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Basic Tool Behavior

Lesson 8 from: Quick Start to Capture One

David Grover

Basic Tool Behavior

Lesson 8 from: Quick Start to Capture One

David Grover

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Lesson Info

8. Basic Tool Behavior

Lesson Info

Basic Tool Behavior

Let's have a look at some basic tool behavior. So this is the prequel to working with all the tools in Capture One. You need to know the same thing that you can do, or the same things that you can do with all the tools. So let's bring out exposure as an example. And you'll see that the way the tool works is that it has these buttons at the top. There's normally five, or four to five, in this case six. And we have the various sliders which relate to the particular tool tile as such. Now I'm sure, all of you can use sliders by simply picking up the slider and dragging it in the direction you wish. If you want to reset a slider, the fastest way to do it, rather than trying to painfully drag it back to zero, is simply double click anywhere on the slider bar, and that takes it back to zero. So that's the first thing. And I do that a lot, if I've made some adjustments and I'm not happy, it's very easy just to do a quick double tap and take it back to zero. So that's the first thing that's go...

od to know. The second thing that's good to know is that if you click the name of the slider and hold, it will temporarily reset for you, just that slider. So if you want to see before and after, then you can just tap the name like so. Let's zoom in. So just by clicking and holding the name, you can see it pop back and forth like so. If you want to let's say, let's just change stuff around. If you want to reset the entire tool, then we have a reset button here. It's the backward arrow with the line on it. So back to zero, take you to the defaults. If you want to preview what the tool is actually doing, then you take your option key or alt key, and you see the help menu tells you that, option click to temporarily reset. So if I option long press, I can see before and after. In Lightroom you're used to having like an on off switch to turn the tool on and off, it's just a simple option click, whoops, pressed the wrong shortcut, it's a simple option click to see before and after. So you can very quickly see the effects without having to press a clumsy button on and off twice, as such. Reset everything, reset as such. Now the first one is a help button, so if we tap that it would take us to the help page for that particular tool. So it'll open you up to help.phaseone.com to the exposure tool pages. A is a for auto, so if we tap that that will give me an auto exposure adjustment based on the histogram. Copy and apply, hold that thought in your mind, because we're going to do batch operations like copy and apply coming up in a forthcoming lesson. But that simply allows you to copy adjustments from a single tool to any other image or batch of images. This one here, the stack of three lines, allows you to save your user presets. So for example if we wanted to save an exposure compensation preset, then we can do so. And finally, if we go to the last one it allows us to remove the tool, because remember this is our floating tool, so if we didn't want it floating anymore, we can either tuck it back, or we could simply say remove tool and then it will disappear. And finally we've got apply defaults. So let's go to a couple of different tools to see what that means. Let's bring out sharpening and noise reduction. So you'll find that in Capture One nearly everything when you first load an image, let's reset, this is master reset for everything. So if we tap this then we are at Capture One defaults, which is zero pretty much for everything. You'll find that some tools, and it's probably only the lens correction tool and sharpening and noise reduction, have some kind of value placed in them already. So we have default sharpening and default noise reduction for every single camera that we support, which is close to 500 now, I think. Now these values you see in sharpening and noise reduction, they vary camera to camera, I don't know if we have a different camera on these. Let's go to, so if we pick this camera, so you see this was shot with a Nikon D810 I'm guessing. Nikon D810, so you can see the sharpening value is 120, on the Canon 5D Mark II, then the sharpening value changes a bit. The reason for that is that every single camera is treated sort of individually in Capture One. So if we feel that a certain camera at a certain ISO needs this much sharpening and this much noise reduction, then it will do so. The defaults do vary camera to camera for sharpening and noise reduction. So you can think of it, as well as having a color profile for you camera, you have a sharpness profile, and you have a noise reduction profile. So three very useful things that are unique in Capture One to give you the best out of the box result, if you like. Now if you don't like these defaults, let's say you think, okay for a Canon 5D Mark II or III, whatever it was, Mark III. You feel that 180 is too much, for example, let's go to one that's in focus like so, then you can change it. So let's say you feel that 100 is better, or you might feel that 300 is better, it's up to you, then you can change the defaults for that camera. So save as defaults for Canon EOS 5D Mark III. So that simply means that anytime you import a new image or set of images from a Canon 5D Mark III for example, it will then have that new default for such. And that works with any tool, like if you always wanted to have plus 10 contrast, we could say apply defaults, save as defaults. So it's a good way of making base corrections to your camera. If you want more contrast, I mean exposure you probably won't want to change, because that is a constantly moving variable, but if you always fancied a bit more contrast, then that's a good way to do it. Now when it comes to, we can reset, there we go. When it comes to noise reduction, you will always see 50, 50, 50, and maybe a few values here for single pixel. Now even though it's at 50, 50, 50, there's some additional noise reduction work going on under the hood, if you like. But you can consider 50, 50, 50 as the zero point for the camera. But whether it's a Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax or whatever, we might do more stuff under the hood, especially if it's high res and so on. But you can consider these to be the zero points. But again, if you think the noise reduction is too much or not enough, then you can simply change the parameters and then save as new defaults. So, just in summary, if you remember that you've got double click to reset, like so. If you want to preview what the tool is doing, then we can option click the reset button, like so. Or alt click, if you're on a PC. To reset everything, it's the little reset. Help is the question mark, A is for automatic, copy apply, which we come to in a forthcoming lesson about copying and applying values, saving presets for easy application like so, and then finally changing the defaults that we spoke about as well.

Ratings and Reviews

Juan Sebastián Echeverri
 

This class is a great introduction to Capture One. David covers the CO environment including the basics of tools, tool tabs, toolbar, cursor tools, action buttons, the viewer, and the browser. It includes some useful shortcuts and best practices for an efficient workflow.

Dan Donovan
 

A comprehensive overview of Capture One. David does a FANTASTIC job of getting you started with Capture One!

user-940746
 

David is extremely well versed in CaptureOne Pro and he has the ability to share his knowledge in a way that is easy to follow and understand. My time in the audience was well spent, increasing my knowledge of CaptureOne basics. I would particularly recommend this class to anyone who is relatively new to CaptureOne or who is considering making CaptureOne part of their photo editing process.

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