Lessons

Lesson Info

Building your First Catalog

So now, in the next lesson we start building on that and making your first catalog. Remember, later on and in later lessons we talk more about sessions but in this particular segment we're going to discuss catalogs. So we make a first catalog we do a couple of different imports from a hard drive or from a memory card from a camera so two different scenarios. Then we look at ways that we can organize or different organizational items that we can use to help manage your images better. We look at the all important metadata, so adding metadata to your images to aid search terms and just the general security of all your assets and then we look at, a little bit more on searching in terms of using things like smart albums, filters and other ways to search the catalog. So that's going to be a lesson, so if we can move back to Capture One, we can start. So, right now on the screen you can see this sort of catalog that I prepared for Creative life, but we're gonna close these two down so we're j...

ust totally starting from scratch in Capture One. So what we do is, we make a new catalog. We do that a couple of times and we do a couple of different imports so you can see some different scenarios. So we do a basic one, first of all and the we up the gear a bit and do something a bit more intensive. So to make a new catalog, it's very simple, it's file, new catalog and this part, this is making your database if you like. So this is the brains that tracks the locations of your images, knows certain things about them like metadata and so on. Now for best performance as we said in the previous lesson if you can put it on an internal hard drive so much the better if that's an ssd so much the better again because it can access it faster. So let's say, new catalog and you'll see this dialog pop up which has a few different options on it. So the first thing, the name, what do you want to call our catalog? So no hard and fast rules there, so I'll just call this David's catalog, like so. The location, so by default it will go into the Pictures folder on your mac or pc but you can choose to put that anywhere by just clicking on this box here with three dots. You'll see a few of these around Capture One they're easy to miss but if we tap this that just goes into the location dialog to choose where we want to put our catalog. But I'm just gonna leave it in pictures, but essentially we could place it anywhere. As I said, internal hard drive best but if you want to experiment with external drives mass drives, all that stuff, then you can do so. So let's keep it there. Template, we'll cover in later lessons probably more likely with sessions but what a template allows you to do is to save kind of the structure of the catalog, the organizational structure and actually have that pre set up for you when you open a catalog. But that will come a bit later. So let's say, OK and we have a catalog like so. Nice little tip, if you right click or control click on the name that will show you the exact path of where that catalog is. So from all the way from the top right down to the root is. So if you ever need to get to your catalog, for whatever reason, just right click on the name and that will show you exactly where it is. So this is what we've made so far, David's catalog, Capture One catalog, it's only 61 kilobytes and we haven't introduced any images yet so it's very small and so on. So to reiterate, this our database, the brains, that knows where our images are and certain things about them. So the next thing to do, of course, is to get images into a catalog. So you can see when you open up a brand new catalog there's this enormous button in the center which says import images. So you can either click that or if you're importing into a catalog which you've already been getting images into you can simply say file, import images. Note, there's a shortcut as well which you could use to expedite that process even further. So if we say import images, this opens up the second dialog like so. We can make that a bit bigger if we wish. Now really, the only kind of, two things you have to get right in this window is import from, where am I getting images from, import two where are those images actually going to go. So the source really is where are we getting those images. So on this particular import I'm going to pull from this little hard drive which I've got attached to my computer. Just an ssd. So we click in here and we say, choose folder let's locate that so I've got ssd, creative life, images to import, like so. So this scenario is if you've already got images existing somewhere, you know at home, your studio or office or whatever and you want Capture One to catalog them. Because a catalog is not a browser, it's not like you can now go into this catalog and then start looking through files and folders looking at images. You have to introduce images to a catalog so that they're logged and databased and so on. So this scenario, very good if you've already got images sitting on an external hard drive or an internal hard drive and you want Capture One to read them and import them into this catalog. So let's just choose this folder and then we've got a few images to import as you can see. Note that underneath we've got this additional option called include sub folders, we can just zoom in a little bit so include sub folders So that means if you've got say the top tier folder, like my images and then you've got sub folders and then even further sub folders then Capture One will drill through all those different folders pulling images into the catalog from that location. But this is just a simple import so I don't need to check