Hello from Phase One (Capture One Pro and Express for Sony)

[worldpixel]

Do you guys know the contact email for phase one? I want to email them directly or if I can talk to that phase 1 member here that would be good.

[David Grover]

Hi David,

 

I am new here. I use the full version C1 and also Sony equipment    I was wondering whether the Sony version might help with the following problem which I have also seen reported in other forums.

 

I want to use C1 in combination with a Digital Asset Management DAM program called Photo Supreme, although I also have a license for Media Pro. I do not use C1 to change any of the meta data. However, the exif data on images exported from C1 is written in a different space and Photo Supreme cannot recognize it. Is this problem known and being addressed?  

 

Thanks

Simon

 

P.S. If you could post a small jpeg file exported from C1 Sony version then I can test it.

 

 

Hi Simon,

 

The way Capture One and Capture One for Sony makes an export is identical.  

 

Can I suggest to make a support case with us?  Have you also made a support case with Photo Supreme?

David

[David Grover]

Do you guys know the contact email for phase one? I want to email them directly or if I can talk to that phase 1 member here that would be good.

 

Hi World,

Whats up?

D

[David Grover]

David,

I have been traveling and just took a look for the first time since I posted this question. I see that when I pick Manufacturer Profile the distortion changes. Is there a place that tells which profile is automatically chosen? I see the meta data is correct.

Thanks

John

 

Hi John,

 

Manufacturer profile will be chosen if there is not a specific lens profile listed in the drop down menu.

 

David

[Marc Pecquet]

David;

Would it make sense for C1 to develop a forum on its Capture One site so we can chat amongst C1 users; I've "discovered" at least 2 "things" that I never saw on Youtube presentations concerning C1 and I am certain others have identified things worth sharing in order to make the C1 experience even better...

Cheers

Marc

[weinhous]

Would like to see more active discussion here.

 

Have an ulterior motive - am trying to decide whether to upgrade Lightroom 5 to Lightroom 6 (not cc!) or to switch to C1 (would have to be the full C1 as I use more than Sony cameras).

 

Thoughts anyone?

[Guest all8]

From Aperture to C1:

 

Last week I purchased the Pro version of Capture One for Sony. Cost 60 € and I think I will pick up a film simulation pack for 50€. I would have rather purchased the full version of Capture One, however it was a little too expensive - right now I'm only using Sony and scanned negatives and they both work fine.

 

The real problem is not the price, but the amount of time it takes to learn new tool. Photography is a hobby for me so I don't have much time, and the time that I have to learn a tool is spread over weeks and months. The tutorial videos enabled me to get a good introduction to features, some I know I needed but could not find, and some I could not quite understand how to use correctly. Without that I would have taken Lightroom because I'm sure that it does what I need, with C1 some of those features are only in the Pro version and I was not sure that exactly what I needed existed.

 

I'm definitely getting better results in C1 Pro over Aperture, in a faster time, with tools that are mostly easier to use and more capable. The new Keystone tool is really great for quickly fixing up holiday shots, the Auto Adjust usually works well for normal conditions but not for anything where you are looking for an effect. It seems like you can automate much of the workflow. In comparing against Aperture, for the same feature set, C1 Pro is generally more effective and easier. The adjusting tools seem to work better, are more capable and produce better results. The new Photos app from Apple is nice to use on a Tablet but the results don't even come close to C1.

 

 

Still, there are some things which are not so great.

- Performance on a Retina iMac is not what I expected, C1 Pro was running faster on my 5 year old iMac ... so not particularly happy, however I understand that Lightroom has similar problems. What I expected was less than 1 second to render and switch between images ... C1 does not seem to buffer/cache corrections so well, often each time I switch between images it recalculates. Sliders are in many cases far from real-time in applying their adjustments.

 

- A set of keyboard shortcuts which mimic Aperture would really be helpful. I'm starting to adjust/set them myself because I find the common tools I use are given complex keystrokes by C1.

 

- I can find no way to Compare against Original. I'm sure that it exists and I just need to discover the method. Currently I'm just making a new version and compare against that. Its more effort than should be required.

