Skip to main content

⚠️ Please note that this topic or post has been archived. The information contained here may no longer be accurate or up-to-date. ⚠️

About Full User's Manual. Addressed to Phase One

NNN635077039496462564
Hi everyone of Phase One team,

I would like to say that it would be highly appreciated to get full CO8P User's Manual which is not available yet.
Surely, video tutorials and short "Getting Started With..." are welcome too, but all that is a bit not what IS really needed.
But, maybe the manual is already available to download and, due to my stupidity, I just couldn't find this remarkable document ?
Anyway, thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Mike.
0

Comments

17 comments

Date Votes
  • Christian Gruner
    The user manual was available from day 1: http://help.phaseone.com/en/CO8/
    0
  • NNN635077039496462564
    HI Christian,

    Thank you for such quick response, but I meant downloadable PDF.
    And I can't find it so far. Does such PDF manual exist at all, please?

    Thanks a lot,
    Mike
    0
  • Florin Coter
    You can print the User's Manual. Use PrimoPDF, a free program, to print any document to a PDF document.
    0
  • Alveric
    What would be really nice is if someone wrote a book like the tons about say, Lightroom, that are out there, and every item would be addressed in detail with detailed examples. For example, what exactly each item/slider in Sharpening does and illustrations showing the changes. There are many things in CaptureOne that are totally mystifying or downright cryptic. I remember seeing months ago a complete guide for version 7 on Amazon and I added it to my wish list to purchase it as soon as it was out, but it was never published.
    0
  • Gerald Bonne
    I agree with the requests for a detailed manual.

    I remember in the past, when I did not have C1. I wanted to understand what it was and what its features were. So I downloaded the manual (there used to be a PDF version in v6) and read it. It was so thin and superficial (which I did not realize at the time, I trusted it was complete), that I thought C1 was a lot of fuzz for very little power. Because most of the really great cool things you could do with it are just not brought forward in the manual.

    My feeling is that Phase One is losing customers on this. Yes there is PODAS, yes there are some webinars. But these are scheduled events and not thorough guides to your products that customers can read when they need it.

    I am not trying to put a blame or to point fingers. This is a twofold tip you guys should really consider wisely. On one side it is enabling users to better understand and use the product (which in turn will encourage user to user promotion) and on the other side this is also a part of the marketing.
    0
  • Permanently deleted user
    I agree with and fully support this request. So, Phase One, how about it? It's very much in your own interest.

    Peter
    0
  • SFA
    In my experience the problem with User Guides for a complex product in a fast moving environment is that they can very quickly become out of date. A well presented on-line solution, now that on-line is the expected basis for information, preferable with active links is usually a better option. Of course some of come from the even older days of hard copy printed manuals. It can be difficult to break a habit.

    User guides can take a lot of effort to produce and keep up to date and translated into many languages. Once you get beyond the generic use features and into the 'creative' mystique of some personal discovery that really applies specifically to certain types of image or preferred 'look' (i.e. your artistic creative USP) then the complexity of documentation may increase exponentially. In business application software I have seen attempts to do similar things in generic manuals lead to the documents becoming almost unreadable and unmaintainable. In fact I have at times written a few chapters that I was extremely glad to see accepted as complete so that I could pass their futures into the hands of others ...

    Might I suggest the User Guides are not good substitutes, in a creative field, for getting one's hands dirty and experimenting to see what can be with the tools available and so finding and learning the parts of the product that are of most use to us individually based on a good (but not necessarily detailed) generic guide.



    Grant
    0
  • Tan68
    I don't like PDF manuals.
    I prefer paper as well.
    Paper isn't that common...
    I suppose on-line manuals are better, for me, than PDF in that I can open several different tabs in a browser and reference back and forth. Closest thing I can think of to the ease of flipping back and forth between marked pages in a paper manual...
    0
  • Permanently deleted user
    Hi Grant

    I think you are being unduly negative on this one. At the moment PhaseOne has produced just bits and pieces by way of guidance, from one version to another. I seem to recall even Drew has commented that Cap1 may be getting too complex.

    I still refer to a CS5 book when using PS CC. The core guidance still applies.

    If PhaseOne were to attempt to produce a guide (perhaps just for image manipulation) I am sure they would discover for themselves many of the bugs and 'quirks' that we users are left to pick up on. Win-win all round, I suggest.

    In the meantime, before my hands get too dirty I am putting my gardening gloves on. In other words I deliberately do not try this and try that in C8. Keep it simple - keep it clean.

