Live Editing Sessions - Capture One 22 Launch - 9th December 2021 (Panoramic Stitching, HDR, Rotate)

In my first entry back online for a few weeks, we pick up the brand new release of Capture One 22 and put it through its paces. For those wondering, aside from Canon tethering and performance improvements, here’s my view on the three main new tools:

1) Auto-Rotate.
Don’t confuse with auto-keystone, this is a very different thing.
While AI-based, it tends to be confused sometimes with vertical lines, prioritising those over obvious horizons.
Where the rotation is purely around the horizon level, sometimes manual is still a safer bet - but the clear advantage here is it can deliver a different result to each of a much bigger batch as a selection.

2) Pano Stitching.
For those looking for a quick hand-held stitch, the results are surprisingly good.
The output of the panorama as a DNG raw is the killer app here - retaining full editing capabilities.
Don’t over-shoot the sources (too many frames, too much overlap, causes issues with all stitching software).
Overall, the more care taken to getting good input content, the better the end result (especially with nodal rails, etc).
Certain projections (panini) are better for architecture than others (spherical), but take longer to process. Experiment with them all as they’re cached once generated.
De-ghosting would be helpful, saving potential "heals" after the stitch and the inevitable hunt to find any joins.
I believe this has some work to go with it, but that’s likely the intention - for now, it does 90% of scenarios pretty well.

3) HDR Merge.
My least favourite (mostly as a style, not the tool itself).
It depends on what camera you’re coming from, but if you can already shoot 15, 16, 18 stops of dynamic range (as we can on a Phase One IQ4), you’ll often find a more natural result using the (very good) HDR sliders on a single exposure.
The lack of ghost removal / fusion settings is a challenge - as it’s possible to see artefacts in certain (mainly moving) situations - but then HDR isn’t great on moving subjects anyway.
Auto-Adjust delivers quite a cartoony-output as a finished result, given the slider manipulation that’s done for you. Some may like that, I think it looks too "typical HDR".
Auto-Align is great if you have any movement between the frames. If you’re steady on a tripod, however, disable this.
The lack of parameter setting will be a challenge for many "core HDR lovers", but to me, I still haven’t seen a "real"-looking HDR shot of a landscape anyway, so I’d prefer to stick to a single frame set of adjustments.
For commercial work (hotel rooms) with huge spans of DR, this will be a great addition to a workflow (especially, again, as the output is a fully editable RAW DNG). Just be careful nothing moves…


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Join us live, for an hour of interactive raw editing with your own photographs and images in the brand new release of Capture One Pro - version 22.

We’ll be covering the brand new Panoramic Stitching function, along with HDR Blending and Auto-Rotate in our session, using a mix of sample images and your own photographs to see what the new version can do.



We recommend requesting the HD option in Chrome via YouTube for full 1440p screen captures.
A trimmed replay will be available in our Facebook Group and YouTube channel following the live stream. (But give those systems a couple of hours to publish the trimmed version!)

To submit your image for a future session, head to https://www.paulreiffer.com/workshops/live-online-sessions/ for more info.

Recorded using Capture One Pro 22 (15.0) on an Apple Mac Pro 16-core Xeon running Monterey with 192GB memory, 2x Radeon Pro Vega II Graphics cards and 4TB SSD.

And don’t forget, the discussion continues on our Behind The Scenes Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/PaulReifferLive/

00:00 Intro
02:48 What’s New in 22
10:01 AI Auto-Rotate
13:22 Issues with Auto-Rotate
16:30 Panorama Stitching
21:30 Projection Types
26:00 Example Projection Types (Why Panini Can Help)
29:46 The Timer Lies!
32:08 Pano Stitching HDR Output
34:31 Multi-Row Pano Stitch from Drone
38:33 HDR Merge (Intro)
41:50 Starting the HDR Tool (Auto Adjust / Align Choice)
45:30 The Importance of Inspecting at 100%
48:48 User Sent-In Samples of Pano Stitching
51:10 Why Image Order Doesn’t Matter
55:35 Get Involved by Suggesting Developments