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Author Topic: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving  (Read 13159 times)

Scott Hargis

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C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« on: April 15, 2012, 09:29:12 pm »

I'm transitioning to C1 as a tethered shooting solution, and loving it so far. But - I'm pretty deeply invested in my Lightroom archiving system, and I'd like to keep my RAW files in LR. But I can't seem to get them imported WITH Capture 1 adjustments. What's the best way to deal with this? Most of my "final" files make a round-trip through photoshop, and so the master file is a TIF, which LR can handle easily. But some of my images are "done" with RAW adjustments, and I need to be able to easily open them and export deliverables. As I understand it, C1 will not include adjustments in a DNG export, which I find pretty dumb.

So: is it just a matter of figuring out where the sidecar file is so I can get the metadata into Lightroom? Or am I missing something really fundamental here?

Schewe

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #1 on: April 16, 2012, 01:54:07 am »

...But I can't seem to get them imported WITH Capture 1 adjustments. What's the best way to deal with this?

You can't...give it up. You can use C1 to capture the images and control F-stop & shutter speed (with P1 or Mamiya cameras) but nothing you do in C1 to "adjust" the image will mean ANYTHING to LR/ACR. You need to give that up entirely. C1 adjustments have no meaning to ACR/LR adjustments. Never have and likely never will. Apples and Oranges. I use C1 to control my Phase Once camera but all adjustments are done in LR.
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Doug Peterson

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #2 on: April 16, 2012, 08:01:59 am »

I think the DNG marketing has pulled you in! That marketing (or perhaps less nefariously the perception of that marketing) has made supporting DNG (the container format), and supporting Adobe Camera Raw Adjustments seem like the same thing.

The issue here is not at all the DNG format. DNG is just a container. If you open a raw file in ACR, adjust some sliders, and export a DNG then ACR will put a list of those adjustments in the DNG container along with the raw file. When someone else opens that DNG in ACR it will opens the raw file inside and sets its sliders according to the list of adjustments. But it sees them because the adjustment list was placed in the container, not because the container is a DNG. You can also use ACR, convert to a DNG container and use a sidecar of the adjustments. Convenient!

If ACR opened a DNG and and saw a list of C1 settings it wouldn't know what to do with them. So to do what you're asking C1 would have to translate settings made in C1 to equivalent settings in ACR.

Unfortunately "translating" and "equivalent" are competing concepts. Translating from one raw processing engine to another is like translating from one language to another. You can get good results by hand (just as you grade first in C1, then grade later by hand in LR to match it). But if you do it by machine translation you'll get - at best - rough results. And just like language there are some ideas that would be easy to translate, some ideas that can be translated in a rough but imperfect way, and ideas that are nearly impossible to translate with any real meaning.

Let's do a thought experiment about what it would take to translate all of C1's adjustments into ACR adjustments, so that those translated adjustments could be placed inside a DNG container and read by LR.

Easily Translatable Adjustments
Some adjustments are relatively straight forward. For instance rotation and crop could be translated perfectly from C1 to ACR. 1 Degree of rotation is 1 Degree of rotation in any software.

Harder to Translate Adjustments
"push 2 stops" seems pretty specific. But open a raw file in both C1 and LR and push it two stops in each program and you'll get similar but distinctly different results. Other examples of "harder to translate" adjustments include highlight/shadow, clarity, and vignetting. All seem to have relatively clear definitions but they are different at the nitty gritty level.

Impossible to Translate Adjustments
Some tools in C1 that are just not available in ACR. How can they make the RGB Levels tool compatible with LR when LR has no such tool? How can you pass on the chromatic aberration removal when the tool in C1 makes the tool in LR look like a joke? (not important for your work, but literally hours of work saved in manual retouching for some of our product shooters)? How can you translate the setting for Single Pixel Noise Reduction (critical for landscape/architecture shooters) when there is no tool for that in LR and the handling of stuck/hot pixels is very different between the two (IMO much better in C1). How would you translate Color Editor changes - one of the most powerful reasons to use C1 - when LR's color tools are very different and lack any equivalent of the "consistency" slider (huge for quickly tweaking aberrant skin tone)? How would you translate the dust removal part of LCC in C1 (you couldn't just put patches down on each piece of dust in LR because the dust removal in C1 is more sophisticated than that). Then you have the masking/layering which is quite different in both programs.

