10 Tips and Hacks to Make Your Editing LIGHTNING FAST in Capture One

these are 10 ways that I speed up my workflow and capture one I'm going to go over them with you and I'm not even going to talk about the speed editor because I don't use it these settings tips and hacks will start to build on one another the further along we get in the video so stick around to the end and don't skip ahead all right let's go all right the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to customize my workspace if you are new to capture one and you're coming over from Lightroom the smartest decision you'll ever make by the way the best thing that you can do is use the migration workspace there are multiple workspaces in capture one and there's one called migration and it is set up to as close as possible with the tools all in the same order as Lightroom but once you do that once you start getting into capture one I recommend changing it sooner than later but if you need it then you know use it so customize your workspace all right you can move the browser set up the browser how you want move the tools you can move the tool tabs you create new tool tabs remove tool tabs uh remove the tools you don't need add the tools you do need and even add multiple instances of the same tool it's that easy make it save it adjust it update uh regularly uh I have a full video on how I customize and set up my workspace so check that out in the description to this video so I'm not going to get into that too much right now customize your workspace that's uh that's the first thing make things a lot better easier faster for you next thing we're going to do is we're going to set up some defaults for our tools and the tools that we're going to set our defaults on are base characteristics we're going to set those up the base characteristics for uh each camera model that we have then we're going to set the noise reduction the thing that I like to to do and set as a default for my noise reduction is to set the single Pixel value to one that way if you have any hot pixels or uh burnt out pixels then uh capture one is going to hide them for you I just leave it at that it's um it's not noticeable if there isn't a problem and if there is a problem it's also not noticeable so it fixes it right away next you're going to set defaults for lens Corrections and you can do this for every lens type you just select a photo that has a specific lens select the lens Corrections that you want and then you can set those as the default for that lens in your base characteristics you're going to want to use a Pro standard camera profile it's a better profile it shows a little less red in the skin it is uh just not as as Pinky and magenta in the Skin So set your default for your base Corrections your lens Corrections and your noise reductions next thing you going to want to do to speed up your workflow is save presets for your tools that you use almost every tool in capture one you can create a preset and save a preset 4 presets allow you to see a quick preview before applying that to your image and you can just hover over and do that you can stack presets which means you can have more than one preset active on some tools not every tool obviously because some tools you will need to overwrite that preset in uh metadata Tool uh you can set presets for like all your contact info copyright data Etc then you can have another preset for your common shoot locations that's what I do and then when you're stacking your presets you can add onto those presets so because you're not adding contact info with your common location shoot it's not going to get rid of your contact info when you apply a preset for your common shoot location now as you use Capture One create new presets as you go if you find yourself doing something frequently just create a preset I want to look at one preset a little more closely and these are our naming presets they are available in the import panel the export panel and the or the naming tool and uh in next capture naming under the tether tab so Capture One uses text and tokens to create naming presets so you can add text or have uh a number of variable tokens to create a preset and just save that preset and it's uh available to you everywhere in capture one where you can change the name of a file including in the batch renaming of your images you could also create your preset by right clicking hit batch R name and you'll find it there as well my biggest recommendation I can give you about naming your files is do not change the file name on export if you exporting your proofs if you're delivering images to clients that need to come back and you need to work on them do not change the name of the file when you're exporting it or you won't be able to find it as easily in Capture One a lot of people make this mistake they rename their files when they're sending out proofs to clients and then their clients select their images but they can't find the matching image in cap capture one and that's not a capture one issue that's a user error issue so only rename your files on import and speaking of import use presets during the import process you can apply metadata presets on import you're going to want to fill in the headline and the description a tip that I will say for the description is to just use your client name as the description and you'll see why a little later use presets during the import process if you've also set up presets for your tool TOS or have a custom style have created a custom style um that consists of a number of specific looks for example if you have a specific way that you process the clarity the shadows and the contrast and things like that within head shot and you're going to deliver those out to clients and proofs you can apply that preset on import do that like when when your images are being ingested into Capture One it saves you a ton of time doing it later now going to the other side uh looking at export presets I want you to create export presets for every situation that you might encounter if you're finding that you need to change your export settings when you're delivering a specific set of images to a client you're probably going to need that those settings again so create a new export recipe name the export recipe appropriately and then you'll have that available to you any any