My Issues with Capture One

Every time I release a Capture 1 update video, I get a lot of comments about uh things that Capture 1 should be doing that they're not doing that people think Capture 1 is too focused on portrait photographers and not landscape photographers. You know, maybe that's true, and it's may be true for a reason. I went to edit a session today which I need to deliver to a client tomorrow. But when I opened up Capture 1, I got I got a survey basically asking, you know, uh what kind of photography do I do and at what level do I do it?

And it's a great way for them to get a good assessment of who their users are so that they can focus on the kinds of things that would be useful to their user base. So, I'm going to go over my wish list of what I would love to see in Capture 1, what I think is missing, what it could improve upon. So, I want to start off talking about a AI features that I think Capture 1 uh could and should be adding.

They just added AI retouching. Very basic features. I know for a fact cuz I've seen it in comments from Capture 1 employees in in related groups that they are working on and probably already have in Alpha Stages other AI retouching features. They're just not ready for public consumption yet. Next, AI noise reduction. This is something that people have been asking for for a long time, especially landscape photographers, and I would love it if for no other reason than to make the landscape photographers happy.

One thing that I would like to point out, and I feel a lot of people just don't know, is that noise reduction is really only visible at 100%. You can only see it in effect at 100%. So, if you're using noise reduction, you need to make sure that your image is set to 100% in the viewer. And if you're not doing that, then that might be all you need to do. Next thing I'd really like to see is AI coloring, specifically detecting closed eyes and blurry images.

Even if it could go so far as detecting if eyes are making eye contact with the lens or looking off the lens, most of my time is spent in culling. If I could just click a button and Capture One finds all the images out of the hundreds of images that I've taken where my subject's eyes are closed or the images slightly out of focus and I can just red flag them. Life-changing. If if you could speed that up, that would be amazing a reality.

I've said it many times on this channel. Artificial intelligence is great for taking away the menial tasks that we have to do. I'd rather not spend half an hour or 45 minutes going image by image by image by image looking to see if my subject's eyes are closed or if the image is slightly out of focus. Oh my god. And if I can just focus on the processing of the images, that's the creative work that I really want to be doing as a photographer.

I don't want to be sorting through hundreds of images.

The next thing would be object detection for automated keywording. Since we already have face detection, I would like to be able to label the faces in a session or in a catalog would be phenomenal. There are plenty of open- source pre-built libraries that Capture One could just plop into its software and start using. They're open source and they're free like YOLO, Detectron 2 by Meta, Media Pipe by Google.

There are a number of others. So, those are available for Capture 1 to just grab put out with with its releases and then it can just like do its thing on our images and detect what's in the images and and keyword it automatically. And if we could control the level of keywords and the hierarchy to some extent, that would be great. And if the object detection detects something that's in a keyword library that we have, it matches it to that specific keyword in the in the library.

That would just be amazing. So object detection, face detection, being able to label faces. That's a big one. The biggest set of groupings that I have for my wish list are in color features.

Now the first one would be uh color passport support. Da Vinci Resolve has support for multiple color passports. It can recognize this panel here. You just grid over it and then it will color correct based on on this product. Photographers need this level of color accuracy. Fashion photographers need this level of color accuracy. Scott Cucinho uh from Tin House Studios here on YouTube did a great video about how to do this and how to import this into Capture 1, but you're having to build your own profiles and then bring that back in and then apply that to every image and it's a process.

If Resolve can do it and then Capture 1 should be able to do it. Next thing that I would love to see in terms of color is smart color detection and adjustments. It exists in Canva. It's probably going to end up in Lightroom soon. I think it's only in Photoshop's beta right now. But it will detect the major color palette of the image. So, if you look at this frame, I've got blue here. I've got purple up here.

I've got skin tones here, gray, maybe a bit of red here in the hat, but that's about it. But it would automatically detect the major colors. I can just make adjustments to the colors, and it's already detected them and done like an excellent job. What I would also love to see in color adjustments, and I've talked about this before, are uniformity sliders for all color selections. If I select a color, I don't want to have to go to the skin tone tool and do that every single time.