Basic Look - Different Even Before Adjustment
When you open a raw file in both C1 and LR you'll notice not even the default look is the same. Both programs start with the same messy raw data but every layer of math thereafter is proprietary. Intuitively you might think there is only one "true photo" contained in your raw file, but this is just not the case; the raw file is meaningless without the extensive, complicated, and proprietary math used to convert it into a pretty picture. So even the default rendering, even with a calibrated profile in each, is going to be subtly different. Like hearing two tenors sing the same song - even if you ask them to tune to each other and sing it "straight", without embellishments or adjustment - it still sounds different. Even if they wanted to neither program could match the other perfectly - it would be like Coke reverse engineering Pepsi's flavors and releasing it as "Coksi"; the math is Intellectual Property. The math is WHY you use one raw processor over another (or at least one of the primary reasons along with usability, speed, feature set, stability etc). The math is the program. So arguably the most important "adjustment" is the underlying conversion from messy raw data that takes place before you even touch a slider. This would be essentially impossible to "translate" to ACR (without processing to a TIFF or other final-image "cooked" format).

Implications
I hear this often. "Why can't I export the raw from C1 to LR and keep my adjustments?" What this misses is that the Adjustments and the Program are the same thing. The entire interface, the sliders, the math, everything, is created from the ground up. C1 is C1's Math.

Competition is good for everyone. It fosters innovation. I'm betting Adobe would have paid a lot less attention to Lens Corrections in LR4 if dXo hadn't carved out a niche with them. Nor would Adobe have bothered to improve the low frequency color noise it had in shadows of LR1/2/3 if it weren't for C1 v4 which leapfrogged them. LR4 has improvement Chromatic Aberration Removal, an area they have been behind C1 in for years (still behind C1v5 if you ask me). etc etc. LR introduced tethering late in the game and still has no where near the feature set to make tethered shooting the workflow option it is in Capture One.

Likewise I'm sure Capture One 7 will have some great new tools (or tool improvements) which leapfrog LR4. Should they wait to release those new tools only after Adobe has implemented them, to make sure that they can translate the C1 settings into Adobe settings? Or perhaps all non-Adobe raw processing developers should ask for Adobe's blessing anytime they wish to develop a new tool and then give the improvements back to Adobe to insure compatibility?

Because that's the ultimate implication. If you want universal compatibility in raw processing then you have to remove all competition and uniqueness. No competitive program can develop or improve any tool before Adobe. Adobe will do all the innovating in raw processing, and the the other companies can scramble to reverse-engineer those innovations, or buy them from Adobe, add them to their software and then match them up as closely as possible.

DNG is not the automatic universal compatibility that it's pushers would like you to believe. It is simply a known container.
« Last Edit: April 16, 2012, 08:24:28 am by Doug Peterson »
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Doug Peterson

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #3 on: April 16, 2012, 08:06:57 am »

Also, have you tried C1 as a raw processor? That is, have you tried making some basic adjustments to a raw file and comparing the results with LR? If you haven't you owe it to yourself to try it. They are both very good pieces of software and very good raw processors, but there are differences both subtle, and not to subtle, about the tools available to adjust the raw file, the quality of those tools, and the speed at which an experienced user can apply those tools in a workflow.

If the "complicated" user interface is a bit intimidating for initial use, simply select "Window > Workspace > Simplified Tethered". This will hide most of the advanced/obscure tools and present you a more streamlined interface that is easier to learn. Just know that when you're ready you can add/remove/rearrange/float/minimize any tool anywhere in the program, take advantage of a second screen, use and customize keyboard shortcuts and otherwise delve deeper into C1's power. But the "Simplified Tethered" preset workspace is a great way to get started.

Or if it's simply maintaining the catalog in LR and using other software as your processing and/or tethering engine that concerns you, there are several strategies to accomplish this used by many C1 customers. But alas that is a whole nother story and as you can tell from the above I've already spent my free time this morning on this post and my other work duties call. If I don't get out and do my morning run now then I won't have time for breakfast.

By the way we (Digital Transitions) have a Mamiya Open House in NYC this Thursday at which I'll be teaching C1. Well worth your time if you're anywhere in the area.
« Last Edit: April 16, 2012, 08:16:14 am by Doug Peterson »
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Bryan Conner

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #4 on: April 16, 2012, 08:44:37 am »

Very thought provoking and interesting posts Doug.  Thanks for sharing.  I use both C1 and ACR 6.7 for my processing.  I agree that both are super pieces of software.  Each has the capability of producing wonderful, but different appearing images.  I find myself sometimes preferring the look of C1's output over the output I can achieve from ACR....and vice versa.  It depends on the image.

