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Lesson Info

Interface Introduction and Customization

We'll talk about the terminology, and we'll look at a graphic layout in a second, about all the different kind of naming conventions we use around Capture One. Some are similar to the applications you already know, some are probably quite different. So we'll just talk about that terminology so you know exactly what I'm saying over the next two days. Customization, that's a really big thing of Capture One. You can move around the palettes, you can change a whole bunch of stuff within the interface to make it work for you. There's no point having a Capture One tool up on the display if you're never gonna use it. So you may as well just get rid of it. There is of course a basic workspace. We argue every single year at Phase One what the best workspace is, and we all come up with (inaudible) And then we make some kind of general workspace. But pretty much every user of capture one does something to their workspace to make it work for them. I can show you some recommendations, of course, bu...

t everybody is a bit different. Then we're gonna look at shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts. Capture One has shortcuts for everything. And if you lean to master those, you can navigate your way around the software much much faster than if you're just driving with a mouse, or a pen and tablet in this case. And then we get on to the image management side of things, getting images into Capture One, deciding on your strategy and so on. So if I bring up this graphic, this basically describes the default layout of Capture One. I'm just gonna go nearer to the screen for a second. So over on the left, but it could be the right, and you'll see that in a minute, this is the default workspace of course, we have tool tabs, if we begin that the top left. They're those little icons which basically categorize the different tools into kinda different jobs. So the first tab, for example, could be about image management, the second one lens corrections, and so on and so forth. And then within those tabs you have all the various different tools, again, which you can customize as well. In the center, you can probably guess what that does. That's the viewer. So that allows us to view our image at various magnifications. Right at the top, that little row, which you saw me use just earlier, are the cursor tools. So they change the behavior of the cursor from perhaps just a normal pointing device to a cropping device or something like that. The toolbar indicated here, that has these kind of action buttons or shortcuts which turn something on, turn something off, like exposure warnings or a focus mask or rotating the image or something like that. And then finally, by default on the right hand side is the browser, where we have all the thumbnails which you can scroll through and look at your shots. So that's the basic Capture One workspace. So tools and tool tabs, the viewer, browser, cursor tools and the tool bar like so. So, let's just bring up the default workspace like so. Now generally you're gonna have a bit more real estate on your screens, 'cause we're running at resolution so we all don't go blind over the course of two days. But generally you're gonna have a bit more real estate on your screen. So, working in the default workspace, what exactly can we do? If we look at the view menu, this is pretty much where all the customization elements can take place. So let's start over on the left hand side with the tool tabs and the tools. Now as I said, if you don't like them on the left hand side, if we look at view and we scroll down a little bit, you'll see down here, place tools on the right. So if we say place tools right, then those simply switch like so. So if you're used to working with applications with a right hand sided tool set, then it, you know, makes perfect sense just to switch them over to the right hand side. Let's just switch those back. We can say, place tools left again like so. Also the browser. If we again go to the view menu, and we've got place browser below, like so, that will drop that to the bottom of the screen, which, kinda like a film strip, which you might prefer, basically. I'm still stuck in between do I prefer the browser at the bottom, do I prefer it on the right hand side. But again, it's simple to change. If you want, of course, you could also, if you had the browser on the right and you switched the tools, then as you saw earlier, the browser jumps up on the left as well. So really it's totally independent. Going back to the tools again, you see these various different tool tabs. So if I click through these tools tab, then all the various tools pop up down below. As I said, this is the default workspace. The second tool tab is something which I personally don't use very much. That's for shooting tethered. So in this particular example, if you don't want a tool tab there, we can simply right click, and when I say right click, that's also a control click. So whether you're using a mouse, you can right click, or in my case, I just use control on the keyboard. We can remove that entire capture tab. Get a little warning, and then it's gone like so. So that, again, frees up a bit more real estate. If you don't like the order these tool tabs are in, then we can change that as well. So for example, I like to have my exposure tool tab as my kind of third part of the process. So you'll see, if I just hover the mouse over the top, you get a little tool tip that pops up that tells you you can use the command button to drag to reorder. You'll see if you're on PC that would be control. So if I just do a quick command click, then we can move that tool tab over there, which is where I prefer it to be. So you can arrange all those tool tabs as you like. If you wish, you can actually right click anywhere and you can add your own custom tool tab. So if we wanted to have, basically our kind of standard go-to set of tools, we could say, let's have a custom tool tab. Just call that David's Tab, for example. Pick an icon that you might wanna have, let's go for a star. Say add