Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Session Workflow Organizing And Making Selects

So let's get our wonderful model, Lisa, Lisa, sorry, on stage (laughs). So, we've set up our session, we've got our naming convention down-- You know what, let's pull up a chair. To the side. Okay. And what you'll, Jeff if you can pop off the first shot. Come up just a touch-- See how we're doing exposure-wise. Perfect. Just right in towards me. Oh, no flash. Oh. Went to sleep (laughs). There we go. All right, here we go again. Just like that. Okay nice, as you can see, the shot's come in pretty quick, and you get instant preview on the screen. The normal workflow is, I mean, obviously we set this up earlier so we're pretty close, but generally, I'll just be your assistant for a second, Jeff. If you can just pop off a shot with gray card in tone, is that about right? Yep. Okay. Okay, so that gives us our white balance which we can pick off, obviously you can either use the presets in the camera if you know them to be good, we can use the preset in the white ba...

lance tool. Conveniently there's a little white balance picker in the camera tool, so we don't have to nip back to the color tool tab, for example, we can stay here, we can grab the white balance picker and if you just zoom in a touch, we can just grab out gray balance and pick that. So that gives us a nice gray balance which sets our image like so. Now the way Capture One works, by default, if we don't change anything, is that the next shot Jeff takes will remember that white balance and so on. So if you rattle off a few more shots. And you can do a bunch, Jeff, if you like. So you see in the camera tool there there's a small little colored dash next to the shutter button, so that means there's images in the buffer which are coming down. So you can see that we'll probably have one more shot, and then we're done. So you can see the speed of capture is pretty fast, again, depending on the camera that you're using, it may well be quicker if it's like USB 3, for example, then you can expect that tether speed to be quicker. You can see I've got thumbnails rolling down the right hand side. If you wanna change the order, like if you want the newest at the top, then basically if we go to... Not this one, go to reverse over here, then we're going to see the newest image right and the top. So, Jeff, if you actually do a few more. And then we throw in some adjustments or a look. Fantastic. So Jeff will never hit the buffer on the camera, on any camera, and tethering to a relatively new computer, you're never going to be interrupted, I dunno, Jeff, do you ever find you hit the buffer in the camera-- No but I've seen that fast under a strobe that I would run into that. I mean, you can just really keep on going, you won't be held up. It's really very high performance in that respect. Let's bring this up, so while Jeff is shooting, of course, the images are coming in automatically like so. If you want to, up in the camera menu, there's a useful option here, which you might want to explore, which again, is sometimes useful if your collaborating on set with people and you don't want the images popping up in Capture One, you don't want a makeup and stylist or a client crowding round the computer. Cause quite often, Jeff, I imagine you're shooting and looking at the screen to see what's going on. You're looking at, you know, three people crowding around your monitor and you can't see, it's quite irritating. So by default what Capture One will do is show the image on screen when ready. So that means it's had its color profile applied, any other adjustments and so on and so forth. If you want to, we can say never. So if I choose that, so we can see what happens. And then, Jeff, if you start rattling off again. (camera clicking) So basically, thumbnails are coming in over on the right hand side, like so, but the image is static to the one we looked at last. So if we'd hidden our browser, and Jeff can shoot comfortably without a few people popping up, sticking their heads around the screen, trying to see what's going on and so on. So you can really control that as well. And you might've noticed, if you had keen eyes, that we had shortcuts as well. So P, you can just tap P quickly on the keyboard to kill those images popping up straight away. You can say auto pause as well, which is really if we're in a situation where you have photographer, and perhaps a digital technician in really high pressure situations, like Jeff could be shooting, and I could be processing images in the background as well, without, you know, being interrupted basically. So have a look in the camera menu for a few other things. Something that might be interesting for still life photographers is this one, composition mode. And the reason we have these big, kind of scary warning symbols top and bottom, is that in composition mode we only save the last picture that you shot. So, it allows you to dial in the lighting, for example, get your exposure good and so on, but we'd only save the very last image you shot, it overwrites the previous one. So just be aware what composition mode does, that's why the warning symbols are there. So I'm sure you can imagine, Jeff, if you shot a whole day in composition mode and you had the very last image you shot to show for it, that would not be a good day in the studio. So composition mode. Orientation, generally, we don't have to worry about too much. Orientation is handled by the rotational sensor in the camera so you saw Jeff was shooting portrait, so the camera will automatically, or Capture One will automatically rotate. So, yeah, if you shoot a landscape for us quickly. Then by default the camera's rotational sensor will take over. So now they're gonna pop in landscape, like so. Let's make sure we've got that set so we can see them coming in. If you need to force rotation, and this is sometimes useful, if perhaps you're shooting overhead, looking down, the camera's rotational sensor can get kind of messed up and confused. You might get some coming in landscape, you might get some coming in