 

 

What really matters for me is that I'm getting better images now than I was with Aperture, with less effort.

 

Even though Lightroom is available without CC I found the purchasing process and everything else to be in the direction of CC ... they (Adobe) __really__ don't want to sell the standalone version and that makes it not a good choice for the future. Capture One might be thinking the same things as Adobe but at least it is still easy to buy a stand alone version - the same cannot be said of Adobe.

[David Grover]

David;

Would it make sense for C1 to develop a forum on its Capture One site so we can chat amongst C1 users; I've "discovered" at least 2 "things" that I never saw on Youtube presentations concerning C1 and I am certain others have identified things worth sharing in order to make the C1 experience even better...

Cheers

Marc

 

Hi Marc,

 

forum.phaseone.com!

 

David

[SimonT]

I want to use C1 in combination with a Digital Asset Management DAM program called Photo Supreme, although I also have a license for Media Pro. I do not use C1 to change any of the meta data. However, the exif data on images exported from C1 is written in a different space and Photo Supreme cannot recognize it. Is this problem known and being addressed?  Thanks.

 

Hi Simon,

 

The way Capture One and Capture One for Sony makes an export is identical.  

 

Can I suggest to make a support case with us?  Have you also made a support case with Photo Supreme?

David

Hi David,

 

Thanks. Yes, I made support cases long before posting here. Photo Supreme identified the problem as being with C1. It appears that my query with C1 had not been registered within your support system (browser problem?). It has now been re-entered and is being attended to. Hopefully the next update will accommodate this glitch, which for me is a major problem and is creating a back log of work.

 

Simon

[David Grover]

I want to use C1 in combination with a Digital Asset Management DAM program called Photo Supreme, although I also have a license for Media Pro. I do not use C1 to change any of the meta data. However, the exif data on images exported from C1 is written in a different space and Photo Supreme cannot recognize it. Is this problem known and being addressed?  Thanks.

 

Hi David,

 

Thanks. Yes, I made support cases long before posting here. Photo Supreme identified the problem as being with C1. It appears that my query with C1 had not been registered within your support system (browser problem?). It has now been re-entered and is being attended to. Hopefully the next update will accommodate this glitch, which for me is a major problem and is creating a back log of work.

 

Simon

 

 

Ok, glad you are in the hands of support.

Would it not be simpler to catalog in Capture One?

[SimonT]

Would it not be simpler to catalog in Capture One?

Indeed, and I would have preferred to go that way. However, despite belonging in the upper leagues of photo editing software, Capture One (and also Media Pro) unfortunately have only very basic cataloging features and meta data management is distinctly lacking, or dare I say deficient? BTW, I have no biases and just want the right tools for the job.

 

[OldNoob]

I just download Capture One express for Sony cameras and am giving it a test run.

It's interface is quite different than Rawtherapee and Silkypix which may be due to it being the express version.

[David Grover]

Indeed, and I would have preferred to go that way. However, despite belonging in the upper leagues of photo editing software, Capture One (and also Media Pro) unfortunately have only very basic cataloging features and meta data management is distinctly lacking, or dare I say deficient? BTW, I have no biases and just want the right tools for the job.

 

 

Hi Simon,

 

What do you find deficient?  Can you explain further?

David

[SimonT]

What do you find deficient?  Can you explain further?

Hi David,

 

As data is increasing exponentially, so is the use of meta data. Not all programs show the user all of the available meta data fields which exist in the image and which might be very useful tomorrow or even today. One field which I use for various purposes is the lens information. A program I use for filing images shows this meta data field, but once an image has entered and left Capture One, this valuable information disappears.

 

It would be ideal if C1 were to write this field and the other (hundreds of) camera data fields to XMP. These are provided in the original image anyway. Unfortunately, what happens is that the exif "version" field is changed without changing any exif data.

 

This oversight could easily be corrected with other software if the exif version tag were not changed. Other software programs check for the existence of this tag as an indicator that the full technical data was written to XMP, which C1 does not do.

 

A second (inferior) option would be NOT to change the exif version at all and rely entirely on other programs to provide the missing data which they had available and saved before exporting the original image to C1.  

