Wishlist for improved productivity
(Most of these were in v3.x and I miss them dearly)
- Flags so that I can mark "finished" images. It's not enough to just know which images have been tweaked. I don't always work in order and I rarely finish a shoot in one sitting. I relied on the v3.x flags to help me keep track of my progress. Bonus points if you give me the option to gray them out in the thumbnail viewer (I personally don't like sorting out my finished images; if I have multiple images in a series I want to see all of them side-by-side, even if some of them have been finished off already).
- Which images have been rendered already?! I never thought I'd miss that little green dot so much!! This is so simple and yet so vital. Errg!!
- "Move to" command is CTRL-J?! A single Backspace press was so much more efficient in v3.x. CTRL-J is either a two-handed keystroke (left CTRL and right "J") or an awkward right hand command. Bad choice. And what the heck is the significance of "J" anyway? Wouldn't CTRL-M have been a more logical choice? Does the verb "to move" start with a "J" in whatever language Phase One's developers natively speak? Let me customize what keystroke(s) activate the Move-to command, please!!
- Option to keep Develops as a subdir, ala v3.x behavior. I and many other photographers simply don't work on one project at a time; global output settings do not work for our workflow!
- Option to scroll through images with mouse wheel. I'm sure many people will like the UI the way it is. But I'd like the option to customize it to suit my needs.
- Batch renders - reading this forum I learned that there IS batch support if you hold down the shift key. I will adapt if necessary, but really this is silly - if I've selected a bunch of images and hit Process, I expect all of them to get processed. I confess that this gripe is a minor one though.
- (from another thread) You absolutely have to support importing v3.x settings files into v4. Even if I'm going to change my settings once they're in, I still want to start where I left off on my previous images. Telling us to just return to v3.x to tweak those images is not desirable and is, in my professional opinion, indicative of a really poor software design philosophy. I refuse to believe that the v4 engine is so vastly different that you cannot write a translator to import v3.x settings.
- Do not automatically start thumbnailing a directory just because I right-clicked on it. I right-click on a dir in order to set it as my Move-to dir (usually for weeding out discards) but I don't need the app to start thumbnailing everything that's already in there! Only thumbnail a dir when it is left-clicked on. That is an explicit selection.
On a positive note - the image quality is undeniably improved. Sincere congratulations for that. I'm also very happy with the speed of every operation in the app. Again, kudos for good engineering on that front.
The dismay and passion of your users over v4 is indicative of how much we liked and appreciated v3.x, so please take it as a kind of upside-down compliment.
The productivity tweaks mentioned here and elsewhere really aren't huge, drastic measures. Simple little tweaks to the UI can get us operating in v4 as quickly and as efficiently as we had been in v3.x. Please, please listen to your users!!
-ps: I read the manual in its entirety. I'll grant that I may have missed something. However, if reading the manual and using v4.x for a number of hours doesn't make a feature come to light, then that's just a bad interface.
- Flags so that I can mark "finished" images. It's not enough to just know which images have been tweaked. I don't always work in order and I rarely finish a shoot in one sitting. I relied on the v3.x flags to help me keep track of my progress. Bonus points if you give me the option to gray them out in the thumbnail viewer (I personally don't like sorting out my finished images; if I have multiple images in a series I want to see all of them side-by-side, even if some of them have been finished off already).
- Which images have been rendered already?! I never thought I'd miss that little green dot so much!! This is so simple and yet so vital. Errg!!
- "Move to" command is CTRL-J?! A single Backspace press was so much more efficient in v3.x. CTRL-J is either a two-handed keystroke (left CTRL and right "J") or an awkward right hand command. Bad choice. And what the heck is the significance of "J" anyway? Wouldn't CTRL-M have been a more logical choice? Does the verb "to move" start with a "J" in whatever language Phase One's developers natively speak? Let me customize what keystroke(s) activate the Move-to command, please!!
- Option to keep Develops as a subdir, ala v3.x behavior. I and many other photographers simply don't work on one project at a time; global output settings do not work for our workflow!
- Option to scroll through images with mouse wheel. I'm sure many people will like the UI the way it is. But I'd like the option to customize it to suit my needs.
- Batch renders - reading this forum I learned that there IS batch support if you hold down the shift key. I will adapt if necessary, but really this is silly - if I've selected a bunch of images and hit Process, I expect all of them to get processed. I confess that this gripe is a minor one though.
- (from another thread) You absolutely have to support importing v3.x settings files into v4. Even if I'm going to change my settings once they're in, I still want to start where I left off on my previous images. Telling us to just return to v3.x to tweak those images is not desirable and is, in my professional opinion, indicative of a really poor software design philosophy. I refuse to believe that the v4 engine is so vastly different that you cannot write a translator to import v3.x settings.
- Do not automatically start thumbnailing a directory just because I right-clicked on it. I right-click on a dir in order to set it as my Move-to dir (usually for weeding out discards) but I don't need the app to start thumbnailing everything that's already in there! Only thumbnail a dir when it is left-clicked on. That is an explicit selection.
On a positive note - the image quality is undeniably improved. Sincere congratulations for that. I'm also very happy with the speed of every operation in the app. Again, kudos for good engineering on that front.
The dismay and passion of your users over v4 is indicative of how much we liked and appreciated v3.x, so please take it as a kind of upside-down compliment.
