How to stack photos in Capture One like Aperture?
I'm using Capture One as substitute for Apple Aperture. I have watched tutorials and read a lot of documentation and I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to stack images as in Aperture.
For those who don't know what are the Aperture stacks, have a look to this reference:
Thanks in advance.
— Fabio
For those who don't know what are the Aperture stacks, have a look to this reference:
Thanks in advance.
— Fabio
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You can't stack images like Aperture. Only "Variants" are stacked in CO and that is automatic. 0 -
Has anyone created a feature request for this? - It's crazy how many basic features are still missing from a current piece of software compared to Aperture that hadn't been updated in 3+ years (5years in terms of major version release). It is very frustrating to say the least. 0 -
What I have done i created an album inside the project for each each set of bracketed or sequential set of images as name_of_the _first_image_stk or name_of_the _first_image_bkt.
The structure is like this (supposing images 9-14 are a bracket set and images 27-30 and 45-55 are sequential sets):- main_Project
- images_Album
selects_SmartAlbum
sorted_Album
stacks_Group- 00Picks_SmartAlbum
image9bkt_Album
image27stk_Album
image45stk_Album
All images in these folders are are first color coded red, the pick is color coded yellow. Only yellow images are included in the "sorted" album.0 -
[quote="dredlew" wrote:
Has anyone created a feature request for this? It is very frustrating to say the least.
We should all do! I sometimes think that these Phase One guys have pretty much ignored almost anything that has been established as sort-of-standard-functionality in RAW editing tools in the year of 2015. It starts with keyword management, basic DAM/SQL functionality like recursive folder viewing and ends with automatic and flexible stacking of images based on the EXIF data. Not to speak of slideshow functionality below Preview/Finder level and being able to separate your images into edited/not edited....the list is long if you came over from Aperture.0 -
By what measure is stacking "standard" - much less "essential" - functionality? 0 -
[quote="EnderWiggins" wrote:
[quote="dredlew" wrote:
Has anyone created a feature request for this? It is very frustrating to say the least.
We should all do! I sometimes think that these Phase One guys have pretty much ignored almost anything that has been established as sort-of-standard-functionality in RAW editing tools in the year of 2015. It starts with keyword management, basic DAM/SQL functionality like recursive folder viewing and ends with automatic and flexible stacking of images based on the EXIF data. Not to speak of slideshow functionality below Preview/Finder level and being able to separate your images into edited/not edited....the list is long if you came over from Aperture.
Ender,
One has to observe that Apple, having created the most wonderful application and attracted thousands of users despite no real development (so I read here somewhere) for about 3 years has now abandoned the product (and its users it seems).
So was it so good that they felt the need to start again?
Or could they simply find no way to monetize it?
Or was it heading into a software technology black hole of some kind?
It strikes me that Apple had a whole load of interesting display tech. (not sure, not an Apple user except once at a client that was 100% Mac in a commercial business environment until they realised they were constrained in terms of business applications and changed 6000 users to Windows.)
The tech mainly related to displaying stuff and managing files. On to that tech they bolted things like RAW processing to give it some extra purpose and capture part of a very specific market a couple of decades ago. A market that was, back then, very used to extremely expensive solutions and the cost was worn as a badge of pride.
Capture One come to that market from a different angle. Photographic Hardware rather than Computer Hardware for a start. And then Photo Processing first with DAM requirements, historically already managed elsewhere when the product hit the market, coming second. Quite natural given the business mix and the target Pro market (for the camera hardware) likely being already invested in DAM solutions of one sort or another.
There seems to be a grey area of users somewhere between the major Pro agencies a and studios (who likely have DAM requirements far beyond the sort of things that a "cost per seat" application in the C1 range is likely to offer - not the least need being a comprehensive multi-user server environment) and the hobbyist snapper who like the look and feel of C1 and thinks a comprehensive Keyword function would be great .... but does not really have a fully justifiable NEED for such a solution - not the costs a comprehensive application might entail. Well, there are always Open Source combos that can address such things for the truly brave.