 

The lens information is just one of dozens of (camera) specific maker fields available in the original image file.

 

These links give an idea as to the type of information saved in the makers notes:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/Sony.html

http://www.exiv2.org/tags-sony.html

 

I cannot know which data (saved at the time of capture) might be important to me in the future, as and when the need arises to find or sort images by a certain field. Who can forecast this? However, I do know that once I have used Capture One on an image, this data is destroyed and thereby damages the integrity of my portfolio and my archive. That is unfortunate, annoying and in my mind, unnecessary.

 

Due to the close relationship between Phase One and Sony, the maker data fields are available and we know that Sony has been showing fast response to customer feedback.

 

Regards

Simon

[Guest all8]

 

What do you find deficient?  Can you explain further?

David

 

One thing that I have noticed ... if I have a series of images (2 or 3 versions of the same file) and I switch between then in the Browser, then each time I select one image or the other the image is "recalculated", which takes a few seconds ... and I have a fast iMac Retina with 16GB Ram.

 

It would be nice if Capture One could cache its image processing (calculating) in some of that free memory so that switching between a pair of images was near instant. Then, to make Capture One "seem" even faster, if C1 would notice that I'm selecting images in a "downward" or "upward" direction, then C1 would "calculate" images in advance of my selection and put them in the same cache - call it Predictive Processing and Caching.

 

Cheers, Tim.

[Wesley]

So C1 doesn't create or read the sidecar XMP files?

 

And is C1 more like Lightroom where I have to import pictures for some reason or like Adobe Camera RAW where it's like a regular computer file system?

[foto-fanatic]

I changed preview image size to 640- made loading sessions much quicker.

[David Grover]

Hi David,

 

As data is increasing exponentially, so is the use of meta data. Not all programs show the user all of the available meta data fields which exist in the image and which might be very useful tomorrow or even today. One field which I use for various purposes is the lens information. A program I use for filing images shows this meta data field, but once an image has entered and left Capture One, this valuable information disappears.

 

It would be ideal if C1 were to write this field and the other (hundreds of) camera data fields to XMP. These are provided in the original image anyway. Unfortunately, what happens is that the exif "version" field is changed without changing any exif data.

 

This oversight could easily be corrected with other software if the exif version tag were not changed. Other software programs check for the existence of this tag as an indicator that the full technical data was written to XMP, which C1 does not do.

 

A second (inferior) option would be NOT to change the exif version at all and rely entirely on other programs to provide the missing data which they had available and saved before exporting the original image to C1.  

 

The lens information is just one of dozens of (camera) specific maker fields available in the original image file.

 

These links give an idea as to the type of information saved in the makers notes:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/Sony.html

http://www.exiv2.org/tags-sony.html

 

I cannot know which data (saved at the time of capture) might be important to me in the future, as and when the need arises to find or sort images by a certain field. Who can forecast this? However, I do know that once I have used Capture One on an image, this data is destroyed and thereby damages the integrity of my portfolio and my archive. That is unfortunate, annoying and in my mind, unnecessary.

 

Due to the close relationship between Phase One and Sony, the maker data fields are available and we know that Sony has been showing fast response to customer feedback.

 

Regards

Simon

 

Hi Simon,

 

What lens information in particular?

 

Any image in a Capture One catalog can be searched for via lens type, name, aperture and so on.  What are you missing?

 

And have you made a support case?

 

David

[David Grover]

So C1 doesn't create or read the sidecar XMP files?

 

And is C1 more like Lightroom where I have to import pictures for some reason or like Adobe Camera RAW where it's like a regular computer file system?

 

Yes, C1 can create and read XMP sidecars if necessary.

[SimonT]

What lens information in particular?

 

Any image in a Capture One catalog can be searched for via lens type, name, aperture and so on.  What are you missing?

 

And have you made a support case

Hi David,

 

Specifically, the two fields are called:

Focal Length

together with

Lens and Lens Model

 

Basically,

the (existing) maker notes should not be removed from files, nor

should the Exif Version tag be written / overwritten or changed in any way.

If that can be achieved, then you can forget the first paragraph above.