portrait, so in your next capture adjustments tool, you can force the orientation to a particular degree. So most of the time you probably won't need to do that, but for copying artwork or if you're shooting overhead, or, you know, shooting folded fashion overhead or something like that, it's really frustrating when the camera sensor gets messed up. So this way we can force it to a known one. But default, again, will just use the camera's rotational sensor. If you want, we could shoot with a style, so the styles that we made in earlier lessons, or any of the built in styles. You can actually shoot and get that style applied straight away if you wish. But generally I would say, the changes that you make here, doesn't really happen very often. Mostly what's happening, and maybe you'll agree Jeff, that you're always copying from last with the adjustments. So whatever we set, and we're throwing some adjustments in in a minute, will get copied over to the next one. So, what we should do, Jeff, let's just pop that back over there, is... Do a few more sort of portrait style, because that's how we were gonna shoot. (camera clicking) (mumbling) Okay, great. Let's shall we throw in some kind of look and adjustments? What would you like to do? Any, oh. Let's delete that one. The last two didn't-- The last two flashes. Very simple to delete, just before you shoot, Jeff. What we can do, if I just do command-backspace, like so. Then what happens is they go to the trash folder, like so. So it doesn't go to the system trash, it goes to the session trash. So if we look here, trash, that's those two captures. It was actually very useful that that happened, cause then that give us a (laughing), and opportunity to show that. Yeah, you meant to do that, of course. Okay, so. Yeah, what should we put on adjustment-wise. Exposure's pretty good. We could just throw in a bit more contrast. We could grab our color balance tool which we're gonna look at later and just do some tweaks to color and so on. Maybe put in... A vignette, or something like that. Just a few pointers like that. And what's gonna happen if you do another shot, Jeff. Let's just go to one of the tools we adjusted. Then if you watch our exposure tool here as the new adjustments, as the images come in, it'll pop up in a second. Oo! (laughter) Let's do another one. Nice one. Actually, for some reason, my adjustments didn't stick. Let's do that again. So let's have a bit more contrast, drop saturation down, a bit of vignetting, let's throw in a quick color grade, like so. And then copy from last. Okay, Jeff, just pop off a shot for me, just the one. Like so, so now you can see that the adjustments follow those images. So whatever you're adjusting, Capture One always gonna be catching up. Now, if you want to monitor focus, we can do a couple of things. If you remember from earlier lessons we had the loop tool, so we can use the loop tool straight away just to check different areas of focus, for example. You can either do that on the main viewer, or you can do that on thumbnails themselves. But even as Jeff is shooting, the digital tech or whatever can just whiz through thumbnails like so. Again, you don't have to have the viewer up, so if you just want to be working in this view, we can do so and then we can check focus too. You'll also remember in the details, too, we had the focus tool. So if we pop in a little focus tool like so. If, we just do another couple of shots, Jeff, we can make this bigger as well. Getting useful if you've got your monitor. So as the shots will come in your see the focus tool also updates pretty rapidly as well. And then that way you can keep an eye on focus pretty easily too. Notice that the rendering to 100% is pretty fast and pretty immediate too. So if there is a focus issue, then pretty much, straight away someone can flag it up and say, hang on a second, Jeff, or hang on a second, photographer, focus is just slipping off a little bit as well. And this focus window you can actually make pretty big, if I had a bigger screen I can make it even bigger. Or you can just have a little smaller one tucked up like that. So let's drop that back in there. Any questions so far, Jim? So we did have one from one of our students that says, "When you set it to copy from last "is it what you see directly on your preview image?" Yes, so basically anything that I have set in any of the tools gets copied to the next image. You have some control over that with next capture adjustments, there's a whole tool dedicated to that. And as I said, most of you will probably never come off the default from this. So we'll have our default ICC profile, default orientation, default metadata, and then all other copy from last. There's some other options in there, like copy from primary, so if you had, say, a collection of images that we just shot and there was one particular image that you wanted to grab adjustments from, what we could do is say, okay, this shot, perhaps, we adjusted a little differently. So if I said copy from primary, and we took a shot, then it would grab the adjustments from that one. But generally, 99 percent of people are just using copy from last. Any others, Jim? We're good. Okay, so I think, Jeff, we've got quite, quite a few shots in here I would think. So the next part in our basic sort of session workflow would be kind of making some selects. Liza, you can take a breather for the moment. Jeff, if you wanna, you can see the monitor, can't you? So the simplest way to make selects from a session like this is we can either drag and drop to the selects folder, or if you look in the edit menu, you will find, or is it file menu? This one here. Move all selected variants to the selected folder. So that's just a kit, a simple keyboard shortcut, command-J. Or we can just do drag and drop if you prefer that. So out of these, Jeff, let's pick like five or six that we wanna kind of go through and-- That looks like a good one. This is a good one. So if I do command-J, I get a warning that says, "Files will be moved "to a new location, continue." If we just have a look in our selects folder, you can see that that iage is popped in there. Now that warning can be a bit prohibitive if you're trying to move (fingers snapping) nice and quick. So if we look in references, you'll find the warnings page here, and you'll see a few options about warning when moving images in folders. So probably, most of you are gonna want to uncheck that box. So now, Jeff, if we pick, if you tell me-- Maybe the one, number 33. 