time in the future that you want to use it looking at the export recipes uh what we want to do in terms of like naming presets so we're going to use the file name token for our proofs so that will export your images with the exact same file name that they are in your catalog or your session when you're delivering final images later then you can use naming presets for your final images like I do here by adding photo by Kevin Patrick Robbins to the end of every image so that way once the images are delivered and someone's looking for them and maybe they find it a few years later and they're like ah I I want to go back to that photographer but I forget the names right there on the file name so they won't forget now the next thing that you want to do is you want to within your export presets use the open withth function where possible I use jpeg mini to minimize the file sizes on all my jpeg exports and so I have the version with the plugin and so I use that plugin to minimize my files as I'm exporting them that will keep the file size down when I'm delivering it to clients it'll keep the file size down on my computer one of the other things that I use the open width for is I use the retouch for me plugins to do a lot of like the initial Prime file prep in Photoshop but because I have set that into an action in Photoshop I can then save that action as part of a droplet a Photoshop droplet and have that existing on my hard drive so now when I want to export proofs and have them go directly into Photoshop and have that action applied saved and closed and have my proofs have some element of retouching automated retouching applied to them then I use that droplet I use open with and uh it makes uh my proofs look so much better another quick thing that you can do with your export presets if you are saving your images to a like a hosted Cloud Drive such as Google drive or Dropbox and that that's how you are delivering them to your clients what you can do is create an an export preset for client delivery and using the client's name as a token for the subfolder and this is where entering the client's name in the description will allow you to create that subfolder automatically you'll want to select your Google drive folder then you'll want to set the subfolder to the client's name and as you export the images the images will be exported in your Google drive or your Dropbox in that client's name then you can just link that folder directly to your client and because it's Google Drive and Dropbox it's being synchronized right away so as you're exporting your images they are already being uploaded the next thing you want to do is you want to customize your keyboard shortcuts in capture one there are a number of actions in Capture One to which you can apply your own keyboard shortcuts uh or even change the keyboard shortcuts already set up by Capture One and the first thing you need to do is open the keyboard shortcuts settings on PC that's under the edit menu you first need to create your own custom set by clicking the plus symbol naming your set and clicking okay so now you have your own set of custom keyboard shortcuts that you can adjust and save so I'm going to go over some of the keyboard shortcuts that I have added some of these might already exist in Capture One some of these I may have added but I can't tell you the difference uh right now all right so looking at color tagging first we're going to look at green red and yellow which is is you know very similar to a stoplight so the green is the Plus on your keypad red is minus on your keypad and the yellow is the asterisk on your keypad now in Capture One you can't toggle these colors uh it would be great if you hit the plus sign again and it deselected green but you can't do that so what I've done is I've taken the division sign and I've assigned that to color tag of none so that basically deselects the color tag next thing you have is color tag filtering using the same keypad settings for green red and yellow yellow I'm now going to add controll and shift and then uh tap the keys to filter by those colors so if I want to filter by green and this is a toggle I just hit control shift plus and that shows me all the green images if I want to toggle that uh if I want to deselect that filter then I just hit it again and the same for red and the same for yellow the next thing we're going to look at our Auto adjustments for vertical Keystone so for that I used the pipe sign pipe symbol is just a vertical up and down line and I think that makes sense for doing an auto adjustment for vertical keystones the next keyboard shortcut I have set up is for match look and that's uh setting the match look reference and applying match look and so for match look I just use M and control shift m is going to set my match look reference to the the image or images that I have selected and then to apply the match look it is going to be alt control shift M and then uh rotate left and and rotate right they are set as different shortcuts in capture one so I change these and rotate left I just like control comma and rotate right control period so they are the less than and greater than brackets rotate this way rotate this way I also set up a keyboard shortcut for black and white and I just use the forward slash for that so once I press that the black and white toggle is set in the black and white tool now I also have keyboard shortcuts set up for layers and these uh again I've changed from the default settings so for a new empty adjustment layer it's just crl L layer is ltrl L new layer now if I want a completely filled layer with a new filled mask then again control shift L for that layer if I want to duplicate a selected layer I'm going to use control shift and then the Plus on my keyboard if I want to delete the layer it's control shift minus on on my keyboard if I want to toggle a layer on or off this is already I think a default keyboard setting in capture one and it is just control altshift L if I want Capture One to mask out the subject I'm going to hit control altshift s for subject if I want the background it's going to be control altshift B for the background and if I want to use uh the people settings then it's going to be Control Alt shift p right so I'm keeping everything pretty sensible in terms of the logic that I use to apply the