective on buildings for example or just using perspective to control to manipulate an image. So that's going to be our next lesson, so we'll get straight into the selection side of things. If we can go back to Capture One on screen, great. So the term culling, selection, and rating as I said that deals with taking a body of work, I've just got a catalog here with a few sample images that we can use to then boil down, if you like, to the fina...

l selects. As I said there's a whole bunch of sort of different techniques that we can use to do that in Capture One. So basically I list all the various sort of options that we have, give you some examples, and then you can go on and decide which one makes the most sense for you. So, the images that you see here basically, just a rough, quick headshot/portrait shoot. And if we kind of put ourselves in the seat of the photographer, the first thing that we're going to want to do is perhaps reject some of those shots that we're definitely not going to use. And we have a really handy tool, which you can see up here on the toolbar, called the focus mask. Now, by default it's not on the toolbar so this is something you'll have to add. And if you remember, that's a right click and customize toolbar. If you don't want to add it on the toolbar, you can actually access it here as well, show the focus mask. And what the focus mask is is really like focus peaking if you're used to shooting video for example, you can turn on focus peaking, where if you use a mirror-less camera, you can see that view in the camera which shows you where the sharp focus is. So if we turn on the focus mask, what you see is an overlay on the image which basically highlights where the plane of focus is. So let's just make the thumbnails a little bigger so you can see better what's going on. But just as a quick glance, it becomes very apparent which shots you can simply reject off the bat. So if we look a the top row, looks good, looks good, looks good. As soon as we get to the second row, you can pretty much see the plane of focus is sitting too far back. The focus mask can control in the preferences a little, so if we look at focus you've got a threshold and opacity. So the lower the threshold, the more mask you're going to see. So it's kind of less critical if you like. If you bump up the threshold, then the mask kind of gets a bit thinner, but I tend to keep the threshold fairly low just so it gives you a really kind of good indication of where it focuses. But this is an adjustment you can experiment with just to see what works best with your camera-lens combination and so on. Focus mask is really better with lower depth of field images because then the algorithm can really pull out where the sharpness is, so if we try to switch it on on a landscape, which is front to back shot, then it's not going to be so useful as such. But on an image like this, it really helps us. If you want to confirm if you're a little bit worried that you don't trust the focus mask or you need some time to learn specifically how it works, as well as using the focus mask, we've also got in the details tool tab, this one here, the focus tool itself. So we can pick up the pick focus point cursor tool down here and then you can tap on an image like so and then you can see that that's definitely out of focus. So you can use the focus tool, we can set the size of this focus window, we can pan around it as well. Then if I go to this one for example, then we can pretty easily see that one is nicely in focus. If you don't wanna use the focus tool, you can also pick up the loop tool, or you can use the keyboard shortcut zed as you can see. All of the cursor tools have shortcuts so if I press zed, then I'm going to get the loop tool up, if I do shift+zed, I can actually cycle through the other tools. So if I want to go between pick focus point and the loop tool, I can just shift+zed and cycle through them. So with the loop tool, all I have to do then is click on the image itself and it shows me the hundred percent view, so then with a group of images like this we can see that's bang on, as the focus mask told us for example, and so on. So, either use the loop or use the focus tool for example. So, getting back to sort of culling and rating, we can see out of the first six here if we go to this one, like a simple way to reject an image: color tag. So there is no, in Capture One, like reject or pick or flag or something like that, but we've got star ratings and color tags really to use how we choose. So in this case, it makes it very simple to just tap nine on my keyboard, and that marks it red. So with the logic keyboard, we've color coded the keys of course so it's green, yellow, red for example. If you have a smaller keyboard, of course, it's still going to work on the number pads as well. If you want to change those shortcuts for color tagging for something that you prefer, if you look under adjustments, you can see the shortcuts there. So rating, one, two, three, four, five, color tag, clear tag, red, yellow, green, for example. So remember if you want to change that, just go to edit keyboard shortcuts, look under adjustments, color tag, and then you can change whatever you want in the shortcuts here to something you prefer. But if you have an extended keyboard, whether it's this logic keyboard or not, it kind of makes sense to have seven, eight, nine as nice and quick to access. So if we go through we can see that one's probably a dud, so we can mark that red, so it becomes much quicker to spot out of focus shots because we don't really have to open them up. That one's probably out of focus too, and then the last one, out of focus and again we can always use our pick focus point if you just want to quickly look and check. That one is kind of borderline if we were happy with that, which is why it's sometimes nice to use the focus tool if you're not 100% sure if it's going to be sharp or not. So very quickly, let's just drop that back down. We've done kind of our first pass, we've rejected all those images which we know are definitely no good, because they were out of focus, which is not much use. If you want to verify that, we can then turn on our filters that you saw earlier. So down here if we look at filters if you just wanted to do a quick verify, we can turn on the red like so, do another quick pass