33, so that's down here. Woops, wrong shortcut. (laughs) 33, 33. I went too far. Oh, this one here. So command-J, that will move there. Probably not this one-- With he smile, 30, number 30, why not. Number 30, command-J. Yeah, and you wanna pick one of the horizontals maybe? Yeah, why not. So, what've we go? We got out of these three. And remember if you want to look at all three, just shift-select, hide the thumbnails, and then we've got, you know, a nice comparison. If you wanna zoom all of them we could, just to check for focus. If we use the hand tool, which is H on the keyboard, and the shift key. My mistake, sorry. Shit, zoom. Then we can look at all, or pan all three at the same time. If we just want to check for focus. And where I double click as well, that will zoom all of them to the same spot. So I'd say top left is the one with the-- Sure. With the best focus, I think, wouldn't you? So, that would be this one here, yes. So command-J. That's now in our selects folder. So how many have we got, we've got four. Let's grab a couple more. How about number 40? Number 40, yes, this one here. Command-J. And maybe 34. 34, which is right there, so command-J. So, very basic collaboration between photographer and tech, using simple shortcuts just to bounce them over to the selects folder, like so. Now if you wanted to do any other adjustments of course, we could do so here, we could finesse what we've done, we could copy and apply them across like you saw in earlier lessons as well. And of course, at this point if we wanted to just make sure that we were happy with what we've got, then we could always advance through in sets, like we saw in an earlier lesson as well. Anything else you wanna do to these shots, Jeff? Or shall we-- I mean, we could maybe make them a little warmer, what'd you think? So, a couple of options there. We could either tweak the white balance, or as you're gonna see in later lessons when we get to the color side of things, the color balance tool, we could just, we could throw in a little warm tint with the color balance. What's your preferred method? Um, I mean, I like to try white balance first, normally. Okay. Let's go to white balance. And I see how that works and then usually I tweak it with the color balance. Okay, so you want to go just a little warmer, correct? (overlapping speech) So if I move int hat direction, how's that looking? It's coming. Here you go. Okay. Any other adjustments? I think we could maybe go into the color balance and refine it, maybe. What'd you think? Well, we could have a little colder shadows maybe. Yep. Just to tweak that. Ad again, this really, this tool here is fantastic for just throwing in a quick grade. And we're gonna be getting to that in later lessons too, so don't worry about that. Happy with that, Jeff? Yeah, I think that looks nice. Okay, so, if we just get our thumbnails back. Remember, like we did yesterday, we can copy up here and then shift-select everything else and then say apply, and then that will that to everything else. Oo, I missed one. Let's grab that one and say apply, like so. So now we've got six final shots. So let's select all of those. And of course, the last piece of the puzzle, just so you can see where we are. That was our captures, that was the selects we made, we did those two flash misfires that went to the trash, and now we're gonna process out to the output folder. "When you edit in session mode, "where are the edits stored?" Oh, okay. Good question. If we look in the capture folder, so you can see all the Sony raw files, the .ARWs, and then... You will find a folder in there called Capture One, and this has a couple of things in there, cache, and settings, like so. So cache has stuff like the thumbnails that we're looking at. So, remember earlier when we spoke about catalogs and building previews, the session does exactly the same thing, but they're stored in this little sidecar folder. So, again, when we're browsing through a session, and if we just bring up, let's just go to all images for a second. If we need to browse through a session quickly, you could see I can tap through really fast, because we're not having to look at the raw data, we're only really looking at those previews. So it's super quick to browse in Capture One, like so. So, answering that gentleman's question, in the Capture One folder, like so. If you want to, if you remember earlier when we spoke about EIP files. So if we look at preferences and under capture, I think. No, my mistake. Sadly, I can't remember every single, here we go (laughs). Preference in here. So in the preferences in sessions, you can actually pack them as EIP straight away. So rather than having that sidecar folder with all the settings, instead of seeing .ARW here, you will see .EIP. So if you know when you're shooting tethered, and Jeff had to immediately send our selects off for retouch, for example, and the retouch was a Capture One user, then they could bring those EIPs in, so all the adjustments that we just put on there process out, or refine the adjustments, and then get going. So you can capture directly in EIP. If you want to, while we're on that subject, you can at any point right click and pack an image as EIP. So if in our select folder, oops, let's just bring that back. In our select folder if we knew that this one we were gonna send to retouch, we could say pack as EIP and just Dropbox that off or... transfer it off to the retoucher. So even if you don't shoot with EIP, you can just pack and unpack at a later date as well. There's no disadvantage to that, really. If you're on a super, super older slow computer it might slow you down by the tenth of a second, but it's a good option.