Book Recommendations


Colour Correction and enhancmentt made simple


The Workflow Book


Landscape photography and philosophy

The book on Exposure

Guide to great Photography Book

Great photography and how to do it

rssFeedBlog

Sunday, 13 January 2008 

How to Automatically delete Capture One V4 Cache Files

One of the regular complaints about Capture One V4 is the way it fills up your various directories with its cache and setting files. Personally I have no need to archive or back these up so I wanted a way to remove them from all the sub directories in one go.

In the end I came up with the following solution - but it only works for windows users so you chaps with nice shiny Macs will have to use something else...sorry!

Select and copy the following line:
FOR /R "c:\Working" %%a IN (CaptureOne) DO RMDIR /S /Q "%%a"

Open Notepad and paste in the text
Replace c:\working with the name of the directory where you keep your photos;
i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\Chris\My Documents\My Pictures
Save the file as C1.bat on your C: drive.

Now when you double click on c1.bat in Explorer, all the Capture One temporary files will be removed as if by magic.

Labels: ,

posted by Chris Shepherd at 20:16 0 Comments Links to this post

Wednesday, 31 October 2007 

Capture One V4 Beta2 Released

The Second Beta of Capture One 4 has just been released. My first impressions are that they have fixed quite a few of the obvious bugs, the controls seem more usable and it's relatively stable.

From the release notes:

What’s new from beta 1
This is a non-exhaustive list of issues we have solved with beta 2:
  • Viewer adjustable background (Windows only)
  • Importer (new on Windows)
  • Improved, brighter and larger icons
  • Better file management (drag and drop, rename, delete)
  • More room for sliders (min max labels have been removed)
Capture One 4 beta 2 now runs on Windows Vista 64-bit edition and on Mac OS X
Leopard.

I processed this last night:

Stillness
(Click to view large)

And everything seemed to go swimmingly. Why not download it and have a play.
Please Note though this beta will not run on AMD XP processors.

In a separate announcement Capture One have signed a strategic agreement with Microsoft. Hopefully this should mean better integration of iView and C1 as part of an attempt to take on Lightoom and Aperture.

Labels: ,

posted by Chris Shepherd at 08:10 0 Comments Links to this post

Thursday, 30 August 2007 

Capture One 4 Beta

Ohhh, I'm so excited - I'm about to lose control and I think I like it!

Finally, Phase One have released the beta of my favourite raw converter Capture One. I have only just downloaded it so no conclusions yet but if the image quality is as good as Capture One v3 and the promised workflow improvements work I will be a happy bunny.

Why not give the beta a try too?

Update

I've been having a play with it, on some shots I took of a chair I found in the middle of Epping Forest, and I'm very impressed so far.

A Seat in the Country
(Click to view large)

  • It seems pretty stable for a beta, certainly much more usable than the Lightroom betas.
  • UI seems to have taken a lot of the good features from Lightroom & aperture and made them workmanlike rather than gimicky.
  • Variants are a great addition to the product and seem to work well.

Labels: ,

posted by Chris Shepherd at 18:10 0 Comments Links to this post

Wednesday, 8 August 2007 

Colour Management - like a steering-wheel down the trousers*

OK I am officially confused by monitors and colour calibration.

The trouble all began when I accidentally managed to select the wrong profile in Capture1 without noticing. My images colours had all gone wrong when I got them into Photoshop.

The problem was occurring on my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop, so I used my spider monitor calibration system and colour plus software to recalibrate the screen. Since then things got worse and worse with images looking fine on the laptop but lacking completely in contrast when viewed on other screens.

The most obvious way to see how the monitor was performing was to use the Monitor Black Point tests. Performance was frankly poorer than a Enron share holder. I tried a few things:
  • Setting the right profiles in Capture 1
  • Removing the monitor profile
  • Adjusting Screen brightness
  • Uninstalling the Colour Plus Software.
Only the last one actually solved the problem. So what exactly is the monitor calibration software for? If it makes things worse, what exactly is the point of it? Anyone less confused than me?

*It's driving me nuts!

Labels: , , ,

posted by Chris Shepherd at 08:00 1 Comments Links to this post

Tuesday, 26 June 2007 

Black and White in Capture 1

As I detailed in my blogs on workflow I use Capture 1 (C1) for my raw processing. I am still waiting for the next release of C1 to compare it against Lightroom 1.1 to decide which one I will use in future but at the moment C1 produces the results I need with the minimum of fuss so I am sticking with that.

Being a fan of doing the development in the raw converter rather than Photoshop I was glad when I came across a technique the other day which details a great way to create black and white images from C1.

It's quite simple really:
  • Download the file, unzip the fie and double click on the profile file to install it.
  • Start Capture 1 and change the camera profile to the new one.
  • Process your images as per normal to produce B&W how you like.
Cool! Here is one I processed earlier:




Moonlight Rush
(Click to view large)

Labels: , , ,

posted by Chris Shepherd at 11:51 0 Comments Links to this post