I have never felt a need for "Image Stacking ", whatever that is, but it seems, based on your description of what it might offer, that if I want it I can obtain it by sorting or maybe an Album or perhaps a Smart Album or even just a filter should I choose to activate one of the many default filters available.
What am I missing here?
The most common criticisms I ready in this forum can be summarised as "C1 is not Aperture/LightRoom/PS/etc."
Why do so many people seek to create a single "product" that everyone should use? Is something different to be met with disdain for being different? Whatever happened to people's enthusiasm for individuality and creativity?
Grant0 -
[quote="SFA" wrote:
One has to observe that Apple, having created the most wonderful application and attracted thousands of users despite no real development (so I read here somewhere) for about 3 years has now abandoned the product (and its users it seems).
So was it so good that they felt the need to start again?
Or could they simply find no way to monetize it?
Or was it heading into a software technology black hole of some kind?
I sense a little sarcasm in your reply, but let me say that a) the codebase of Aperture was said to be a big mess and b) Apple sees the professional photography market as dying, so they have no interest to maintain a bad codebase for a shrinking market. As simple as that.[quote="SFA" wrote:
The tech mainly related to displaying stuff and managing files. On to that tech they bolted things like RAW processing to give it some extra purpose and capture part of a very specific market a couple of decades ago.
Capture One come to that market from a different angle. And then Photo Processing first with DAM requirements, historically already managed elsewhere when the product hit the market, coming second. Quite natural given the business mix and the target Pro market (for the camera hardware) likely being already invested in DAM solutions of one sort or another.
I fully understand where C1 is coming from since I was using it (till 3.7) before I jumped into Aperture when the 1.0 came out in 2005! So I'm not a newbie, I was just out of town for ten years and was actually pretty disappointed when I came back and pitched the actual version against LR when I was looking for my new home after Apples announcement.
I think you have a wrong idea where Aperture came from. It was not a "display/DAM solution with RAW as an add-on", far from it. It was Apples idea of how professional photogs should handle their thousands and thousands of RAW files from now on. They sold it very hard from the beginning as a top notch editing tool with capabilities close to Photoshop PLUS a neat SQL database as the backend. It was the birth of the "non-destructive RAW editing" idea and changed the whole freakin market. Everybody does this now, catalog the RAW file and save every version as a small sidecar file with the edits. You can thank Apple for that. They actually hit the nail so very hard on its head with the 1.0 that Adobe was totally shocked and rushed out a quick Lightroom beta, which was nothing else than different tech projects bundled together in one package. That's why LR still today feels totally weird with its modular approach, which makes zero sense.[quote="SFA" wrote:
I have never felt a need for "Image Stacking ", whatever that is, but it seems, based on your description of what it might offer, that if I want it I can obtain it by sorting or maybe an Album or perhaps a Smart Album or even just a filter should I choose to activate one of the many default filters available.
What am I missing here?
Ok, let me explain. What Aperture does (and I think LR has the same functionality in principle) is - if you want - auto-stack images based on their EXIF time stamp. That means, you can set a time intervall, say 10 seconds, and every image which was taken inside a ten second time frame will be put on a stack. The same way C1 puts versions on a stack. Who needs this? Everybody who shoots a ton of images in a very short time, like in my case sports shooters of fast sports like Racing or American Football. When I do a panning shot of a race car going by, I put down my shutter and let my Canon rip off 10 images a second. Then I wait for the next car and do the same. Looking inside the stack I can easily see, which of my images is the best one of the series, centered and sharp. That's the pick, the rest may get deleted or I keep them for documentary reasons. It's just a great workflow tool and Aperture had this since version 1.0, because Apple had a vision of how Pro's would shoot and have to select their images in the future. They said "hey, we do have a SQL database behind all this, so let's use it for all kinds of funny stuff, everythings in the EXIF".[quote="SFA" wrote:
The most common criticisms I ready in this forum can be summarised as "C1 is not Aperture/LightRoom/PS/etc."