keyboard shortcut so that it's easy to remember the next shortcut that I have changed is cuz Capture One uses control K which doesn't make sense to me maybe k for capture sound it used to be before capture one could read video files that I could assign the space bar to be a capture doing a tethered shoot I could just hit the space bar new capture new capture new capture new capture and that's nice it's nice having a big button that I can just tap but because space bar is now assigned to playing a video you can't use that so instead I I use a shift space bar whatever uh it works now because I like to customize things I also want a keyboard shortcut to open the keyboard shortcuts panel so instead of control K being a capture now control K opens my keyboard shortcuts k for keyboard makes sense right and then if I want to open the cloud keyboard settings then it's control shift K if I want to open the preferences it's just control shift p p for preference es and the last one that I have is uh control shift U which checks for updates I'm currently running the newest version of capture one now here's where things start to get a little hacky because you cannot set keyboard shortcuts for everything in capture one I have figured out a way to sort of hack the process and basically create a workaround and create a cheat you can turn almost any tool or setting in Capture One into a custom Style so now a lot of people and I know I used to be one of them tend to think of Styles as sort of like a finished preset or look that you can apply to an image so historically that's probably true but over the past couple of years capture 1 has been improving its Styles and presets tool and any changes you make to a layer can then be used to create a style for example you can create a filled adjustment layer control shift L fill adjustment layer apply a color grade to that layer using the color balance tool and when you have the the way you like it you can create a style that you can use on other images and in other sessions now you can create a preset for that color grade and then create that style based on that preset that preset is going to be available to you but if you create a style as a layer then you can just apply that layer and that style across any image in any catalog or any session and if you don't and you just use presets then it's going to apply the color grade to to whatever layer that you happen to have selected at the time so there are three ways that you can do this first you can just save the color balance settings as their own preset in the color balance tool and these will show up in the tool whenever you click on the hamburger menu and they'll also be listed under custom presets in the Styles and presets tool as well the second way is you could select the layer you've applied the color grade to you could select the more menu or right click on the layer and then click save settings as style all the settings currently applied to that layer will be automatically selected but the layer itself will not be selected so the Third Way which I think is the smartest way to do it is to go to the Styles and presets tool then click on the more icon then select save custom style and make sure the only thing selected is that color grade layer now that will not only save the color grading but it will save it on its own filled layer as well that way you can skip having to create a new fied layer every time you want to use that color grade but you can then also shift the opacity settings of that layer and the the strength of the grade that it's applied to and you can set Luminosity masking on that as well so once you have it in its own filled layer as a grade then you there's so much more that you can do with it so now with keyboard shortcuts and presets on their own you're going to run into limitations but because we can create a custom style for almost any tool setting in capture one and because we can apply a custom shortcut to a custom style we can essentially create a workaround by creating a custom style and then by applying a custom keyboard shortcut to that custom style so in this example I was able to create a custom shortcut for a 4x5 crop since there's no keyboard shortcut for this I cannot set a preset in the crop right if you look at the crop tool there's no ability to set presets so what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to create a custom style so I'll select an image and press C for the crop tool then I'll right click to change the aspect ratio to 4x5 now in the Styles and presets tool I'll create a custom style create a folder called composition and call this crop 4x5 now if I clear the crop from this image and then apply the style you can see the style is applied just as a crop to that image so now taking it a step further I can right click on the custom style and select assign shortcut so you'll see under the custom shortcuts menu I now have apply style and it's showing my new custom style for the 4x5 crop and I'll assign the shortcut to control alt 4 and hit close and four again for 4x5 it just makes sense to me now if I select another image and want to apply that crop I can just use my new keyboard shortcut and that crop is applied now you might be wondering like why you would want this you might not you could probably use the AI cropping and that would do a better job but what I'm trying to show you here is that even if there isn't a preset you can still will create not only a preset in the form of a style but you can then create a custom keyboard shortcut to apply that preset for pretty much anything that you need in capture one so similarly you can do this for any of the settings that you don't have uh available keyboard shortcuts or presets get creative and let me know in the comments what you come up with cuz I'm here to learn from you as well if you come up with something that is going to make my life easier please tell me I would love to know okay so we can take this another step further so we're now now able to create a custom Style with a predefined set of dynamic masks generated by the AI when the layers are applied to an image and we can assign all of that to a shortcut so I want to show you what I've done and how I've done this first we're going to select an image of a person we're going to create the background mask and we're going to