I really like your comparison of the two different programs to different languages and the translation of the languages.
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Scott Hargis

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #5 on: April 16, 2012, 10:26:07 am »

OK, thanks for the replies, everyone. Doug, I appreciate the extended answer, but I'm thinking I didn't make my question very clear....I don't care one way or another about DNG. My only interest is in getting my RAW files archived in Lightroom, with a preview that comes close to reality.
I've been doing my RAW adjustments in C1, and while I find it pretty clunky, and lacking in some areas, it's really cool in other areas.

Formerly, I did everything, including tethering, in LR. I bought C1 while it was on sale (half off) a few weeks ago, simply because I'd heard so much about it. Now I'm questioning whether I should just bag it and go back to LR in the field. I sometimes do white balance and cropping and even some minor toning while in the field with my client, and the cropping especially is very precise, so it'd be nice if I didn't have to re-create that later in LR.

So -- to sum up, it sounds like if I want to stick with C1, I'll be either ignoring all the RAW adjustment capabilities and just performing the capture....*OR*....I'll be doing RAW adjustments in C1 and then baking them all into a TIF before moving forward in my workflow. But the workflow is going to include cataloging in LR....In that case, is there a simple way for me to catalog the RAW file in Lightroom, along with whatever sidecar C1 uses to hold the metadata? Even if it won't display with adjustments? I just want to be able to find the damn thing and get it back into C1 if I want to re-visit the file later on.

Thanks again for the help, folks!

john beardsworth

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #6 on: April 16, 2012, 10:36:22 am »

The difficulty of translating raw settings is a bit of a distraction. It is perfectly possible for C1 to add its own adjusted preview to a DNG and save editing instructions there too. Lightroom would then be able to display the C1-adjusted results using the preview, if only Adobe wanted LR to display them. As an example you can already adjust DNGs in LR and see the adjusted results in Aperture (and in many other programs). Sadly Adobe show no sign of exploiting embedded previews, and C1 no sign of taking advantage of DNG.
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john beardsworth

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #7 on: April 16, 2012, 10:44:07 am »

Scott

DNG is relevant here because it is, as you hinted at in your first post, potentially a mechanism for doing what you want.

To answer your last paragraph "is there a simple way for me to catalog the RAW file in Lightroom", if you only used C1 for tethered shooting, you'd just import the raw files into LR - nothing more complicated than that. You could use a watched folder, so C1 and LR would be open while you shoot and save to this folder. LR would immediately pick up the new files and they'd be available for adjustment in LR.

John
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Scott Hargis

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #8 on: April 16, 2012, 10:54:22 am »

John - got it, but what about the C1 meta?

I've got the rest of the week pretty much free, so I'll be doing a lot of experimenting, but this thread is helping me to focus my thinking. One thing I'm questioning is, how often do I *really* go back and re-visit RAW files?? Not that often....

john beardsworth

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #9 on: April 16, 2012, 11:03:57 am »

I'd have to test to see if anything entered in C1 would carry across. I don't think so - I suspect it just stores everything in a subfolder which it builds in the folder with the images. With my watched folder approach you'd be using C1's tethering features but doing all the work in LR.
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Doug Peterson

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #10 on: April 16, 2012, 12:36:57 pm »

Metadata Syncing is in the preferences of C1. Simply turn it on and metadata will sync to a sidecar file where LR can pick it up easily.

Unless you are mixing the terms "metadata" and "adjustments" (I don't think you are, but to be clear metadata would include star ratings, color tags, keywords, caption info etc, while adjustments include crop, push/pull, rotation, lens correction etc).

Doug Peterson

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #11 on: April 16, 2012, 12:40:14 pm »

The difficulty of translating raw settings is a bit of a distraction. It is perfectly possible for C1 to add its own adjusted preview to a DNG and save editing instructions there too. Lightroom would then be able to display the C1-adjusted results using the preview, if only Adobe wanted LR to display them. As an example you can already adjust DNGs in LR and see the adjusted results in Aperture (and in many other programs). Sadly Adobe show no sign of exploiting embedded previews, and C1 no sign of taking advantage of DNG.

The ability to write a with-adjustment preview to a DNG would be helpful, assuming Adobe read the embedded preview.  C1 does this with EIP format, and Media Pro (another Phase One product) has the option to read embedded Previews.

However that only enables you to view a preview with adjustments. It does not allow the user to then continue to adjust the image from that starting point. Which, for most users, makes it rather moot.

However, I agree the embedded-preview functionality would be useful if implemented broadly!

Scott Hargis

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #12 on: April 16, 2012, 12:52:12 pm »

??
It's all meta, right? That's the point of RAW - you never touch the original data, just manipulate the way it's rendered. There's metadata that affects the rendering, metadata that contains the EXIF, metadata with copyright/keywords etc. etc.

