Improve Capture One

Request a new feature, or support for a camera/lens that you would like to use in Capture One.

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Status Awaiting review
Workspace Feature requests
Categories Capture One Pro
Created by Class A
Created on Apr 3, 2024

RELATED IDEAS

Capture current editing/image state for "Before" view

The current "Before/After" implementation is rather useless for judging subtle edits that follow a series of stronger edits. Since the "Before" view is fixed to the initial state of the image, too many (strong) changes tend to drown the latest (subtle) edits one applied. The idea is to isolate recent editing operations so that they become observable, when compared to a recent image state.

It would therefore be good if one could capture the current editing state, i.e., associate the "Before" view to the current image state, then apply some adjustment(s), and finally do the "Before/After" comparison.

This would help with all my image editing.

It would also help Capture One to demonstrate the effects of certain editing techniques, e.g., using the color editor in combination with the skin tone editor, in C1 webinars. Current attempts to use "Before/After" comparisons to that effect are typically marred by previous editing operations (white balance, curves, etc.) being removed as well in the "before" view, thus making it next to impossible to judge the effect of some recent editing steps that are meant to work together.

Current workaround

There are two workarounds: a) one can undo the last adjustment, and b) one can temporarily deactivate a tool, but these is a very poor workarounds for several reasons:

  1. "Undo" only affects the very last editing step. I typically don't want to see what my very last tweak to a tool's parameters achieves, but rather what the effect of using the entire tool is and/or the effect after having made several changes to the tool parameters. Due to the latter scenario, temporarily deactivating a tool is not always a solution.

  2. One often tries to achieve a certain effect by combining several tools, e.g., a cloning operation, with some blurring, and burning, or similar. One cannot simultaneously deactivate several tools at once (let alone partially), so a significant number of "undo" (or tool deactivation) steps are often required to get to the "before" state one wants to judge the implementation of the effect against. This makes it impossible to get a direct "before/after" comparison.

The best approach would be to let users pick an arbitrary stage of the editing process from an editing history (this would be more flexible and would not require the foresight to capture the "before" state before one tries to implement an effect). However since providing an editing history is much more work (and has been requested for many years to no avail), I believe the above suggestion would make it viable to obtain actually useful "Before/After" comparisons without implying the implementation of a full editing history.

P.S.: Having to create an image variant to capture a "before" state is not a good workaround either. This would require a constant management of such variants, e.g., having to delete them manually, once they are no longer needed. Also, image variants would not support a "Before/After" slider, as supported by the "Before/After" tool. If image variants were an adquate solution to the problem raised with this request, there would never have been a need for a "Before/After" tool to begin with, since all users would have had to do is to capture the unedited state with a variant once and then compare the variant to the current state whenever needed.

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