create the subject mask next I'm going to use the people mask to create separate masks for the body skin the face skin and ACC combin of the body and face skin lips eyes and hair I personally don't do much work on people's eyebrows so I'm not going to create an eyebrow mask but before I continue I'm going to refine all of the skin masks and soften their edges so they're not these hard sharp edges okay so now that I have the masks and layers built out with absolutely no tool adjustments on any of the layers only setting the masks up the way I want them I'm going to save this layer setup as its own capture one style now to do that I will have to go to the Styles and presets tool click on the more icon in the top right corner of the tool and select save custom style so in the popup I I want to make sure that the only things that are selected are my layers then I'm going to click save and I'll give it a name so now you can see that style under custom Styles in the Styles and presets tool so now if I select an image and click that custom style capture one will create all of those layers for me and because those are all Dynam Dynamic layers they are created as unique layers for each image they're not rasterized so they're not going to look the same on every image they're dynamically generated every time you use the style so now we can assign a custom shortcut to that custom style and with a single shortcut we can create all of our Dynamic masks and prep our images with the layers we want I'm going to go ahead and use control shift 9 because that is what I use in Photoshop to prep my files as well if you want to take that get another step further further if there are specific settings that you always apply to a specific type of image such as a corporate head shot such as increasing the structure on someone's face then you can make those adjustments to your layers and then save that as a custom style assign a shortcut and then have those settings baked in for that custom style so you can create a custom Style with preset layers for any type of image that you create assign a keyboard shortcut and save yourself so much time okay so the final thing here is session 10 templates templates are something that I just kind of misunderstood for so long and now that I get them I get how powerful they are is one of the things that I missed from Lightroom was being able to have an import preset so I could have on import select a preset for a specific type of shoot and it would change the keywords the metadata the look that's being applied to the image it could change all of those things and we can somewhat do that on our in Imports in capture one there's so much more that we can do with a template as well so instead of just doing it at import what we're going to do is we're going to do it at the time when we're creating the session because at that point we know what type of shoot we're creating the session for I'm going to go through this and then we'll talk about how you can create a different type of template for different types of shoots what a template will save is the folder hierarchy of your session session albums and smart albums looking at this uh setup that I have for acting head shot you'll see the session folders I keep generally the same capture selects output and trash then what I'm going to do is with session albums I then you I have all images five star those are defaults in capture one then I've added a smart album for images that are tagged green a smart album for images that are tagged red then I have just like a regular album for my selects for my favorites and then I have another session album for the client selects then I also have a session favorites because this isn't just an album created within the session this is a folder on the hard drive called slate shots and slate shots are videos that I I create when I'm shooting acting head shot so I want to have those those are in their own folder and when I'm dragging images in and importing things I can put them into the right folder all the video files go into the Slate shots templates can also save import settings for each template type so it can save where your files are being allocated and and saved on the drive and it can also save the file naming it can save save the adjustments that you want to apply to it so if you have a style for head shots you can apply that you can save that if you want to exclude existing adjustments that are applied you can do that and that will all be saved when you save a template also saved in the template is your workspace configuration right your tool tabs your keyboard shortcuts your view settings your grid overlay guides tool viewer and browser settings so if you the way I would uh process a wedding might look very different than the way that I process head shot or the way that I process an editorial shoot so having everything set up and done for me every time I create a session if I want to create a session for an editorial shoot I can create a new session create and set everything the way I want it and then save that as a template I can also change my color and editing settings my base characteristics and Tool defaults I can save those my layers my Styles and presets all of those can be saved in a template templates can also save metadata so different session types can have different type of keyboard lists you can also save your annotation settings such as the the tool you want to use the color you want to use and and whether or not you want those annotations to always be displayed in terms of tether settings those can also be saved in a session type I tend to work here in my office on capture one but if I'm tethering I could create a template specifically for tethering with its own tethering workspace layout and its own capture naming the next capture adjustment settings and overlay images and have all of that saved for the type of session that I'm doing so those are all the ways in which I have like customize Capture One to work for me very efficiently and to get things done faster all right if you found this helpful please give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel turn on the notifications that's really going to help me I'm trying to get to 10,000 subs don't forget to let me know the things that you do that help speed up your process in capture one as well