I think my reply was worded a bit too negative and sounded like I hate C1 and want it to turn into Aperture 4.0. That's not the case, actually. I made a decision pro C1 because I realised, that the superior image quality trumps everything else I may have a problem with, period. I don't use keywords anymore. I don't miss stacking that much anymore, because my photography moved from sports over to other stuff.
My disappointment is just, that these few missing things are such low hanging fruits and so easy to code and implement, and it just boggles my mind that they never took the time over the last ten years to look around and copy+paste this or that idea from Apple and Adobe and thus expand their potential market.0 -
Hi Ender,
That filled in a lot of the rationale of your position nicely.
I understand what you are describing here for the Stack concept and I most often shoot the same sort of subject matter but, interestingly perhaps, have never really felt a need for a stack feature (other than for variants of the same image) possibly because I have not used an application that had such a feature. Or at least if I have I have not used it regularly enough to know it had the feature! I use star ratings to identify (subjectively) the "quality" potential of an image and then colour tags for picks when selectively processing for specific subject. It's interesting, I find, that people will often select images that I tend to reject on the basis of technical demerit or less than interesting compositional arrangement. So I try not to be too critically selective with what I offer.
Likewise the non-destructive aspect of editing. My first look at digital image manipulation involved the usual suspects and the need to make copies to preserve originals but I quickly discovered a tool I preferred (not dissimilar to C1 in the way it was conceived and as I recall it has been around since about 2004) with non-destructive editing and settled on that. It doesn't off much in the way of DAM features. I ran LR V1 for a while and quite liked it (compared to PSE) but did not much like the need to use a catalogue so drifted away from it.
I think irony rather than sarcasm would better describe my opening comments and your analysis of the reasons that Apple may have had for moving away from a strong presence in the Pro photo editing market . I suspect you are right about the reasons. A mess of code would, by now, be expected and each new OS update would add to the challenge.
The economics of selling concepts to billions of people (potentially) with simpler lower value applications (apps) that can be re-created whenever they get too messy must be highly attractive compared with developing and maintaining monolithic products with significant legacy support and no obvious way to charge the price that is really required to support them. Maybe not even via a subscription model.
I probably oversimplified my statement about Apple's starting point for Aperture. However, as with Photoshop to some extent, they had existing products for graphic manipulation and storage (with DAM concepts) that they could utilize more or less off the shelf and add a digital Photography oriented front end as the digital market moved towards becoming affordable at both Pro and consumer levels.
Canon back then, to their credit, at least supplied software with the cameras and I recall their solution was to provide Zoombrowser and an convertor for RAW files - and that is pretty much still the case afaik.
Phase, coming to the market from the other direction - more a Canon position than an Apple/Adobe starting point - needed the RAW converter functionality and probably had no need of the DAM concept for the MF and digital back client base. Very high volume and 10fps were hardly part of the MF market at the time and are still not. One has to assume that if the customers had been requesting more DAM and Stacking and a number of other things they might have appeared but presumably that was not the case or at least not the case for the large majority of users. Resource would have been allocated to other matters perhaps more aligned with the core hardware products.
I suspect that it is still the case in the Pro sector that separate powerful dedicated DAM systems are preferred in many cases and necessary, possibly, for the large agencies and studios.
I can sympathize about Keywording. I actually find it quite easy to do in C1 for single subject images (For example 1 race car in a one driver situation). However multiple drivers for the car during a race ... then you either have to name all of them (not too bad it you have the information already available somewhere) or try to ID which driver is driving (more effort required for the ID). Still not too bad though.
If, however, there are multiple cars (or bicycles or runners or whatever) then the keywording might be a much greater task mostly for the identification and the repetition of effort than for the action of applying a keyword. But I guess it is required if you set out to rely in image identification that would help with a question like "Can you offer me any pictures where John Brown is present."
