Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Capture One Q&A => Topic started by: johnvanatta on October 01, 2018, 06:04:06 pm

Title: C1 Deep Customization
Post by: johnvanatta on October 01, 2018, 06:04:06 pm
Thought I'd share some of my findings on customizing the appearance of Capture One, since there isn't a lot of information out there right now. This is all going to assume Mac OS 10.13, though some will apply to Windows with a little modification, I'm sure. Buckle up :)

First goal: Get a usable fullscreen, with no dock, for distraction free editing. What Lightroom does out of the box.

Some googling indicates that the trick is to change the Info.plist file (right click capture one application, show package contents) and add this key in:
   <key>LSUIPresentationMode</key>
   <integer>4</integer>

This makes the code signing squawk, C1 will throw an error on launch. So override that with the terminal:
sudo codesign -f -s - /Applications/Capture\ One\ 11.app/Contents/MacOS/Capture\ One\ 11

Okay, we're making progress. Next, I wanted to emulate the quick "full image view" that Lightroom has. One keypress, and just the image, with no distractions. I consider the existing fullscreen inadequate for several reasons. First, it uses the Mac's execrable fullscreen API, with a laggy animation, and breaking of "command-h to hide app". And there are two ugly triangles, which I find distracting. It also doesn't play well with the trick above, the dock will reappear temporarily when fullscreen is toggled. Frustrating.

After trying unsuccessfully to overcome those issues, I tried a different approach, by turning off every tool palette I could and creating a workspace like that.

(https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=126961.0;attach=185096;image)

A decent start. But the catalog name and icon are annoying. Luckily that can be fixed--just right click on the catalog in the finder, show contents, and change the icon of the .cocatalog file. I took a screenshot inside capture one, copied a swatch of the dark gray color, and pasted it into the icon to get it to match exactly. Then I renamed the catalog to "   ", yes, that's three spaces. C1 won't let you do that from the GUI but it works fine, and I'm only ever going to have one primary catalog.

Now we've got something pretty clean:

(https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=126961.0;attach=185094;image)

Unfortunately I don't think it'll be easy to get rid of the Mac circle buttons in the left corner, and the cursor doesn't disappear. Maybe they'll add a proper quick fullscreen like other raw editors have.

This is good for viewing, but not great for editing. I'll need to be able quickly toggle between this workspace and one with some tools enabled. C1 has pretty decent keyboard customization, but rather strangely missing is the ability to bind workspaces to keys. But it's possible using the Mac's application specific settings. There are two ways: through the GUI, System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, then define for Capture One app specifically. Just set the shortcut for the exact name of the workspace. The drawback is this only works with command-f, you can't do it with a single key. Having proper single key control requires delving deeper:

Create a small plist (they are just text files), for example custom_keys_input.plist, then add something like this. My fullscreen workspace is called "everything off", and I want to switch to it with the "f" key.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>NSUserKeyEquivalents</key>
   <dict>
      <key>editing</key>
      <string>c</string>
      <key>everything off</key>
      <string>f</string>
      <key>everything on</key>
      <string>b</string>
   </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Then load it in to wherever it is that these plists go (some sort of cached database perhaps?) with terminal:

defaults import com.phaseone.captureone11 ~/Documents/custom_keys_input.plist


Voila! For bonus points, use USB Overdrive to map them to your mouse buttons.

(https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=126961.0;attach=185098;image)

Now, C1's keyboard support is decent, but it's not perfect. For some reason Undo/Redo can't be remapped through the GUI. Some others as well, but Undo/Redo were the problem children for me--far too valuable to have stuck on a two key combo. This one is pretty easy: there's a file buried inside the application bundle which just needs a bit of mutability,

<bundle>/Contents/Resources/KeyboardShortcuts/ImmutableKeyboardShortcuts.plist
      <key>undo:</key>
      <string>w</string>

The @ in front of it by default is the code for "command".

(https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=126961.0;attach=185100;image)

Editorial: I wish productivity software designers would stop thinking in terms of "hotkeys" and start thinking in terms of "keybindings". Look at how games are controlled for inspiration.

Last call: while rooting around, I noticed that the GUI icons are stored as tiffs in <bundle>/Contents/Resources/

I think the default 'pan' cursor, the little hand, is kind of ugly, so I removed

cursor_pan.tiff
cursor_pan_grab.tiff

and replaced them by making copies of

cursor_guide_move_center.tiff

Whew! That's a lot. Now, for what I haven't gotten working:
-- I'd like to change what metadata gets displayed. Right now everything is displayed in a huge pile; I'd love to just have a quick info palette with about 8 items. The fact that there isn't a plist of this somewhere obvious makes me suspect the display code on this looks something like:

for (item in metadata_dictionary):
  print item, \n

 :-\  >:(  :'(

-- Custom resizing of tool palettes. Having the file browser bigger would be nice.

If anyone knows a trick here, let me know!
Title: Re: C1 Deep Customization
Post by: TommyWeir on October 02, 2018, 02:30:47 am
Interesting.  I just click the green 'fullscreen' button.

Actually I usually drag the C1 windows up to form their own set of Spaces on my Mac.

I use Keyboard Maestro quite a bit with C1.  Macros for different actions, adding layers with set names etc.  If I were switching Workspaces frequently enough I'd use that to set up a keyboard shortcut. 
Title: Re: C1 Deep Customization
Post by: Kiwi Paul on October 02, 2018, 06:02:22 am
For full screen viewing I just click the "Slideshow" icon and pause the slideshow, move the mouse off screen and the panel at the bottom disappears, you can move between pictures by clicking the arrows on the control panel, pity you can't do it by pressing the keyboard arrow keys though.
Title: Re: C1 Deep Customization
Post by: johnvanatta on October 02, 2018, 08:07:05 pm
I tried fullscreen but can't get over how slow the animation to switch it in and out is--my workspace version is nearly instant. I tend to toggle this back and forth many times while editing, so I need it to be seamless.

Slideshows work reasonably for viewing one image, though again with a bit of interface lag. I can't stand switching between images with them though. So many gratuitous gimmick transitions, and no simple cut. I think another case of Apple's APIs sucking.
Title: Re: C1 Deep Customization
Post by: TommyWeir on October 03, 2018, 06:22:16 am
Perhaps fullscreen works for me given my multi-screen setup.  I have the Viewer and preferred editing tools on my main monitor and the Session or Catalog window on my side monitor.   I just Cmd+T the tools in and out on the Viewer, it's pretty quick.   One thing I do wish was that we could have a slider for the Proof Margin on the Viewer window rather than setting it in Preferences.
Title: Re: C1 Deep Customization
Post by: DougDolde on October 08, 2018, 08:32:04 pm
you gotta be kidding.
Title: Re: C1 Deep Customization
Post by: Aram Hăvărneanu on October 14, 2018, 08:31:12 am
Hmm, do you think the appearance of C1 could be changed so that it uses a white/light gray UI?