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14 comments

Date Votes
  • RichardT
    In the past, Phase One has published user guides in PDF format.

    User Guides for Capture One v8 and earlier can be found at:



    However, they have not published any for v9 yet. I've not heard an explanation for this; maybe they need to focus all their resources on development and bug fixes.

    Online help pages (English version) can be found at:



    Richard
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  • Kirby Krieger
    Richard — thanks for the inf.

    +1 for a printable User Manual for C1P9.

    I have found no more efficient way to learn how to use a program than a well-written User Manual. Moreover, given C1P9's complexity and organizational need, PhaseOne's teaching style, and the business benefit of having well-informed users, the lack of a printable User Manual is both notable and worrisome.

    PhaseOne: what is the time-table for the User Manual for C1P9?
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  • Permanently deleted user
    I agree. The current online Help isn't very useful if you can't get online (as in "I'm traveling", or "my ISP is down"). I've compiled all of the Help pages into a single bookmarked PDF (royal PITA to do!), which helped. I've also aggregated lots of other info I've found in various places into another PDF, which is much larger and more descriptive than the skeletal Help pages.

    But the best reference I've found so far is Rocky Nook's Capture One book that was published in March. Even with the old C1 8 manual in-hand (it's still relevant with C1 9), the Rocky Nook book is extremely useful.
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  • Kirby Krieger
    [quote="Nature Isme" wrote:
    I've compiled all of the Help pages into a single bookmarked PDF (royal PITA to do!), which helped. I've also aggregated lots of other info I've found in various places into another PDF, which is much larger and more descriptive than the skeletal Help pages.


    That was next on my list of bridges to erect over the moat left by PhaseOne not publishing a User Manual. Could you make this available to others? It would be, as you know, helpful. Thanks.

    [quote="Nature Isme" wrote:
    But the best reference I've found so far is Rocky Nook's Capture One book that was published in March. Even with the old C1 8 manual in-hand (it's still relevant with C1 9), the Rocky Nook book is extremely useful.


    I will take a look. Thanks for the pointer.

    —Kirby.
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  • Permanently deleted user
    Kirby, my document is about 50 MB big and includes observations and tips I and other users I know have discovered. The size could be accommodated if I put the doc up on Dropbox, but I'd need to get permission from the other users to post their observations—or else I'd have the onerous job of removing them from the document. So at this point I don't foresee posting it publicly.

    However, it's pretty straightforward (although time consuming) to peruse the Image Professor's Blog, and by doing so you'd also see user comments that I've stripped from my composite document. Some of those comments are very interesting and useful.

    David Grover's free webinars are my favorite source of info, though. Although usually covering basic elements, David almost always says something that gets me off researching or trying new things in C1, and trying is how I learn best. At this point, other than DAM performance issues and wishing for better print presets, I'm feeling pretty comfortable with C1 because of the resources C1's put online.

    There's a lot more to C1 than presents itself when you first launch the program. I got a lot out of creating a fairly small test catalog and doing a lot of exploration of C1 capabilities: sliders, presets (still more work to do there), the various tools. Sasha's C1 book then fleshed out some really useful details. And I took notes along the way (incorporated in my composite PDF and a separate document). Being a former engineer and tech kind of guy, I enjoy exploratory work like this and just deal with the frustrations of not having good documentation. And also keep in mind that "good documentation" seems to rapidly be becoming a thing of the past. Gosh: I'm trying to learn Affinity Photo and all of their "documentation" consists of a huge list of video tutorials with virtually no written documentation of any kind. At least we can download the C1 v8 PDF and read a lot of Phase One's online materials...

    Abbott
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  • Kirby Krieger
    Hi Abbot,

    Thank you for the full, considered, and helpful reply 😊 . I understand and support your decision to not make your (and others) work public in this way. Tracing my own path through the same fields won't take too long, and has the benefit of teaching me the geography and the plant and animal life I am likely to encounter both in the fields surrounding the Castle of Mastery and in the courtyards and terraces within.

