Capture One Adds AI Retouching. Is Photoshop in Trouble?

Capture 1 just released a new beta with some new AI retouching features. They've built this as everything you need from capture to delivery. These features are great. They mark the beginning of something. It's a public beta, so in your account, you can log into your account, download the beta, create a test session just to play around and and see how these new tools will benefit you moving forward.

They've also redesigned their website and introduced a new logo. There's rebranding. So, I think that calls for a little change here as well. Okay. So, before I open up a session in Capture 1 and dig into these new features, I want to take a look at some of the clips from their next capture event and talk about some of the things that they said that I think are important and that stand out for me and are one of the reasons why or actually many reasons why I I really like and appreciate Capture 1.

So the CEO Raphael Orta says, "Many people think of Capture 1 as a software company, as a technology company, but what if we told you that we think of Capture 1 as a photography company?" He went on further to say that there is some uncertainty about the future of photography. And because we also have a a foot in the technology industry, we can see that there is a strain of folks in technology who seem to uh have a vision of the future of art without artists and photography without photographers.

Now, this is not a vision that we share. We think this is a a vision that is dark and it's ugly and it's scary and frankly it's unacceptable and we think that this is a future that would suck that it would suck greatly. So we've decided that we're going to do the exact opposite at Capture 1. We've decided that we're going to apply all our skills and all our abilities and all our energy towards building tools that help you create more tools that you enjoy using, tools that you may call game changers, tools that you may even fall in love with.

That's my argument that I've been making for a couple of years now, ever since I discovered that Adobe was using our work to train its AI. Even though they claimed they didn't, I've got proof. It's in a video that I posted. Uh you may have already seen it. So, Raphael was very clear to say that this is not a vision that they share. They don't believe in a in a world of art without artists or photography without photographers.

So, it's clear that everything that they do and and the work that they do and bringing AI into their software is to help us do our job better and faster, easier, reduce our workflow, make our workflow a lot faster, but not stripping us out of the process. And this is what we want. This is what we as photographers want. We want to make this the the tedium much less. We want little tedium. We don't want lots of tedium.

We want we want AI to reduce the tedium in our lives. Something that I noted later on was that it was said that we train our own AI model. When we train these models, we use our own images and images that we have the rights for. They're not training it on massive data from the internet or you know your work. That was very clear that they do not train their AI models on our work. And I think that's very important.

Being focused and dedicated towards making our lives better and reducing the the stuff that just takes like it used to take me 2 hours to at a pixel level retouch an image. I have uh my retouching pen here. It sits here on my desk, but I no longer have a tablet on my desk. I haven't used a tablet in probably a couple of years. I I I do my retouching with a mouse because the tools are so advanced and at a level where like I don't need to be the person that's going in and doing things at a pixel level.

If I have a commercial shoot that needs to be retouched, that's something that I will send out to a professional. I don't need to be doing that. If the client's going to be paying for retouching, they can do that. If the client is wanting me to do the retouching, especially if it's just a portrait client or head shot or something like that and it's not a big commercial campaign, then Evodto is good enough.

Capture 1 looks like it's heading down the path to take on Evodto. And I think that's a very smart move for them because when you look at a tool like uh headshot tools which is used for queuing and and uh file renaming and delivery of galleries to people at like large events where a photographer might be shooting 300 head shot. People were using they were tethering into Capture 1 because Capture 1 had a token that allowed you to rename the image file based on the contents of the clipboard.

So headshot tools just adds content to the clipboard and then it allowed you to rename your files and then people were taking those images uploading them and then when people wanted retouching they were doing the retouching in Evodto but Evodto got smart. You can tether raw files into Evodto. They added tokens for file renaming that uh facilitated the the type of clipboard capture that headshot tools uses into the renaming of their files.

So people then did not need capture 1. They could do everything directly into Evodto. They could ingest the images. They could put out retouched images as you know they're being delivered. So Evodto effectively made changes that eliminated Capture 1 from the process. And Capture 1 needs to not be eliminated from the process. What I would prefer is to have all of this stuff be able to be done in Capture 1, which I already pay for and I'm never not going to use because this is the best image processor on the planet.

