The crop tool in Capture One Pro works very well, but does not make it easy to see what crop ratio has been applied. I usually crop for standard frame sizes; 11x17, 10x8 (4x5), and 5x7 mostly. When I go back to look at an image later, I can’t always tell which frame size I cropped it for.

When you choose the crop tool while viewing an image that has been cropped, the crop dimensions, in pixels, is shown. But not the aspect ratio.

One very popular sharpening approach for digital images is the three pass sharpening technique described by Bruce Frazer and Jeff Schewe in their book Real Word Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom. Those phases are Capture Sharpening, Creative Sharpening, and Output Sharpening.

Capture Sharpening attempts to correct for the inevitable blurring that occurs in any digital capture. If there is a desire to bring attention to a particular area of the image, Creative Sharpening might be used to achieve it. Every output medium has its own particular requirements for sharpening, be that to a computer screen, or to paper. Output Sharpening optimizes the image for the media requirements and expected viewing distance.

Phase One Capture One allows for that same approach, in its own way. That way differs a bit from Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), but will achieve much the same results. If I discuss Lightroom’s sharpening, it is for all practical purposed the same as ACR’s.

I’m getting more comfortable working within Capture One Pro (C1, for short), but I still did a little work trying to see if I could continue to use Aperture for its excellent DAM features, but use C1 for adjustments. I don’t think I’m going to go that route, but I wanted to document what I learned. If not for anyone else, then for me.

There’s a plug-in for Aperture called Catapult that will allow Aperture to export an unconverted RAW file to a “drop folder” and then import edits made in another program saved to a “pick up folder.” It will even stack the edited version with the original in Aperture. And it’s easy.

You won’t be able to work with C1’s catalogs with this round-trip method, it must use sessions. And it gets a little messy to keep C1’s edits non-destructive as the C1 session gradually fills with images that have been round-tripped from Aperture. But it works.

Back in 2010 I posted a few articles about how to handle Lightroom techniques as they’d be done in Aperture. At the time, Aperture 3 had just come out, but many had already migrated to Lightroom having run out of patience waiting for a long overdue Aperture update. Sound familiar?

Now I’d like to write up a few posts as I get to know Capture One Pro better (I’ll call it C1, for brevity). So a good place to start that learning is to go back and show how those Lightroom techniques could be replicated in C1.

Before getting into that, this post is an overview, concentrating mostly on C1’s interface. Don’t look at this as a Lightroom vs. C1 thing – it’s not.