tab. Just have to bring this across, and now I've got an empty tool tab which I can load up with whatever tools I wanna have. So if we right click we can say add tool, and then we can pick up basically any of those tools, drop them in that tab. I just removed that one now, of course, which is the same right click and say, remove David's tool tab. Had a short life, that one. So if we go back and look at the tool tabs themselves, then as you can see, they're loaded with, again, those various default tools. If you don't like the order those tools are in, simply pick it up and drag it to the spot that you want it to have. So you can reorder these in any particular way that makes sense to you. They can be collapsed as well, like so. And because of our smaller real estate, I'll probably be doing more collapsing and uncollapsing than you would probably be doing yourselves at home. So we can reorder these however we like. We can also drag them out onto the workspace. So you can have a floating tool. So regardless of what tool tab that we're in, that tool will remain wherever we place it in the workspace. If we wanna introduce it back into any tool tab, we can just drag it across like so. If we drag a couple of tools out, then we can actually stick them together. So then they become on and the same. So that's kind of nice, and you'll see that probably tomorrow when we talk about some color adjustment stuff, some of the tools actually work better if you take them out of the tab and make them bigger, 'cause when we're doing kind of precision adjustment, then we can get to some of the elements of those tools better if the tool is actually larger. So let's just pop those back over there. Additionally, if you have two monitors, if you're working with a dual workspace, if we have a look in the window menu, you'll also see we've got an item here called viewer. And if we just tap that, then essentially that gives you a secondary viewer which you can drag onto another monitor. So you can have tools on one monitor space and then the viewer on the other monitor space. Now, by default, and this kinda drives some people a bit nuts, it has kind of an auto tool tab arrangement that pops out on the left when you float your cursor over it. If you don't like that, you can just press command T, the shortcut, command T for tools, which will hide those tools permanently. If you want the tools there, then of course you can still customize this viewer window as well. Millions of possibilities in that respect. Having a duel monitor workspace is actually very useful, 'cause it gives you that full screen view of just the image, and then you can have the tools on the other side. So let's just close that window down for a second. You can also make floating tools in the window menu here, so it'll say create floating tool. So if we wanted a color balance tool, for example, that will just make the floating tool like so. To get rid of it, up in the top right hand corner, the three dots next to each other. I tend to refer to that as the sub-menu, if you hear me saying that again. So if we say sub-menu here and remove tool, then it takes it away. So extensive possibilities in just the tool area itself. And as I said, if you find that you're never gonna use the vignetting tool, for example, then simply get rid of it, because it's just in the way. It's cluttering up your workspace. If we look in the viewer, there's a few things that we can do to the viewer to sort of change its appearance as well. You'll see, down the bottom of the image we have something called, just right down here, if I just highlight that, this is known as the viewer label. So this gives us some basic metadata about the image. So its shutter speed, aperture and so on, the name of the image, quite important, color tag, and then a star rating as well. Personally I find that distracting sometimes, if I just want to look at the image. So you can see here that we can say hide viewer labels like so. And if we do that, that just pops that away. Gives us a kind of a cleaner look. Also in the viewer you'll see these funny icons up here. If I just highlight that. So this we refer to as multi-view. This one we refer to as primary view. And this one we refer to as proof margin. Now they don't make a great deal of sense just from that naming alone, but if I just bring up my browser for a second and select, let's just select four images. So you can see in multi-view, it will display all those images for like comparison and looking at images side by side. If we had selected this one here, primary view, then it only shows us the primary view like so. So the primary image. Also another terminology you'll have to get used to in Capture One is that we refer to images as variants quite often. So some of the terminology you see around the application says variant, like clone variant, make a new variant, export variants, and so on. And the reason for that is 'cause we can have, there's an example here, virtual copies of the same image. So we call this variant one and variant two, for example, with their labels in the top right hand corner. And even with a multi selection like this, of four images, if I have primary view selected, then it only shows me the primary one, which is the one with the thick white border. So if I just click through the various images like so, it's only the primary that shows. With multi-view on, it shows me everything. The last one, that kind of curious one which maybe isn't completely intuitive what it is, is proof margin. So if I do command B to hide my browser for a second, proof margin just gives you a bit more space around the image. So it's a visual thing. And I prefer to generally have the proof margin turned on. It just helps to, I think, visualize better. It's like framing the image, I suppose. So toggling this on and off will just give you a bit more space around the image itself. This is a shortcut to various layers. If you've done some local adjustments then you can scroll through your layers from here. Now these, the proof margin here and the default margin, if you like, we can actually change in the preferences. So, preferences over here. And