All right, so I want to dive into these new updates and there are really just two. There's how sessions are built when you're setting them up and AI retouching on faces.

So the first change is to how sessions are set up and sort of organized in our library. You'll see this has been renamed shortcuts. So we have our typical capture folder selects output and trash. Then we have our session albums. That hasn't changed. There's still our our albums and our smart albums. But now we have instead of just going right to session favorites, we have session folders. And this is the hierarchical structure of the folders.

And you can see the icons where this is the capture folder and this is the output folder and this is the selects folder have been moved from uh the shortcuts panel up here down to the session folder. So when you're tethering and you have multiple folders set up, then you will want to change which folder is the active current capture folder and is collecting and sorting the images when you're on shoot, when you're on location.

So when you go to create a new session, you are now met with a few more options in the dialogue box. I'm just going to rename this session uh to give us a start here. In the beta, what this opens up to is a automated method for capturing folders. We'll look at that in a minute. First, we're going to look at manuals. Let's say for a typical acting headshot session, I'm going to have two main folders.

I'm going to have head shot and I'm going to have my slate shots. In my head shot folder, given the location where I am, I have my studio and I also have a larger facility that I can use. So, those would be outside. But I might also have other images that are inside that are more uh environmental. And so I would want a folder structure like this. And the delimiter here is the new line. So, you know, as you can see, I've I've put these all on a new line.

And that's going to delimmit how the folder structure will be set up. One thing that you'll want to note right off the bat is that you have a hamburger menu here. And you can save this custom preset. And so I'm just going to click that. And we're calling this acting head shot. So now if I empty this out and I use this hamburger menu to do acting head shot, it's got the folder structure saved for me.

The other way that you can do this if you're on a commercial shoot, you have uh automated or if you're in uh a studio when you're doing maybe ecom or something along those lines. And so what you can do is you create a folder capture one use this the uh the example of day. So if you have a multiple day shoot typically commercial shoots run over multiple days. You can also say I'm going to I'm going to sort it by location and then I'm going to grab a counter.

So right now I have location 01. I've got the folder count set to three which means it's going to create a location 01, a location 02 and a location 03 because the counter starts at one. If I were to add a subfolder, let's say I'm shooting four scenes at each location, two in the morning, two in the afternoon. Then if I create this session, if I create this session, it's created the session with the capture folder having now the location, three different locations, and each location having four separate scenes.

Now if we open this session up in explorer and I go into the capture folder, you will see that I have each of those folders, each of the subfolders have been created as well. So capture 1 is creating that entire folder structure for me. Now here is my problem. When you go to add a session, automated is only available for the studio version. something that's as simple as this that a pro photographer might use on a commercial shoot but not have need for all of the other features that are in the studio version.

I think this is a really ridiculous decision. This is this is the wrong place to monetize to deny people of that. That's I mean that's such a simple little little tool cuz now all we're going to do is like we're just going to create custom presets anyways and then you know do it once and and save it. So that's that's a little frustrating. That's a a real point of frustration for me. Okay.

So the next thing I want to show you is I've got a new tool tab. I've added this to my workspace in the way that I have my workspace set up. And this is called a retouch. I'm going to remove this and show you here. If you don't have that in your workspace, you just rightclick on the tabs area and then you can add tool tab and retouch is there. Click and drag it to where you want it. You'll see right now the only tool in there is retouch faces.

I'm going to save that workspace and I'm going to save that as my default workspace.

Now the retouch faces, you can see it has detected a face. If I click show detected faces, it shows which face. I can zoom in here on this horribly disfigured face and take a look at these tools. So we have blemishes, dark circles, even skin, which has two sliders, amount and texture. texture is set as a default to zero and you can see it can go into the negative and then we also have contouring and so this is where we're starting with AI retouching in Capture 1.

This is all there is. That's it so far. I have uh these really I don't have forehead wrinkles because I laugh so much and I have these big cheeks. Uh I actually have these big wrinkles underneath my eyes like Nick Offerman. I also have these dark circles cuz I don't get enough sleep. So if I use the dark circle slider, you can see the the tonality in the eyes completely changed. And we can see the difference by using the impact up and down.