    The shift from "good documentation" — which can be well-defined, if not quantified — to simple "Do A➞B➞C➞D" videos is something I, too, decry. It seems the goal today is to enable the successful completion of a process, which must never be confused with teaching. I'm here to learn, and disappointed that Phase One provides no well-marked network of paths nor a detailed map. With the resources you've mentioned — filtered through your own attempts to master the program — I feel ready with boots and a sun-hat. But shame on Phase One for forcing new users to start with skinned knees and fistfuls of chaff.

    Thank you again.

    —Kirby.
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  • Kirby Krieger
    [quote="Nature Isme" wrote:
    At this point, other than DAM performance issues and wishing for better print presets, I'm feeling pretty comfortable with C1 because of the resources C1's put online.


    I'm moving some (very very) large databases into C1Pro9. Can you tell me what are, or point me to discussions of, the "DAM issues"?

    Thanks!
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  • Permanently deleted user
    Just cruise through this forum. You'll find posts about "performance", "catalog performance" and some lingering keyword questions. Personal observation: it seems that a number of the "issues" are caused by not reading the documentation and/or not understanding the program. The Image Professor's Blog and David Grover's excellent webinars have had answers to questions about keywording, organizing and similar topics.

    There are also some useful threads on DPReview's Mac Talk forum and Fred Miranda's post-processing forum. One of the biggest criticisms, which I too share, is that catalog performance slows WAY WAY down as the image count grows beyond several thousand images. There's a lot of discussion of this forum under the "C1 9.1.1 released" thread.

    I'm still using C1 primarily for Raw processing and the biggest catalog I've created so far is just under 4000 images (I still use Aperture for DAM). In addition to the catalog opening slowly (but tolerable), I notice widely varying times to display folder contents when I change folders, and I assume this is related to the same SQLite design strategy that seems responsible for overall DAM slowness.

    From my perspective, C1 fixed the most important DAM issues—keywording, sorting folders and so on—in 9.1.1. The lingering issue that keeps me from switching totally to C1 is performance of large catalogs. Many seem to work around this by splitting their image collections into multiple catalogs, such as by event, year, or subject. But for me, that defeats the purpose of having a DAM—I want a unified library and am hoping that Phase One's able to overcome their catalog performance issues.
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  • Kirby Krieger
    Sorry to hear all that. The demise of Aperture has already cost me well over 200 hours in work-arounds and lost productivity, and I still haven't moved my Libraries permanently. (Fwiw, I started w. Ap3, thought it brilliant, became Apple Aperture certified, spend a good deal of time helping others on the Apple Aperture Discussion Group, and committed all of my photo-based work to it. I'm still running OS 10.10.5, and will continue until I've fully ported my Aperture Libraries, the largest of which holds over 1,000,000 Images. I have others that are only in the 50-100,000 range.) I'll check out the threads you mention.

    What is your strategy going forward? Hope that the DAM performance becomes tolerable and port everything into C1P? Keep running Aperture until ... ? (There is, imho, no excuse for performance issues with databases on desktop/laptops today. The industry has several hundred thousand engineering hours invested in this kind of thing, and has been solving it for years.) I've already had scares where Aperture wasn't working correctly that made me realized how precarious the position of using superannuated software is.

    As for understanding C1P ... er, {cough} User Manual {cough}. But user ignorance has been a problem since that first Apple (no, That One).

    Thanks yet again for sharing your knowledge.
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  • Permanently deleted user
    My plan going forward includes a a lot of hope and confidence in the C1 team.

    I plan to continue using Aperture for DAM until C1's database performance improves to at least be comparable to Lightroom. My belief/expectation is that Aperture will continue working for a long time, and when it breaks, I expect that it's going to be the processing side, not the database/DAM. Right now Aperture, iPhoto and Photos all depend on OS X's built-in Raw engine. Eventually I expect that Apple's going to do something at the OS level that will that engine incompatible with Aperture and iPhoto while retaining compatibility with Photos or whatever Apple decides to do in the future. But the database is SQLlite, so I think it's going to be fine for a while.

    C1's processing is stellar, and far more powerful than Aperture's, so I'm happy to let Aperture and C1 access the same set of folders for their respective referenced libraries. It's a little awkward having to move between the two libraries (search for images in Aperture and then find the ones I want in C1), but I don't process very large jobs, so the added inconvenience is manageable for now.