 

Thanks

Simon

[David Grover]

Hi David,

 

Specifically, the two fields are called:

Focal Length

together with

Lens and Lens Model

 

Basically,

the (existing) maker notes should not be removed from files, nor

should the Exif Version tag be written / overwritten or changed in any way.

If that can be achieved, then you can forget the first paragraph above.

 

Thanks

Simon

 

Hi Simon,

 

Both of those fields are present in Capture One and not stripped.

 

David

[SimonT]

Hi Simon,

 

Both of those fields are present in Capture One and not stripped.

 

David

That might be so and maybe an amateur photographer would be satisfied with seeing this data on screen, however, I paid for the pro version

 

The fact remains (unfortunately!) that once the images leave Capture One and arrive on the customer's computer, those fields and all of the countless other maker notes are missing. As interoperability is important, I do not want Capture One to remove this data when I process and export an image. This meta data forms part of the intrinsic value of the image and I do not want any software to delete it.

 

So, please do not delete the maker notes and please do not update the ExifVersion field.

 

We cannot predict the requirements of tomorrow. Without wishing to complicate the issue, here is an example. Let's say somebody will be searching for an image taken at over 30 degrees. Only images where the "ambient temperature" data in the image's maker field has not been removed will be found in the search. Mine will not be found if they have been processed in Capture One. That concerns me.

 

Tip. Browse for Stephen Mayes on Photography's Future and you will be a step ahead of anybody regarding the importance of the available meta data in images, (much of) which we are currently not using. Perhaps it was his fault for being part of the founding management team at Getty Images?    Other companies and institutions are currently investing heavily in projects which underline the importance of meta data. Anybody hear of GPS?

 

Thank you, David. Your interest here proves that you know the importance of customer feedback and you will also know that only a fraction of them ever voice their opinions.

 

Recap. Please do not delete the maker notes and please do not update the ExifVersion field.

 

Thanks

Simon

 

[Guest all8]

Looks like in the Raw there is:

 

EXIF/LensInfo - 4 values

EXIF/LensModel - a string

 

and the JPG:

 

XMP/Lens - a string

XMP/LensInfo - a string (based on 4 values from above)

 

 

When I add the EXIF Lens Model to the JPG using ExifTool I find that 500px now knows the Lens. Previously this was not the case ... and I had wondered why that was, so I spend a good few hours looking into this ...

 

 

So I agree with Simon somewhat, the relocation of the Lens and LensInfo to the XMP is causing downstream processing problems and it would be nice if the original EXIF fields were preserved.

 

 

 

And perhaps an option in the Export Dialog to keep the MakerNotes from the original RAW file as well - but I don't honestly know if thats a good idea.

 

Thank you, good night.

[SimonT]

So I agree with Simon somewhat, the relocation of the Lens and LensInfo to the XMP is causing downstream processing problems and it would be nice if the original EXIF fields were preserved.

And perhaps an option in the Export Dialog to keep the MakerNotes from the original RAW file as well - but I don't honestly know if thats a good idea.

@timde

Equally or more important is the focal length.

 

You might be using the fantastic Zeiss SEL-1635Z zoom lens and see the lens model, but need to know the focal length used for each shot.

 

Re. the (hundreds of) other maker notes. Let's not lose the data when processing but have a choice, if for some reason we do not want it to accompany the image. We cannot use or later strip what is not there.

 

What do you think David?

 

[David Grover]

@timde

Equally or more important is the focal length.

 

You might be using the fantastic Zeiss SEL-1635Z zoom lens and see the lens model, but need to know the focal length used for each shot.

 

Re. the (hundreds of) other maker notes. Let's not lose the data when processing but have a choice, if for some reason we do not want it to accompany the image. We cannot use or later strip what is not there.

 

What do you think David?

 

 

Sticking with Lens Focal length for the moment... If I export a TIF from Capture One, It is possible to read the Lens Model and Focal Length.

 

I just exported a shot taken with a 24-70 lens. Lens model is shown and the fact that it was captured at 70mm.  Viewing File info in Photoshop from an exported TIFF file.

 

What am I missing here?