Photoshop Layering and Capture One

[David Eichler]

As I understand it, with Capture One, it is not possible to open multiple exposures as stacked, aligned layers in a single Photoshop file, a feature which Lightroom offers and I find very useful. This is one characteristic of Capture One that would keep me from considering it as my primary RAW processor.

[Doug Peterson]

As I understand it, with Capture One, it is not possible to open multiple exposures as stacked, aligned layers in a single Photoshop file, a feature which Lightroom offers and I find very useful. This is one characteristic of Capture One that would keep me from considering it as my primary RAW processor.

You're correct. Part of that comes from their heritage as a digital back company. Phase One backs have so much dynamic range that its rare/unusual (though of course not impossible) to need to stack exposures for a given scene.

Still it's a useful feature!

I'd suggest starting a support case at phaseone.com to log your feature request, as that is where you can be assured your request is read, recorded, and added to the list of feature requests (or in this case, a tick mark added in a feature request previously requested by others).

[David Eichler]

You're correct. Part of that comes from their heritage as a digital back company. Phase One backs have so much dynamic range that its rare/unusual (though of course not impossible) to need to stack exposures for a given scene.

Still it's a useful feature!

I'd suggest starting a support case at phaseone.com to log your feature request, as that is where you can be assured your request is read, recorded, and added to the list of feature requests (or in this case, a tick mark added in a feature request previously requested by others).

Thank you, Jim. Perhaps I will do that.

However, your implication that the only real need for compositing relates to dynamic range is misleading. There are many other reasons to composite multiple exposures where you need exact registration. Furthermore, even with the relatively wide range of many digital backs, there are still plenty of scenes that will substantially exceed the capabilities of those backs to render them satisfactorily in a single exposure, if the goal is to retain substantial detail in the highlights and shadows.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

However, your implication that the only real need for compositing relates to dynamic range is misleading. There are many other reasons to composite multiple exposures where you need exact registration.

Hi David,

I agree, there is a number of other applications for layering multiple images, and they might be relatively (and I know that things may be more complex than meets the eye) easy to implement.

One can e.g. think of (averaged) Darkframe subtraction for long exposures, which is relatively easy to implement because registration is a given. One can also think of averaging, like in Median averaging to remove moving subjects from a stationary scene, or multiple exposure averaging for noise reduction (although exposure stacking is more efficient but not always feasible due to shutterspeed limitations), or super-resolution enhancing drizzling (or support for multi-shot sensors).

One of the hurdles is (sub-pixel) registration accuracy, so it's more involved than just layering some images. But the fact that (as I understand it) the raw data is kept Raw quite long in the processing pipeline, in linear gamma space, opens up a lot of possibilities, also for adding real deconvolution sharpening layers which can be applied locally.

Cheers,
Bart