and then we know it's no good. Now, a useful shortcut down here to avoid having to go into the filters is to be able to toggle those filters on and off. By default, that's a shortcut which isn't enabled, but if you find it useful, you go back to edit keyboard shortcuts, it's right down almost to the bottom, so toggle color filters, let's say red. Let's go to one that I can do, this one here, let's go to red, and we know nine is red, for tagging red, so let's stick with nine but use a modified key. So if I do option+nine or alt+nine, that makes kind of a good case for a toggle. Now if I do option+nine, then I'm just toggling those filters on and off. So nice to see okay, that's the rejects, you do with those what you want. We could delete them, we could just leave them as red just in case, but we know we've flagged them up as the bad ones. So now if we go let's just turn those select all of those, I'm just going to remove those from this album. So now I know that we've only got to turn off that filter, we're just down to my nicely in focus shots, I can now turn off focus mask and then we can go through and look at those shots for rating and so on. So second pass we could do, we could say well green is good, and that's something which I want to potentially go on to the next thing. So there's a couple of different ways we could do this. If you're happy to just look at thumbnails you could do so, we could hide our tools, we could bring up the images like so and we can use our cursor keys to navigate through the shots. And that's a command+cursor click to go next image. If you want to change that so you know where it is in the menu, it's select next like so and select previous. So if we want to blast through images quite quickly we can do so like so. Capture One is nice and responsive on that. If you want to just be double checking focus again for whatever reason, when you're at 100% and we go to the next image, you'll find that Capture One, where's her eye gone, you'll find that Capture One, when you bounce back and forth between images, it'll cache the 100% view so that it's nice and quick if you're just whizzing through a bunch of images like so. So that way you don't have to kind of wait for the image to draw again, so I can go back and forth and maintain that 100% view. That's nothing you have to set up in Capture One, that's just how Capture One works basically, and you'll see I can move through pretty quickly and there's very little or no delay to that 100% rendering. Another nice little quick shortcut, if you're in the hand tool, which is this one here, so the H hand tool. If you do a control+click, you get a mini-navigator pop up and then you can pull the square around and then you can look at any part of the shot that you want to have. So right click with the hand tool gives you instant mini-navigator. And also in the hand tool, double click takes you to fit screen, double click takes you to 100%. So let's just go scroll up, and then we can go through and again, putting the pen or mouse down, we can say okay I'm going just tag ones five stars that I like. So I just tag a few of those images like that one, five, five, and so on. Obviously, you're probably going to have more images in your daily life but you don't want to sit and watch me tag images like so. So now we've gone through, we've done a second pass, we've got some of these images rated as five stars for example. You could guess you could do a similar thing again, you could use your filters if you wanted to, to just look at the selects that you've made. You could set up a shortcut key for toggling the rating filters on and off. So let's do option+five for example, so now if I do option+five, just escape out of the search window, now if I do option+five and it filters down like so as well. So that's kind of a useful way to get down to those final ones, but then we can expand on that a little bit further. So we can create some albums if you'd like to, automatically as well. But these are fixed albums, not star rating albums. So a really nice speedy shortcut that we can do is select all, and then right click on any of them, and you can say create albums from down here. So we've got some options, we could've done this with the color tag if we wanted to, but we're just going to do it with the rating. So straight away, as soon as I click this, straight away and use the collections area, you get a group made and it shows me all the unrated shots and all the shots that were marked as five stars. So completely automatic, you didn't really have to do anything manual about that, all we did was simply select all, right click, create albums from rating. Could've done that with the color tag if we wanted to as well, same principle. If I had other star ratings, if we had some three and four star ratings, you'd see unrated, five star, four star, three star, and so on. That's a really nice fast way to build albums like so. If you prefer dynamic, you've already seen it in earlier lessons about making smart albums, we could do a similar thing, we could go to here to my user collections, make a smart album say Five Star Albums like so, by the way, if you forget like I just did to set your search criteria, you could always right click edit smart album. So I just used that preset here like so, and now this becomes dynamic as well. And this is something we do a bit more often the later lesson when we get to shoot tethered as well, and we're in a catalog right now, but you'll also see how this works in sessions when we shoot tethered in the later lesson. That's kind of just the basics first of all, so are there any questions on just the basics, Jim? Yes, Louise Lindsay would like to know, can you just quickly review again how to access the focus tool. Yes, focus tool, focus mask, so if you're on the default work space, you just look at view, show focus mask, there's the shortcut shift+command+G. Otherwise you can right click say customize toolbar, and the focus mask icon is this one, and drag that to a favored spot on your workspace as such. So now we can just tap that to turn it on like so. The first time you turn it on it might take a few seconds to build because we have to look at every single image and create the mask but we store that mask in the database in a temporary file so that when you turn it back on again it's relatively instant.