    Another option I've looked into and really like is apHUB, but at this point I'm holding out hope for a relatively soon fix to C1's DAM. apHUB's got a nice concept, but a little of the functionality (such as setting preferences and subtleties of interaction with C1) are awkward.

    So bottom line for me: Aperture + C1 for now and hoping that C1 gets it's DAM section together either for v9 (I think this is not likely) or at the latest, v10. Rewriting their database is probably going to be a lot of work.

    Good luck! I know that a lot of former Aperture users are struggling as we are, but C1 seems to listen quite a bit better than some other vendors...
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  • EnderWiggins
    [quote="Kirby Krieger" wrote:
    I'm moving some (very very) large databases into C1Pro9. Can you tell me what are, or point me to discussions of, the "DAM issues"?

    Hi Kirby,

    from your wording I assume that you currently have multiple Aperture databases running parallel instead of all images in one. Since Aperture was scaling actually quite nicely (and C1P does not), I would at least suggest to keep it that way (separate catalogs by whatever measure) since you seem to have had no problems with this approach in the past.

    If you plan to migrate your Aperture libraries to C1 catalogs, you should a) move everything to referenced beforehand using the relocate masters tool in Aperture and MOST IMPORTANT b) use the Aperture Importer of C1P only for small chunks at once, never for a full library in one go. The Importer is very buggy when the library to migrate is above a certain size. Don't ask me what the treshold is, but my Aperture library was about 300 gigs and I split it up into ca. 5 smaller libraries, which I then imported one by one without any issues (my first try ended up in a mess, metadata missing, weird color tags appearing etc.).

    As for documentation I highly recommend picking up Sasha Ernis book from Rocky Nook Publishing. That's as close as you will get in terms of a written manual. In all fairness, Apple also had no decent manual anymore for the later versions of Aperture, but made up for it with an excellent online manual over at . (If anybody from Phase One is reading these lines, just go through this to have a look how much ground you still have to cover in terms of metadata management, stacking, full screen mode etc. 😲 )
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  • pjglad
    I submitted a support request in December and was told that a PDF version would be available after the first of the year.
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  • Kirby Krieger
    Hi Ender — thanks for the time-saving warnings and the information.

    [quote="EnderWiggins" wrote:
    I assume that you currently have multiple Aperture databases running parallel instead of all images in one.


    I have several distinct databases. I always recommended for most users to make one Library for each photographer unless there is a need to combine _those_ databases. "Need", in this case, is a useable benefit from grouping Images. Since Images are grouped by filtering, and Aperture filters each Library separately, it makes sense to put as many Images in a Library as one would want to have grouped. Aperture was, imho, brilliantly engineered to scale larger. I tested a million-Image database before committing important data and time to such a database; Aperture handled the size well. As you say, Aperture scales quite nicely. That's my experience as well.

    My small databases have only a few hundred Images. My largest has a million. Most of them have c. 50,000. The images vary by pixel dimensions, bit-depth, file size and file format.

    Since we have now crossed over the thin boundary of this thread — but have moved to the heart of the questions _I_ have — I will start a new thread on best practice for porting Aperture databases to C1Pro9.

    Returning to our stitching here — by any measure, the Aperture on-line manual was very good. I printed it, read it, and still refer to my highlighted copy. It was current up to version 3.1, which is the highest "full number" version Apple released. Although it wasn't amended to match all the changes in the following minor upgrades, it did cover many of them.

    Is the C1Pro9 on-line help complete and up-to-date? Is there any way to save it for off-line study and annotation? Can it be printed?
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  • Kirby Krieger
    [quote="Nature Isme" wrote:
    Another option I've looked into and really like is apHUB, but at this point I'm holding out hope for a relatively soon fix to C1's DAM. apHUB's got a nice concept, but a little of the functionality (such as setting preferences and subtleties of interaction with C1) are awkward.


    Thanks for letting me know about apHUB. It looks to be an excellent solution, but to the wrong problem (from where I sit). It provides a workflow solution for users who want to continue to use Aperture and still have access to more-recent editors (and perhaps RAW converters — I don't know). That's not me. I want to port my Aperture databases into a format that will usable for a decade or more. If Aperture were still supported, I'd use apHUB all day long. But Aperture is now a defunct program. IME, sticking with defunct programs and OS's is not worth the effort required for more than a year or so.
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