Capture One has always had a strong ability to work quickly with huge volumes of shots. One of our favorite features of Capture One is the speed at which you can copy one setting (e.g. a white balance of 6000k) and paste it to the entire shoot whether its 100 or 10,000 images.
One of the greatest features of Capture One is the ability to use only the keyboard to navigate through a large collection of images and apply minor changes in saturation, contrast, exposure, WB etc based on changing lighting conditions. For instance an editorial shoot on location might have five hundred shots, and every single shot the light changed just a bit. For many photographers a variation of a fraction of a stop is not a big deal. However, many digital techs or catalog photographer adjust literally thousands of shots per day, so every fraction of a second they can save per image adds up to hours more sleep each night.
Why are keyboard shortcuts such a big deal? As you are first learning to use a keyboard shortcut it will take as long, or longer, to perform an operation than finding and moving a slider with the mouse (“what’s that darn shortcut again??”). However as you practice you will find your fingers will train themselves and the shortcuts will become second nature, much as an advanced touch typist doesn’t even think about the keys on the keyboard while typing 60 words per minute. Advanced digital techs who work day in and out on catalog shoots can adjust upwards of an image per second using this method (and a fast well configured computer).
Basic Step by Step
1. Select the first raw by clicking on it’s thumbnail
2. Place your cursor within the text entry box for an adjustment (see right)
3. Use the up and down keys to bump that adjustment up or down.
4. Use Apple-Left and Apple-Right to move to the next or previous image.
Additional Tips
– you can leave the Apple key depressed while you push up and down to reduce the number of total keystrokes involved
– you can use tab and shift-tab to quickly change between different adjustments without using the mouse
– hold shift with up or down to adjust by larger amounts
Specific Keyboard Shorcuts
In addition to the ability to manipulate any slider in Capture One via the keyboard there are direct keyboard shortcuts for specific operations. For instance:
- Increase Exposure Command Control +
- Decrease Exposure Command Control –
- Increase Contrast Command Shift Control +
- Decrease Contrast Command Shift Control –
Note that these default keyboard shortcuts work best on an extended keyboard with a numeric keypad. For laptop users you may wish to remap the commands to the simpler to remember open/closed brackets and command open/closed brackets which are a lot easier to access on a laptop or on a compact keyboard which lacks a numeric keypad (like the low profile keyboards included now with most Apple desktops). To remap these shortcuts simply go to Capture One > Edit Keyboard Shortcuts, create a new keyboard shortcut set (“duplicate”) and then browse to Shortcuts > Exposure and double click in the “key” column (where the keyboard command is shown) and type the new shortcut. Below is what this part of Edit Keyboard Shortcuts looks like after changing the shortcuts per the suggestion of using brackets.