I'm not gonna go individually through every single preference, 'cause that would take us some time. But we'll dip in and out of the preferences every now and then when it makes sense. So if we look under image, nope sorry, my mistake, it was appearance, then you see we've got pixel values for the standard margin and the proof margin. So if I just turn on the margin for a second, and then we change that, you can see the image change dynamically in the background. So you can set up all kinds of parameters. What kind of color you want the background to be, and so on. So my advice for these kind of preferences is just, explore them in your own time and kinda make that setup which makes sense to you. So finally, or almost finally, if we look at the browser, you've already seen that you could put it at bottom, we can put it at the right, we can put it at the left hand side, but we also have a few other different kind of modes down here as well. So this is our film strip mode, as you can see. We can also make this larger and smaller, so it's dividing boundary. We can have a grid, so if you prefer to have the visibility of more thumbnails, you can do so. Or you can have a detailed list. That's the second one in, which gives us even more information about those images themselves. Down here is how those thumbnails are sorted. By default it's name, but that could be on a whole range of various different metadata parameters, basically. But name and date are the two most popular choices. Also for zooming the viewer, basically for 100 percent, if you're a mouse driven person, you can click the big head, and that will zoom to 100 percent. And you can use your space bar to scroll around. If you click the small head, then it will fit to the screen as well. All those various shortcut keys, which we can get into in a minute, which will go between 100 percent and fit screen, for example. Or you can grab the slider and you can drag that through any of those denominations. Also, if we look in the view menu again, you've got some other things called the viewer toolbar. So the viewer toolbar is this, where we can select those various different things. But if you wanna make a super clear workspace, we can hide stuff like that. We can hide the browser toolbar, and so on. So you can really kind of strip that interface down if you just kind of wanna focus on looking at images and not numbers and metadata and so on. So workspaces like that can be nice just for browsing images, showing them to clients without all that kind of clutter and information and metadata and so on. Finally, toolbar at the top. It has a default kinda set of action buttons, as I like to call them. So they might turn on our exposure warnings, for example, turn on some grids and guides and all that kinda stuff. Now if you right click here, you can also customize that toolbar. That will bring up a whole array of some buttons which aren't on there by default, and some that are. If you wanna get the default back, you can just drag the default set back up, or you can pick anything that you might like to have as a shortcut, like, let's say, composition mode, something we'll talk about tomorrow, and we can drag that up to the toolbar. Nice and simple. Now, of course, all of this makes much more sense if you actually save that as your own workspace. You don't wanna go through all this time making a workspace if you then kind of lose it, if you change it and you wanna get back. So it's always worth saving your workspace, and think about making different workspaces for different tasks. So we've put some kind of default ones in here for you. So if we go to workspace default, that will just bring back all the default stuff like so. My own workspace we've got here, I can just pick that up and that will switch nicely to that very quickly. And we've got some various other things like for shooting tethered, editing black and white. This funny name, migration, which might look a bit strange, but that's if you're used to having tools over on the right hand side, that can help you if you're picking up Capture One from other applications. So really, it's worth spending some time in making your own workspace. Now all those different elements, easy to hide and reveal. So as I said, command T hides our tools, command B hides our browser, like so. We can also, of course, hide the viewer, which makes sense. So if we look under the view menu, you'll see an option here called hide viewer, which makes the most sense if we apply keyboard shortcuts to that, which we're gonna talk about very shortly as well. So a simply keyboard shortcut can hide and show the viewer, so you can pick up other shots and just jump back and forth between seeing all your thumbnails and then just your thumbnails, like so. So very fast to navigate around. Okay. Let me just think if I've missed anything. I'd say my best advice is to look in the view menu and see all the different possibilities that you can for customization. My main advice is to look at the tools in the tool tabs after you've been using Capture One for a while, if you notice there's a tool that you never use, just get rid of it. If there's an order that you like to work in, then change those tool tabs to reflect that order. If there's an order in the particular tool tab that you like to work in, then change it for that. Okay, any questions? Jim? There are some questions David. I believe you just answered this, but I'm gonna throw it out again. From Louis Filger, can you have a contact sheet view, more or less a view, that shows all the thumbnails without the viewer? Yeah. That's pretty much what we just looked at. So under view, show viewer. I use the button directly below escape, which is this kind of funny squiggle, which I don't know what it's called. But that basically just gives you a really fast way to switch, 'cause your left hand tends to rest on the keyboard if you're right, left handed. And then that's easy to flip between the two. And then Austin would like to know, is it possible to have the browser instead of the viewer on a separate monitor? And can you also talk about your two monitor and three monitor configurations