include sub folders. So that's the first part done and successfully. Import two, where do we want to put these images, very important that you make a choice here and you get this right. So if we pop this dialog open then we've got a few different options, get that arrow out of the way. We've got current location, that means they will, in this case, stay on the hard drive but the catalog will know how to access them, so log them and so on. The next option, kind of a funny one, inside catalog. Now this is popular with say, Aperture users, who are moving to Capture One because it was something that kind of almost happened by default in Aperture and what inside catalog means is that images will get copied directly inside the catalog. So this catalog here will become kind of one master file that contains the actual images and the database. Now that could be quite nice because you end up with just this one of uber mega file which you can move around quite easily to different locations, backup easily and so on. But, the disadvantage of that is that it's limited or the size of it is limited by the size of available space it's stored on. So I've got 600 gig free which is pretty good but to be honest, with images it doesn't take long to fill up that amount of storage space. So storing images inside the catalog works well for like smaller catalogs that you might want to transport and move around or if you're storing that catalog on massive external hard drives it makes sense and as I said it was very popular with say, Aperture users who were used to doing that. Our photo does a similar thing you know you have all photos I should say, has that one master file which just has everything in it and such. So current location they're gonna stay on this hard drive inside catalog they'd be copied inside the catalog or we can choose a folder where to put them which will be the wise choice if you're importing from a memory card and such. We'll do that next, so let's just say current location. If you ignore everything else on the import window everything else is bonus stuff so if you get import from and import to correct then you're home free. If we have a quick look at the other windows, we've got backup two so if we check that we can simply make a duplicate of anything we are importing to a location of our choice. So if you are out in the field and you're importing from a memory card and you just want to put raw files on another external drive just for safety that's kind of a smart thing to do. In this case we won't, we'll just uncheck that. We can rename, if you're importing images and leaving them in their current location renaming is disabled, you can rename after the fact if you wish. We've then got metadata so we can add some basic metadata here just copyright and description so if I wanted to I could just type in my copyright information. For example, if I wanted to there, but probably what a better choice is, if I delete those is in the next field we have adjustments. So during the import process we can apply adjustments to the image in the form of a Capture One preset or a Capture One style which is something we look at in later lessons. So a preset is basically a single tool in Capture One which we can apply to images on import. A style is a collection of different adjustments that create one overall style. So in this case, what we can do, which is a bit smarter, I'll just show you where this is, we can say use a preset metadata David's metadata so that's a preset I made just earlier And we can show you how to make those presets as well when we talk about metadata. So if I do that then I'm going to add to my basic metadata to images as they import. That's a good thing to do, you know it adds my name, address you know contact details all that sort of stuff so that it's part of that image from ever after and when I export images from Capture One then of course we can choose to include that metadata as well. If we wish we can say auto-adjust so Capture One will make some assumptions and do some auto-adjustments. If those images have been through Capture One before or you're importing images that someone exported from Capture One as originals and made the option to include adjustments then you can bring them into Capture One and include those adjustments. So if you're exchanging raw files and this often happens like between photographer and retoucher for example and the retoucher wants to see the photographers adjustments and when they import into their own catalog or session they can include those adjustments as well. But for us we can just turn them off. File info just means if we tap on an image it will give us some various data about that image when it was captured and so on. So to summarize, we've got images to import off a hard drive we can leave them in the current location we're not gonna backup, we're not gonna rename, we're gonna add some metadata through the form of an adjustment and that's that. So there's a few options down here like eject and memory card, or erase images after copying which you're very brave if you pick options like that. You never know what can happen in an import process. The cat could jump on your lap to often mess something up or whatever it's just really, really not worth it. So let me command A to select all and we're gonna say import 42 images. Straightaway that import process is pretty almost instant because we're leaving them in that location. And then what happens is we start to generate previews for each of those images. So all that simply means is to make the catalog faster in performance that the database say this one here, David's catalog, you can see it's got a little bit bigger it's now 50 odd meg because