I don't want to have to create a layer and then do a skin tone adjustment on every layer. I should just have access to the three uniformity sliders of hue, saturation, and uh lightness for every every color that I select. that just that just makes sense to me instead of having to use that workaround for the skin tool hack that I've shown in a video before and I'll link to in the description. When it comes to color grading, uh the color balance tools are fine, but there's no accuracy.

I cannot enter numeric values. I can't enter hex values. I would love to be able to enter very specific colors. What I would do in Photoshop is I would grab a still image, take it to Adobe Color and it gives me a color palette that gives me the hex values and then I can just take those colors, apply them as layers and then like grade the image that way. I should be able to do that in Capture 1. And if I had smart color detection of the dominant colors and I wanted to tone the image in a very specific way, I could just pick the dominant colors.

I should just be able to grab a picker tool and select a color on the image. I should be able to go boom, purple, boom, blue, and select that and grade my image based on the existing colors in the image and add that to my color balance. I'd love just be able to type in specific color values or pick selected colors or use the dominant colors that are already in the image with a smart color detection uh and adjustment system.

And my final thing for colors is I would like more scopes. I would like vector scopes. I would like, you know, waveform scopes. I would like scopes. A histogram is fine, but I would like some more advanced uh scopes so that I can do more advanced color work, especially after using Da Vinci Resolve now and having access to all of those fantastic color grading tools and scopes, just like improvements on the existing color features that are already in there.

So, moving on to some miscellaneous features. First of all, I'd love to see better cataloging. The new session builder is great, but I would like that same level of focus to be applied to cataloges. Cataloges are slow, especially when I put my entire library into a single catalog, which I should be able to do if it had object detection, keywording, and face detection, and you put that in a catalog of probably 400,000 images at this point.

I want to be able to like scroll through it quickly. I want to be able to click on a folder and it not have to like populate every image preview every single time. It feels like it's constantly rebuilding previews. I could do a whole video about this, but you know, let's let's make the cataloges better. There's a reason why like professional photographers like myself use sessions for Capture 1 and developing our images, but then we catalog in Lightroom cuz Lightroom's catalog is just better.

I shouldn't have to go to another piece of software, a competitor's piece of software to get a better catalog. Another feature that I would like to see and I noticed this in Evodto when I was using it on Friday. We were tethering into Evodto at an event with my friend Alex. You can have automated exports of images. The limitation with that is that it would export everything instead of being able to export based on like selections.

That's something I think a photo should fix, but I also think would be great for Capture 1 if I could set up automated exports of images. So, if I'm tethering, I could apply a preset and export the image all within Capture 1, that would be fantastic. Have the export automation be based on some criteria. If it's if it's a five-star rating or if I color tag it purple, tag an image and then that image is automatically exported if you have export automation turned on.

And that's just another tool to add and you can just toggle it on or off. Turn it on, select the recipe from a drop-own list, add some criteria, and then Bob's your uncle. And the last item on my wish list is do not block basic features into studio versions. There's some features that I understand are studio level features. Face detection and showing the face in the crop tool for AI image cropping.

That shouldn't be a studio only version. We should be able to see detected face boxes. Especially if you're doing face detection for the AI retouching. I think you're going to have to pull that out of the studio version and and allow us to see what faces are detected. I also don't think those features are enough of a differentiator that would make someone go, I need the studio version just so I can see which face is selected.

The advanced AI crops with like how how much of a border you can put around an image and what's Yeah, sure. That definitely sounds like studio version. I feel like we're going to end up with some AI retouching features that are going to end up being studio version only like cleaning up a backdrop or you know filling in a backdrop. Those are all standard things in software like Evodto but if you put them into a studio version like that's just going to piss people off and we don't want pissed-off customers.

We want happy customers. I lied. I've got two more and they are both export related. First of all, watermarks need to be fixed. with the way watermarks work now. Uh, not good. The second one, uh, more importantly that I really would like, I want to be able to add borders to the images on export. That should be pretty simple. I want a white border. I want borders and key lines. I want to be able to add a keyline, add a border, add a watermark.

Just do that. Do that. Make make me happy. You'd make a a million people happy. I want to be able to add a white border and a black keyline or any color border and any color key line. Let's get on that. Thank you. So, that's my wish list for Capture 1. Let me know in the comments what you want to see in Capture 1 and what's on your wish list.