Expose Color Editor Settings in the AppleScript dictionary and API

What problem do you see this solving?

Capture One provides AppleScript integration, which enables Loupedeck to integrate their knob-and-button device with it. This works well to enable Loupedeck users to control many Capture One features more quickly than using a mouse, the menus, and the sliders.It’s a great workflow improvement for photographers.

Loupedeck sells several models; here I am discussing the Loupedeck+ product. It has 8 scroll wheels which (in theory) can be used along with Hue, Saturation, and Luminance buttons to adjust these factors on one color at a time. In theory these would interface to Capture One’s Color Editor > Basic tool; the colors of the LD+ scrollers and the buttons map perfectly. In practice, this fails because Capture One does not expose the Color Editor properties in AppleScript as it does with other adjustment tools.

Capture One’s AppleScript dictionary lists a Property named color editor settings of the type color editor options, which says it “Encapsulates all settings available in the Color Editor tool”. That Class appears to contain an undocumented structure that neither the Loupedeck company nor users have been able to code to, as the dictionary contains a description but no child Properties.

Loupedeck technical support understands the issue, but they are unable to solve it because the API is not open on the Capture One side. As a work-around, Loupedeck maps the scrollers and H/S/L buttons to Capture One’s Color Balance tool. Because that tool is based on Shadow/Midtone/Highlight instead of colors, the mapping of color scrollers to the Color Balance tool is not intuitive (i.e. awful).

This situation has been discussed in Capture One’s forums for about four years. See the article https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005072337

Adobe Lightroom Classic apparently exposes its Color Mixer controls in its API, because Loupedeck has successfully mapped these 8 color scrollers and the H/S/L buttons to it. So it can be done. The use of Loupedeck+ with Lightroom Classic is far better in this respect than its use with Capture One.

Are there enough Loupedeck users to justify use of Capture One’s resources to expand the AppleScript API to expose the internals of the color editor options Class? Maybe not, but Loupedeck is not the only product that is prevented from interfacing in this way. Along with other users, I urge Capture One to open this aspect of the API and enable products to interface to the Color Editor. This would remove a minor competitive disadvantage between Capture One and Lightroom Classic.

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

As a prospective buyer of Capture One, I was quite disappointed to find that the use of Loupedeck+ with it is rather limited. Will this prevent me from licensing Capture One? Probably not, But it will always be a point of irritation: this could be so much better if…