I can think of a number of ways to address that need but I'm not sure that the technology exists to satisfy all of the ideas! Take away the more extreme ideas and I could suggest several ways to enhance the experience (probably) but then they are mostly somewhat specific to volume shoots of things like sports events and realistically I doubt that is a major marketing benefit for Phase at this point. Moreover they would likely not be so effective that any improvement in the process would be huge. Might save a handful of minutes on a large session - would that be worth the coding effort? Well, maybe not possibly because, by the time it all worked, things may have moved on or, like you, I may have moved on. My experiences in several decades of working within the software industry lead me to conclude that many, possibly most, "must have" developments that are in fact developed turn out to be not used by the requester or used in way different to the intended design. We were less worried about that sort of thing when the client was paying for it anyway but almost always avoided doing the work on a speculative basis unless most of the team thought it was a good idea - which it might be from time to time.
I would be surprised if the low hanging fruit was not under constant observation and functional comparison. However development across platforms will likely introduce some areas of conflicting interest and tuning low cost sql databases for both performance and volume can be a black art that may well lead to a few potentially easy options for UI functionality being left on the drawing board unless demand is high and they can be implemented with zero performance degradation. With the file sizes delivered by the MF backs I would think that is a particularly important issue for Phase when considering new features.
Meanwhile the world, encouraged by the iPhone and Apple's market leadership (apparently) as the largest seller of cameras in the world, moves to areas of acceptance that rely on preselected simplification of images to be shared in an instant and for an instant via social media. We are barely 10 years in to the mass market digital revolution and the rapid demise of film yet already the canvas is changing again. I wonder where things will be in another 10 years?
Sorry for the long post. Kudos to anyone who got this far.
Grant0 -
Fully agree with Ender's post, except for the point where Aperture came from and what I expect C1 to be.
• Aperture was not[quote="EnderWiggins" wrote:
Aperture was created due to user request and not what Apple thought was best for the user. As a matter of fact, a number of well-known photographers at the time were complaining to Apple about how Photoshop was too cumbersome for photo processing but Adobe didn't care about the needs of the photographer. Who knows what eventually drove Apple to listen to the photographers but my guess is that it was Adobe having had pissed off Apple a number of times before, especially when dragging their feet during the Intel transition. They really had Apple in a chokehold on that one. Had PixelMator or Affinity Photo existed at the time, I'm fairly certain Apple would have bought them and turned it into a Photoshop competitor. - While not a Photoshop competitor, the idea of Aperture I guess was close enough to making something happen. And as far as I remember, Apple did buy the initial piece of software to get it started.
Apple's idea of how professional photogs should handle their thousands and thousands of RAW files from now on.
There is much speculation of "why" it exactly came to be but the "how" was confirmed that it was driven by photographer's requests. Apple extensively worked with them to bring Aperture to life and promoted it on a roadshow across the country once it was released. And yes, as Ender mentioned, Adobe was shocked and did their best to rush out Lightroom. This can still be felt today where a lot of bugs and broken workflow concepts from that time haven't been fixed until this date.
• I do not expect C1 to be the same as Aperture, though it's helpful that it "feels" the same (at least on the surface). That's what swayed me over in the first place. However, I essentially expect it to be better than Aperture! A 5 year period (an eternity in computer terms) of neglect where Aperture didn't make any major functional progress and yet still, C1 hasn't managed to catch up to its essential feature set. Sure, C1 does have better image quality, a very nice color selector, a (limited) gradient tool but this is frankly all I see where it is superior. For me, that is just not enough given the time P1 had to improve its software. For some, better image quality may be satisfying but for those who value workflow efficiency, C1 is just light years behind. And at the end of the day, time is money. Not sure if the IQ is that much better that it financially makes a difference.
This may all be subjective and everyone has different needs, but let's be real; had Aperture's development continued on, had it received the complete rewrite as was rumored to be Aperture X, C1 would not be relevant today (for Apple users at least), other than maybe for the purpose of PhaseOne's proprietary coupling with its hardware.0
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