And yet another randomly occurring problem ...
My business is shooting artwork for reproduction. Following the extension of the feature to DSLRs, and a specific recommendation in Phase One's blog, I have been using the LCC tool to correct for lighting uniformity by photographing a blank white card under the same lighting conditions as the artwork. Previously I had used Robin Myers' Equalight software for the purpose, but it is very much more convenient to do this correction in Capture One as part of the RAW conversion, and it had worked faultlessly in V6.
V7 introduced major changes in the LCC process, and its operation now appears to be severely compromised, in that sometimes it will correctly generate an LCC profile and others it will not. In the latter instance, the uniformity corrections are still generated and can be clearly seen by toggling the Uniformity checkbox on and off, but the thumbnail does not show the 'LCC' tag of a successful profile and that image cannot then be applied to another image as an LCC correction.
The issue appears to be completely random; sometimes one blank image will generate a successful LCC profile while another nominally identical image in the same folder will not. The very same unsuccessful file will then sometimes work correctly at the first attempt when copied to another new, empty folder, or on another machine, or even occasionally in the original folder at another time. Equally, a previously successful file may then not work when tried again with the original RAW file copied to a new folder.
If opened in C1 v6 instead, the same files all generate a perfect LCC profile first time, with no problems whatsoever.
The files are correctly exposed for a white card under the same lighting conditions as the original artwork, i.e. to the right but with no clipping. Phase One's tech. support department suggested reducing the exposure so that the peak is in the centre of the histogram, to give the LCC tool more information to work with for a correct calculation, but this resulted in no obvious improvement; of the first three I tried with a centred histogram, none generated a corrrect LCC profile, while a further two similar images loaded into a new folder resulted in one success and one failure. Of a subsequent six images, five generated a correct LCC profile while the sixth did not. After copying the sixth (failed) file into a new folder it then generated an LCC profile on the first attempt, but would still not do so in its original folder even after a complete reset (i.e. all parameters cleared back to the original RAW file import).
Phase One claim they have no reports whatsoever that the LCC fails in Capture One 7 provided the RAW file is well exposed and histogram is placed in the centre. Again, it's not an issue of the specific software installation since the identical problem also occurs on my Win 8 laptop.
I love C1 for what I do - I've been using the pro version since v4 - and I'm otherwise mostly very happy with v7, but this issue has now been ongoing with Phase One since the end of October and is causing real disruption to my normal workflow. Just wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar or has any further insight or suggestions? The sheer randomness of the few problems I've experienced with v7.x is becoming exceptionally frustrating.