And this is similar to using opacity on a layer. Once we've uh applied all of these settings, we have an overall slider, the impact slider to determine how much we want to put on that. Right now, I'm going to leave it at 100 so we can see the difference in all of these sliders. And I'm going to do things at an exaggerated level. So, we're looking at blemishes. I have this uh blood spot here. I've got uh another one here.

I've got some age spots that are creeping in here. Someday I'm going to get a blleroplasty and get these eyes fixed. But for now, uh we're just going to use the slider to address the blemishes on the face. And you can see it really makes this look really kind of plasticky when you go all the way up to the edge. This is going to get better. This is not great right now. It's going to get better, but we can control how much I want in it.

Now, my concern here is that the slider is really dealing sort of like with an opacity as opposed to granularity. What it appears to have done is figure out what does it need to do at 100. And it's really just sort of applying an opacity setting over top of that. Not my favorite process. even skin. This is we, you know, we all have these u micro transitions within our skin. The color transitions here.

You can see it especially as we're aging. I've got a lot of redness, you know, some yellowing in here. I would want to fix that with my skin tone tool and pull the the redness out, the rosacea here, which has plagued me for years. If I click on even skin, we can start to see the change here. Now, if we start to double up, that looks a little plastic, a little unreal. Let's see if I can add texture back here.

I don't want to lose texture in the skin. Nothing happens with the texture tool until even skin has been applied. Cuz the problem with applying even skin like this, it's looks like it might be sort of doing a bit of a frequency separation here. We don't want to lose the skin texture. That's a big problem. That's why when retouching has been overdone and it looks plasticky, it's because we've lost the skin texture.

Skin texture is so important. The retouch for me plugins for Photoshop are really good at maintaining the texture of the skin. Next, we can apply some contouring to my face. And you can see it's adding some shadow in here in and around the cheeks. This is what gives us some contour here. But on a face like mine doesn't really look right. It doesn't look great. I don't think it's doing a great job of contouring just yet, but again, these things are going to get better.

This is a starting point. So, if we like take everything, add the blemishes, dark circles amount, drop up some contouring, you know, pull the texture up, we're going from here to here, that's really dramatic and doesn't look real. So that's why the impact slider then becomes very handy so that we can start to just bring this in to a point where once we start seeing oh that that doesn't look real back off and make our adjustments as we want them.

Now because this is dynamic and it can uh detect faces if I then select other images of me and then I copy this over. I can either click here and you can apply what items that you want to copy over or as I would normally do just hit shiftclick and it's going to apply these changes to these other images as well. So you can see the changes have been applied to this image, this image. See the difference there.

Those are the tools. That's an introduction to the tools that have been added. The fact that the facial retouching is dynamic and done on a basis of recognizing whose face belongs to who and what settings were applied to which face is uh great and that's exactly what we need moving forward. The other thing that stood out for me was when uh they said we have a team that we call 10x their vision is with every release to make your workflow 10 times faster.

This generally has been the case for portrait photographers for for other photographers, landscape photographers, product photographers, not necessarily the case. Although the AI masking, not the people masking, but being able to use the AI tool to go in and select uh objects probably has made things a lot better for product photographers and landscape photographers. But in the world of of commercial, corporate and portrait photography, there's been a lot of focus on Capture 1 working towards taking market share from Adobe, which I am all for uh given Adobe's practices over the last few years.

And I think they need to get to a point where we can completely strip out Photoshop from the process. I hope we're on our way there and we will get to a point where we will see this software being the only thing that we need. But right now, it's not it's not in any way, shape, or form uh able to eliminate Photoshop or Evoto from my workflow. But beyond that, I'm psyched about this current update because it's going to help me.

It's going to make my work faster. So, I'm happy about that. I'm I like that uh my work is going to be reduced in this process. I like that when I send proofs out to clients, they'll be able to get rid of like some of their blemishes in their proofs. so you have a better idea of what a finished image is going to look like. I hope you found this video helpful. Subscribe to the channel for more videos.

I'm going to leave a playlist right here for you to go watch more videos about Capture 1 and tips and techniques that I have related to Capture 1. So, uh, stick around and watch that. Thanks for watching. Our season.