    Peter.
    0
  • SFA
    [quote="Peter" wrote:
    Hi Grant

    I think you are being unduly negative on this one. At the moment PhaseOne has produced just bits and pieces by way of guidance, from one version to another. I seem to recall even Drew has commented that Cap1 may be getting too complex.

    I still refer to a CS5 book when using PS CC. The core guidance still applies.

    If PhaseOne were to attempt to produce a guide (perhaps just for image manipulation) I am sure they would discover for themselves many of the bugs and 'quirks' that we users are left to pick up on. Win-win all round, I suggest.

    In the meantime, before my hands get too dirty I am putting my gardening gloves on. In other words I deliberately do not try this and try that in C8. Keep it simple - keep it clean.

    Peter.


    Peter,

    Maybe I am being a little negative but although I too still use various printed manuals from time to time I find their electronic versions much more effective to use when they are are available to me. Especially for technical documents when manuals, for completeness in each section, tend to have to repeat the same information time after time after time.

    As for V8 compared to V7 ... there are obvious differences in the way things are done in processing but the basic user interface is not really any different in concept. The core functionality of most tools in terms of a user interface is very much the same. The completely new features - for example clone and heal layers - are also not really any different to use than previous layer functionality. What there is in there that is new is not so very different to the way other applications deal with cloning and its "healing" twin.

    In that respect it is simple and clean and if you know what you want to do and how to do it in V7 doing the same thing but with a few more options to hand in V8 should not be a problem.

    If, on the other hand, someone is new to Capture One but used to the working of, say, Photoshop, the differences may seem more challenging. Despite reading many the PS guides (though only a trivial number compared to the masses that have been published) I have never been comfortable with PS (or similar) products. I have no idea why that should be but for some reason I don't gel with them and words do not help me.

    Capture One (and similar products) on the other hand seem to be to be quite natural to use right from the start although it may take time to fully appreciate what is possible. And that is where experimentation comes in. Or maybe the tutorial videos that have become so accessible in recent years.

    To extend your analogy - I have discovered that different types of gardening gloves offer greater control than only one type although the suggested gloves for a task are not always the ones I favour. But the gloves don't help me to decide how the garden should look and when the mower starts to misbehave in the middle of cutting the grass it is useful to have some feel for how I might coax it to complete the task before it rains. Preferably without having to find the manual (wherever that might be ... 😉 ).

    I have come to the conclusion that working with the Manual is a bit like painting by numbers (can you still get painting by numbers kits?) when in fact the guidance the kits offered was intended to be interpreted more loosely for a better artistic result.

    Of course inherently talented artists (of which I am not one) would soon outgrow the concept or perhaps never approach it at all being already ahead of what it could offer. Probably because they were always drawing, painting and experimenting.

    That said have we yet established that the currently available documentation is lacking and if so how it is lacking?

    I don't doubt that there may be some areas that people would like to see more explanation for, though it is possible that they are only assuming there is more to explain! Perhaps there is not.

    Without a specific subject to discuss (in my experience often handled rather well through usefully functioning a user to user forum) it can be difficult or perhaps impossible to guess what people want to understand. One could write another 20,000 words and still appear to leave questions unanswered or the answers not readily obvious to the reader.


    Just my opinion of course.



    Grant
    0
  • Peter Meyer
    Yes, I am a for a full user manuel (as PDF) too... 😊
    0
  • Permanently deleted user
    In trying to appreciate and respect age, I'm curious, why a manual is needed? I'm 33 now. When I was 25, I taught myself Photoshop and retouching without manual. I read online materials and learnt from experimenting. I don't see the need for a manual that explains the sliders in sharpening. RetouchPro was a great help.

    Why?

    Why not drag the sliders yourself to see what it does and make mental notes. Dragging and experimenting with sliders isn't going to make your monitor explode. If you look around the tool panels, you can see a "?" icon. When clicking, it will load their online manual, which explains the settings and definitions.

    Think of also the user base of Capture One. Please remember and as a reminder, I'm NOT denigrating anyone or anyone's professional status. Most users who use Capture One are professionals. Meaning: they are already used to Photoshop CS and conditioned with the terminology of both photography and pressing-printing. If you're used to USM in PS, you don't have to learn what the sliders do in Capture One, since C1's sharpening is a form of USM.

    I complete see the validity of your request, especially with how the current version 8 is being marketed—it's meant for newcomers from LR and Aperture refugees.
    0
  • Dave R
    [quote="ronaldnztan" wrote:
    In trying to appreciate and respect age, I'm curious, why a manual is needed? I'm 33 now. When I was 25, I taught myself Photoshop and retouching without manual. I read online materials and learnt from experimenting. I don't see the need for a manual that explains the sliders in sharpening. RetouchPro was a great help.