that you tend to work with? Yeah. So really, anything's possible. Like if you bring up the second viewer window like so, so if I do command T, that could have my tools. You could equally, I mean I would say probably the best way is to have, you know, the viewer on one window like so and then we can pick up that workspace, put that on the second monitor, hide the tools, so now I've got basically thumbnails only, and then we can bring this one up. I think we can actually show the toolbar here as well. So really you've got kind of almost like two capture one windows, which you can configure exactly how you like. So in answer to the viewer's question, then, yes, yes you could. And then same thing goes for, and I'm just quoting one of our students out there, Scott Simon, recovering Lightroom users that can really set up their monitors to mimic a Lightroom experience. Yeah, and I think the best one for that is start with migration, and then that will move the tools onto the right, thumbnails at the bottom, viewer in the center, and then we set up the tool tabs to try and kind of reflect a little bit more about what's going on in Lightroom to some extent. They're two sort of different applications, Capture One and Lightroom. Really the main difference which Lightroom users will kind of begin to get their head around is that there's no modes in Capture One. There's not like a library module or a develop module, or you know, printing module. You can do anything at any point. So even though the first tool tab kind of relates to managing images as such, if I wanted to just switch immediately and start adjusting an image, then I can do so without having to switch some kind of apparent mode. So I think that's, when you're building a workspace from Lightroom, that's something to consider. Don't go looking for different modes, 'cause they don't exist. Great. And a few questions, and you might have already showed it, I missed it, but I'll reiterate. Can you show about how you customize your workspace and then save it out so you can transfer it to a colleague or another computer? Yeah, for sure. So if we, if we've saved our workspace, so we've said save workspace, I had one here called DGRC10, now on the Mac, it's kind of a little bit of a funny location, if you go to the go menu in the finder, and you hold your alt key down, then it reveals library, which is kind of where all the application support stuff is hidden. So under library we've got application support, Capture One, and this is all the stuff that is customized in Capture One, which you can transfer to another machine. So if we go to workspaces, you'll see this one here. So you could put that on a thumb drive, put it on the cloud somewhere, and then transfer it across to all your work stations so you can kind of copy the environment of Capture One. And I should add, actually, if you have more than one work station, every Capture One Pro license gives you three installs. So you wouldn't have to buy Capture One three times. You can install it three times. For the PC it's a different location. And I think for the bonus material, did we offer the workspace? I can't remember if it's on there. The visual workspace? Yeah. I think we just have that one image. Okay, what we can do is also, we can give a workspace away and a location, PC location and Mac location as just a little help file as well. Perfect. Yeah, we can do that. Any other questions? Is this the right place to ask a little bit about your equipment that you tend to use? Sure, sure. So what's your setup at home? And, you know, just for, I know you're using a Wacom tablet, and we have, you know, thank you to Wacom, they've supported us with a great discount code, but let's talk about how many monitors you personally like to use and the other ancillary equipment that you use when you're retouching. You can never have enough monitors. So I have two monitors at home, actually. I have an Eizo and a Dell monitor. So the Eizo is kinda the nice, color-calibrated sort of high end one, but the Dell is also excellent as well. So I have two monitors kind of side by side, and then I have Capture One sort of in front of me, and then I might fly some tools out on the other one. The Macbook Pro is connected to that, but I actually close it. So I don't use the display on this one. Three displays is kind of getting slightly excessive to manage. So a dual display works really nice, but you know, you could, if you were really into it, you could have three, four, five displays. But I think two displays really makes your life much much easier for all kinds of reasons. Equipment wise, yeah, Macbook Pro, took delivery of this a couple weeks ago, running really nice with Capture One. But don't feel you need a supercomputer to run Capture One. I was doing a seminar with a photographer a few weeks back and he had a 2012 Macbook, 13 inch, with a big library of images, and it was actually running really nicely. Obviously, the more you can afford, the better, but you don't need a supercomputer to run Capture One. Does that answer the question? Yeah it sure does. Two more questions and then we'll head on to our next, we'll head on to key words. Keyboard shortcuts. Yes, thank you. Sorry, not key words, keyboard shortcuts. Had the word key in there though. If a tool tab is removed, does that have to be saved as a workspace or does the removal still in future sessions? It sticks. So if I shut down Capture One as it is now, whatever configuration that would be, and then open it back up, then it will look exactly as it is. So if you're kind of dynamically altering your workspace, then yes, you can do so, no problem. Great, and here's one last question from Christina Kramer. And this is going back a few minutes. If you have a Phase One back and Canon equipment, which version do you think they should purchase. Capture One Pro, 'cause then they can use their Phase One back and their Canon. So, I mean you could attempt to switch between various different options, but, to be honest, if you have the Phase One back and a Canon, then to use all of it at the same time, all cameras, then it makes sense to go for Capture One Pro.