3The Workflow Pipeline

Section 1.3 introduced the Capture One rendering pipeline and described how the software links the color and device profiles involved in the raw development process to produce human-readable images from raw image data. The workflow pipeline is based on the same principle and describes how raw image data is altered by the tools you use and the processing steps you apply.

In the course of this book, I use the term “workflow pipeline” to describe the sequence of modules, tools, and processing steps that your images pass through within Capture One. You’ll come across this term regularly in many of the following chapters.

The same way your images are passed along a chain of color profiles, Capture One puts them through a sequence of tools and tasks, from the initial import (or opening) step, all the way through to printing and archiving the results.

As you saw in chapter 1, Capture One Pro is highly configurable and can be set up to suit your individual needs and preferences. It doesn’t matter whether you work with panels or tabs, or a combination of both. The order in which you process your sessions or organize your catalogs is also irrelevant—you can add keywords before or after basic processing and batch-convert the results to black and white, or convert your images first and keyword them later as you wish. In theory, none of this makes a difference in how you work with Capture One.

Capture One enables you to work as you like, but using a structured sequence of processing steps still saves a lot of time.

However, practical experience has shown that the sequence you adopt can make working with Capture One more, but also less, practical. As mentioned in chapter 2, the hardware you use plays a role too. For example, if you do not make use of OpenCL hardware acceleration (see section 2.2), the Film Grain tool uses a lot of processing power and will slow you down unnecessarily if you apply it as the first step in the chain.

You need to question your general methodology, too. For example, it makes no sense to add multiple keywords to an entire sequence of images (see chapter 12) if you end up removing half of them from your catalog later on. If you aim to produce a sequence of monochrome images, you don’t need to correct the white point perfectly (see section 5.3), but you do need to take a close look at the histograms (see section 5.2). The list of such considerations could be extended indefinitely.

In short: Even if Capture One allows you to work as you wish, or perhaps the way you are used to working in Aperture or Lightroom, you’ll benefit from taking a close look at the sequence of steps you apply. This is where the “workflow pipeline” concept comes in.

3.1 An overview of the workflow pipeline. Processing steps and other tasks have white backgrounds; the specific tools and tabs involved are colored orange. Lens corrections occur twice because the tools involved cover two different types of task.