it contains a small preview of every single image. Which essentially means if I just open one up, let's make this area smaller, and then we browse through images you can see I can move through it nice and quickly because we're only having to look at the preview files, we're not having to look at the actual raw data. So we can blast through images nice and fast like so. It's only when we come to potentially zoom in to 100 percent that's when we recall the raw data. Now you have some influence over the size of these previews and there's a very simple rule to follow. If we go to the preferences and we look at image you'll see here preview image size at the top which give you a pixel value along the long edge basically. Now all you really have to do is make sure you have enough pixels for your display of choice. So on laptops, on my monitors at home, they're not 4K monitors or whatever so it's perfectly fine to have 2560 pixels because my monitor is no bigger than 2560 pixels across. So that means whenever I'm browsing through Capture One it's perfectly fine for the preview size because it's never gonna be bigger than my monitor resolution. However, if you have a whopping great 4k screen or 2k screen or whatever you will need to make a bigger preview size because otherwise what's gonna happen is that whenever you're browsing through images Capture One will need to look at the raw data because the preview size isn't big enough to display on the monitor. So that means browsing will be super super slow and you'll be cursing and swearing at Capture One because you don't understand why it's not working quickly. So it's just a matter of those preview sizes. So be aware, if you do have a 4k monitor or even a 5k monitor and really good eyesight then you'll need to bump up the resolution to something suitable. You can do that after the fact, so let's say you've imported 500 images and you thought nuts I need to bump up my preview size there's nothing wrong with changing it afterwards but it will only effect new imports into the catalog but you can ask Capture One to regenerate previews by simply saying file, regenerate previews like so. And that you can select multiple of course, I could select all and then I could simply say file, regenerate previews and then it will go through and regenerate all those previews and such. So you can if you want to do that a batch but just make that setting before you start doing an import. So what actually happened after our import so over on the left hand side in the very first tool tab this is known as the library tool tab which is where you do all the management of your images. So let's just zoom in a touch so we can see that a bit better so it split into three sections, catalog collections, user collections and folders. So catalog collections are basically shortcuts. You can't change anything in that category it's all shortcuts so that shows me all the images that I have in my catalog regardless of where they're stored, the last ten imports that I made and so the point of that is if you come back from a job with 5 memory cards or whatever you'll be able to see the different imports that you did. Recent captures if you want to shoot tethered into a catalog and the catalog trash. User collections we'll come back to that's where we can start doing the powerful stuff with virtual organization and folders shows you the exact location of your images. So you can see that these images belong on traveler ssd creative life, images to import. So if I click on that folder, then you can see the contents of that entire folder. Now at home, if you're trying this and you don't see the complete path, if you right click or control click this option will say show folders hierarchy. So it will either show you just the top and the bottom route or you can see the entire hierarchy like so. So just be aware if you can't see that that's what you need to do. So that's really a basic import. Now the interesting thing about those previews as well, let's just do something reckless and eject this hard drive like so. So if I eject this you can now see, if I zoom in again for you, that there is an exclamation mark next to the hard drive itself and also the folder as well because this hard drive is no longer connected just to prove it let's unplug it as well. But those previews that generated on import are smart previews by default so that means that even without the raw data present if we were to, you know, just grab any particular image you can see it says it's offline. There's also a question mark icon on each of the thumbnails as well, offline at the top, but as it's a smart preview we can still go ahead and we can play around and we can make adjustments without necessarily having the raw data present. So it's a smart preview, by default. So it does mean, in my situation, as an example even with a catalog on your laptop but no access to the raw files themselves you can still do your adjustments, you can still do some organization all that kind of stuff the only thing you can't do, of course, is make high resolution exports. But it does make a big catalog very portable because you don't need that weight of the raw files with it. So if we then reconnect this hard drive And let's just bring up finder so we can see it's now connected and probably just need to refresh that and now you see the warning triangle has gone away, offline has disappeared, and it's not like any synchronization has to take place because remember the catalog is where the adjustment information is stored. So it's not like when I reconnected it had to say syncing adjustments or anything like that it was already there in the catalog we were just missing that offline part.