PROPER implementation of respecting in-camera aspect ratio settings

What problem do you see this solving?
I know, I know, I searched the forum and it seems this feature has been requested before (and to be honest I find it, put mildly, quite disappointing that after several years it has not been implemented yet.)

Why request it again? Because 1. it is a real deal breaker for me, maybe even making me decide to ditch C1 for an alternative, and 2. trying to manually change the aspect ratio revealed some unexpected C1 behaviour.

[side note: I've been using C1 for years now, latest version was C1 22, perpetual license (I'll never subscribe to software!), on iMac 27" running MacOS Catalina, and used it for processing my images from various MFT cameras (latest being the Panasonic G9, if I forget about my G100 that, oh shame, gets no RAW support even though cameras like a TZ series or Olympus Tough TG7 do). It ran smooth, stable and more than fast enough. But then I decided to finally upgrade to/complement with full frame (S5II). And as RAW support is coupled with C1 versions, this meant upgrading to C1 23 even though I am not interested in any of the additions it brought compared to C1 22. But this also meant I had to upgrade my MacOS, which in turn meant I had to upgrade my computer cause it could not upgrade past Catalina. The result? Now running Sonoma on a brand new Mac Mini M2 Pro, only to discover C1 is missing some basic functionality (and apparently has been missing for years) that is standard in MacOS (even the quick look function respects the in-camera aspect ratios) and even cheap apps like the simple but brilliant and extremely well supported file viewer/asset manager ApolloOne. And if/when this feature finally gets implemented it probably means it is treated as new functionality for which I as a perpetual license user will have to buy an expensive upgrade. That's really stretching customer loyalty to the breaking point... ]

When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool?

This is bugging me literally EVERY TIME I use C1. I shoot 4x3 and occasionally 16x9, no other aspect ratios. I recently upgraded from MFT to full frame (Panasonic S5II). Keep wanting to shoot in 4x3 or 16x9? No problem, just change the aspect ratio in camera.

Eh, that would be nice, if only C1 respected the in-camera aspect ratio settings. But it doesn't. So now I have to manually crop literally EVERY photo I take. And that is not so easy as it seems: read on.

Are you using any workarounds or other solutions to achieve your goals in Capture One?
OK, so I just have to use the crop tool to get my images in 4X3 or 16x9 aspect ratio. Easy, right? Just change the ratio from 'Original' to '4x3' (or occasionally 16x9) and you're done.

Well, not really. The camera's sensor is larger than the nominal image size. These pixels are normally not shown and maybe used when applying lens correction profiles or something like that. Using lens correction profiles corrects distortion, but the resulting image is smaller than the nominal image size: if you tell C1 to apply lens correction profiles, the image shown is smaller than the max resolution of the camera's sensor. Great. But how many or how few pixels get cropped this way depends on the lens used, and, if it's a zoom, on the focal length used. This means that in practice there is a wide variety in image sizes.

So, let's assume I took some photos with my S5II (sensor size 6000 x 4000 with some extra unused pixels) with a 28-70 mm standard zoom and imported them in C1. C1 respects the camera/lens profile crop and shows various images in smaller sizes.

An image taken at 70 mm gets distortion corrected and cropped to 5717 x 3811. If I switch the ratio of the crop tool from 'Original' to '4x3' this is correctly changed into 5082 x 3811. (Strangely enough, if I switch the ratio back to Original it crops to 5390 x 3593. To get my original full image back I really need to completely reset the crop tool, but let's forget about this quirk). 

Let's now look at an image taken at 28 mm. This gets distortion corrected and cropped to 6000 x 4000, the max image size my camera can output. Switching the aspect ratio of the crop tool to 4x3 you would expect the image to become 5328 x 4000 (like the image size that is the result of the in-camera aspect ratio setting and mentioned in the Exif-data). Only, it doesn't. The result is an image size of 5510 x 4132 (!).

Unless someone knows a secret trick, to get my original composition I need to manually set the crop size to 5328 x 4000 and then make sure that I position the crop exactly in the center of the image.

I read that some users make use of scripts that crop images to different aspect ratios. How does this work? Do these scripts read the in-camera set image size from the Exif information? Or do they just change the ratio of the crop tool? If the latter, then how do these scripts correctly change the crop when the image sizes differ so much, depending on the lens used? How do they avoid setting the crop size beyond the normal max image size as happens when I manually change the crop ratio? And all this because of some missing basic functionality?

Are you happy to be contacted further about this suggestion or request?
Yes