    Why?


    There is a whole book just on sharpening (Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe) 🤬

    Martin Evening's Lightroom Book runs to nearly 700 pages - I suspect a comprehensive manual covering everything in Capture One in similar depth would be of a similar size.

    As an aside I have been playing with video editing using Davinci Resolve Lite (a free download of an industrial strength program) - it has an 800 page pdf user guide well written and comprehensive. If DaVinci can produce such a document for their software so can Phase One.
    0
  • Rainer421
    I don't think it has anything to do with age. Experimenting may be fine for some and I am sure you can get satisfying results. Why I am strongly in favour of a PDF - or even a printed - manual is that I want to learn about all that is possible with the software. I just want to know *what* is there. I doubt that anyone will find all the features just by experimenting. And this is true to Capture one and is is simply impossible with something like Photoshop.
    Some companies offer a print-on-demand service and I would gladly pay for a Capture One manual that I can read on my leisure.
    0
  • caberto
    I will add another vote to having an actual pdf manual. I am coming from Capture NX2 and Lightroom, and this is a different animal. To have to go the Phase One website for reference is a bit unprofessional IMO, and so far the only drawback I see to using this software, as I'm sure there are dozens of features one would not look to experiment with for the simple fact that we do not know they are there. How can there not be a full manual for a complex tool such as this? One that a person can pick up and read from start to finish over time, with the option to skip over sections that are not pertinent to them? It just feels very unprofessional, as if they're weren't quite ready for prime time yet. Other than, I am liking the results I get from my raw files, but I guess I just don't know what I'm missing and could possibly go even more with it, but I don't know...
    0
  • SFA
    [quote="caberto" wrote:
    To have to go the Phase One website for reference is a bit unprofessional IMO, and so far the only drawback I see to using this software, as I'm sure there are dozens of features one would not look to experiment with for the simple fact that we do not know they are there.


    Actually I think that a huge number of hot links to pages of a current web site that is for the most part maintained as things change and is current within a short time for all new features and facilities added to the application is rather professional. Not only that but there are hot links to related items of interest from within the pages to which one is directed.

    If you are not sure whether you are missing an interesting feature or function within, say, a particular tool, look for the little "?" and click on it to get directly to the context sensitive help available. No need to go and find the manual and then search for any relevant pages nor to download a new one because the one you have is out of date.

    I well recall the days when software came on "floppy" discs and with printed manuals. Nobody I know ever read them and certainly never contemplated cover to cover. Maybe a few business documents that were primarily written as User Training Guides .... but still rarely cover to cover and in any case they could only teach the basics - the "smart" stuff that might be required could not be predicted.

    Back in the day I wrote a user guide for some new software and then had some responsibility for overseeing its revisions as the product and the company grew and clients demanded ever more professional looking output. Still no one read them. We knew that because we were always being asked questions for which the answers were easily found in the manuals.

    Move on to searchable PDF files ? Made no difference. Nobody used them much either.

    Photography is a visual medium for creative people. Pictures and videos and active blogs are, these days, a powerful aid to understanding and learning and perhaps even to encourage interactive investigation of what might be possible - something beyond a list if settings values or reference to a favourite "Style" in a "Styliser" plug-in.

    We operate in a world that allows use to interact and exchange ideas more readily than ever before and on the forum here a "Can I do this?" question will often result in several responses in a very short period of time. Probably less time than it would take to find and trawl through a manual and often with a link that takes us directly to the relevant information at the click of a mouse. Once you get used to it and accept it it becomes a great way to operate.

    IMO.



    Grant
    0
  • caberto
    [quote="SFA" wrote:
    [quote="caberto" wrote:


    Move on to searchable PDF files ? Made no difference. Nobody used them much either.

    Photography is a visual medium for creative people. Pictures and videos and active blogs are, these days, a powerful aid to understanding and learning and perhaps even to encourage interactive investigation of what might be possible - something beyond a list if settings values or reference to a favourite "Style" in a "Styliser" plug-in.

    Grant


    Hi Grant, I understand your points... but they do not negate the benefits of an actual manual to refer back to at will or to peruse to get a "larger picture" of the program rather than one little bite at a time. "Photography is a visual medium", as you say, but this software is a tool to reach that final visual image, not a visual medium in and of itself. As a tool, it should come with a manual, plain and simple, as do power tools, or any other tool with any complexity. We will agree to disagree on this it appears. The status quo of their "manual" may suffice for you, and there is nothing wrong with that, but for many of us, it does not, and there is also nothing wrong with that. One size does not always fit all.
    0

Post is closed for comments.