Scott Hargis

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #13 on: April 16, 2012, 12:56:44 pm »

The ability to write a with-adjustment preview to a DNG would be helpful...
However that only enables you to view a preview with adjustments. It does not allow the user to then continue to adjust the image from that starting point. Which, for most users, makes it rather moot.

Not moot at all! If I could have a DNG that contained C1 adjustment data, and a universal preview, then it could be archived in my Lightroom catalog in a useful way. I could "see" the file, and I could flag it in a way that tells me it's a "C1 DNG", so I'd know how to open it if I needed to. I don't need to be able to cross over to ACR for adjustments - I just need to be able to see the file properly and have it archived in my LR catalog.

But -- this is a tangent, since it sounds like it's not the current reality.

Doug Peterson

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #14 on: April 16, 2012, 01:10:45 pm »

Not moot at all! If I could have a DNG that contained C1 adjustment data, and a universal preview, then it could be archived in my Lightroom catalog in a useful way. I could "see" the file, and I could flag it in a way that tells me it's a "C1 DNG", so I'd know how to open it if I needed to. I don't need to be able to cross over to ACR for adjustments - I just need to be able to see the file properly and have it archived in my LR catalog.

But -- this is a tangent, since it sounds like it's not the current reality.

You can always process a QuickProof JPG (takes about 1 sec per raw file) and import the raws+JPGs as an "add" in LR (rather than "move" or "copy"). You'd see an unadjusted raw file and a C1 adjusted JPG and use the plugin mentioned here to quickly re-open any raw file in C1. Since you've "added" rather than "moved" the file C1 will still see all it's adjustments (which are held in the folder the raws are in, within a subfolder called "Capture One / Settings"). If you don't want to see two versions of every file in LR you can always do a quickfilter on filetype.

I'll also pass on your feature request for DNG preview-embedding in C1. Though, as mentioned above, LR would have to incorporate that on their end as well. Version 7 of C1 is around the corner (don't ask me how far; I don't know for sure and I couldn't tell you if I did!) with many new features. Though, to be frank, DNG has never been a high priority at Phase One because some of it's technical limitations.

Doug Peterson

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #15 on: April 16, 2012, 01:12:22 pm »

??
It's all meta, right? That's the point of RAW - you never touch the original data, just manipulate the way it's rendered. There's metadata that affects the rendering, metadata that contains the EXIF, metadata with copyright/keywords etc. etc.

I suppose it's just semantics. I define Metadata and Adjustments as I did in my previous post (caption/keywords/ratings vs. exposure/contrast/corrections). But for sure you could refer to both as "meta". I'm not disagreeing - just clarifying my use of the terms.

Scott Hargis

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #16 on: April 16, 2012, 02:39:15 pm »

Cool. This gives me lots to think about. Thanks very much, Doug and everyone.

mistybreeze

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #17 on: April 17, 2012, 09:42:28 am »

Competition is good for everyone.
I agree that competition is good. When I used film, I used a Black & White lab that was not owned or had any relationship to my favorite color lab.

Now that digital photographers have more control, we're pretty much forced to be our own lab. Learning two software programs and archiving two process versions is a royal pain in the ass.

Adobe's Lightroom is a beautifully designed user-interface. I wish Capture One had the equivalent visual impact and flexibility.

I find Lightroom to be incredibly stable. It's not perfect, but no software is. I have tons of memory and Scratch Disk, and I've yet to endure a Lightroom crash. I can't say the same for C1.

Some of C1's tools are more pro-centered, and I love that. But many jobs do not have a budget for a medium format camera, or there is no post-production requirement. And if I need to shoot 35mm and need lens distortion correction, I must process in Lightroom.

Tethered shooting has always been the primary reason to use C1. Pros really never had much choice. But so many shoots do not require a tether. I long for the day when C1 can really go head-to-head with Lightroom in all the areas that pros care about.
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BernardLanguillier

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #18 on: April 20, 2012, 08:45:17 am »

Some of C1's tools are more pro-centered, and I love that. But many jobs do not have a budget for a medium format camera, or there is no post-production requirement. And if I need to shoot 35mm and need lens distortion correction, I must process in Lightroom.

Or DxO.

Cheers,
Bernard

Ben Rubinstein

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Re: C1, RAW files, and Lightroom - help with archiving
« Reply #19 on: April 21, 2012, 03:24:32 pm »

Personally I'd kill for C1 to write XMP files with the C1 adjustments included. Keeping track of the adjustment data for backups is a pain in the neck whereas with ACR/LR the adjustments are always with the files, wherever I move them or whatever I do with them, whether I've used 'sessions' or whatever.
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