The productivity tweaks mentioned here and elsewhere really aren't huge, drastic measures. Simple little tweaks to the UI can get us operating in v4 as quickly and as efficiently as we had been in v3.x. Please, please listen to your users!!
-ps: I read the manual in its entirety. I'll grant that I may have missed something. However, if reading the manual and using v4.x for a number of hours doesn't make a feature come to light, then that's just a bad interface.
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A well thought out list, however, PO may never see it here on this forum. You need to open a "ticket" with cutomer support. According to Keith Carpenter, list as a "Feature Request". 0 -
[quote="D2xs30" wrote:
A well thought out list, however, PO may never see it here on this forum. You need to open a "ticket" with cutomer support. According to Keith Carpenter, list as a "Feature Request".
Open a separate ticket for each feature you mention so that they can be individually tracked by you & the developers - otherwise it's too easy for items to slip off the todo list!
I also urge everyone else here to open feature request tickets, especially for the features we all want to see - the more of us who ask for the same feature the more likely we are to get it.0 -
Okay. I'm in the process of logging each one individually as a support item now. Man, it takes a while.
Along the way I've enhanced the following requests:
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Which images have been rendered already?! I never thought I'd miss that little green dot so much!! This is so simple and yet so vital. Errg!!
The thumbnail UI *has* to include some indication for which images have already been processed! If you don't work in order and/or if you only output a few images at a time, how can you keep track of which images you've already output in previous sessions?!
Ideally if you hover over the "processed" indicator (e.g. v3.x's green dot), it'll tell you when it was processed and to which output directory. A right click over the "processed" indicator might even give you the option of opening it in your image viewer.
A further enhancement would be to be able to clear the "processed" indicators - say, if you know you need to edit or reprocess all of the selected images.
Going further, maybe it can change color or somehow indicate that the image settings have been changed since the last time the image was processed (e.g. green dot becomes blue or something).
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User-mappable hotkeys:
Follow Photoshop's lead and let the users set their own hotkeys for all of the various functions in Capture One 4.
This lack of hotkeys or altered hotkeys (different from v3.x - e.g. Move-to's CTRL-J) is one of the biggest complaints that directly impacts professional photographers' workflows. Let us streamline our own processes and usage so that we can be fast and efficient within the app.
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Only after reading the forums did I learn that there IS batch processing support if you hold down the shift key. The UI gives you no help to figure that out.
I will adapt if necessary, but really this is silly - if I've selected a bunch of images and hit Process, I expect all of them to get processed.
We shouldn't have to hold SHIFT for batch processing, batch rotating, etc. If we've got multiple files selected, apply the command to all of them, just like you did in v3.x!
It works as we would expect for applying image settings to a group of selected photos, so why doesn't it work for these other scenarios?!
I confess that this gripe is a minor one though.
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You absolutely have to support importing v3.x settings files into v4. Even if I'm going to change my settings once they're in, I still want to start where I left off on my previous images.
Telling us to just return to v3.x to tweak those images--which one Phase One employee suggested on the forums--is not desirable and is, in my professional opinion (I'm a Java programmer), indicative of a really poor software design philosophy.
I refuse to believe that the v4 engine is so vastly different that you cannot write a translator to import v3.x settings. Sure, maybe the resulting image won't be an exact match with what we saw in v3.x, but at least we'll be 95% of the way there.
This is somewhat akin to saying that a Word '97 doc cannot be opened in Word 2000 - oh, just use the old version of Word if you want to edit your old doc. Absolutely ridiculous!
We should have the option for automatic as well as explicit import:
Automatic: We copy the *.c1w files into the same dir as the RAW files we're about to work with in v4. v4 sees the *.c1w files and automatically applies their settings when we open those images in v4 for the first time.
Explicit: We are already working with a set of photos in v4. We explicitly point v4 to a location that has our *.c1w files (maybe offlined on DVD-R, maybe in a different dir).
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Response from PO about the request for batch Processing without needing to press SHIFT:
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This might be a preference later on but for now this is the only way to indicate the difference between primary selected image in a range and the whole range of images.
I agree it can be made more obvious.
However to compare with CO3 you had to switch between single image view and multi (which was just two) image mode.
We will take this in as a feature request
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And my response back to them:
Your response doesn't make sense to me.
I'm talking specifically about processing multiple files at once without pressing SHIFT.
If you have five images selected and you apply image settings, what happens? The image settings get applied to all selected images.
If you have five images selected and hit "Process", what happens? Only ONE image is processed.
That is inconsistent UI behavior.0 -
Response from PO about making the Move-to command user-configurable:
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We will forward this. Did you know that Mac OS allow you to customzie this in any program?
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My response:
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That's great about Mac OS, but I'm in Windows so you'll have to build support into the app for those of us who are still on PCs.
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Respose from PO about restoring the flag feature to supplement the new ratings system:
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Thanks for your input and we will forward to R+D.
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Final (?) update:
Turns out they do NOT want separate feature requests:
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thanks for all your input,
Can you gather all your feature requests from your various cases and kindly put into one case and then I will forward to our R+D.
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I guess I'll be logging one more mega-feature request.
I hope the developers will go back and sort out the individual feature requests in their own bug/feature tracking system.0
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