A Cool Capture One Feature You May Not Be Aware Of - Working With Offline Images
As I’ve recently started using my Laptop as my full time computer for everyday tasks, I recently came to appreciate a feature of Capture One, that not many people may be aware of. I knew about this feature, and I’ve briefly mentioned it before, but it’s only in the past few months that I came to really appreciate it. If you’re working on a catalogue, and your originals are stored on an external drive, you can disconnect that drive and continue to work off the previews.
At first this might not sound like that big a deal. After all, Lightroom has a similar feature with its “smart preview” function. However, you have to explicitly choose to generate smart previews in Lightroom. In Capture One it works with all previews, so you don’t have to remember to explicitly create them. You can even recover clipped highlights, and export images from the previews. It’s almost as if the originals are still attached. Apparently there are some tools that you can’t use (such as Luma masking) and obviously you are limited to the size of your previews, but Capture One’s previews can be of a higher resolution that Lightroom Classic’s smart previews. It is remarkably flexible.
There are of course some downsides. For a start you have to have your catalogue stored on your internal drive with your images stored on an external storage solution for this to work. This doesn’t really work well with sessions stored on an external drive (as far as I know) because the previews are generally stored in the session folder. Also, you can’t have your catalogue stored on an external drive, because previews are stored in the catalogue file.
Exporting an offline image in Capture One
Capture One’s previews are quite large, and do take longer to generate than Lightroom’s standard previews (but about the same or faster than smart previews) but this is the advantage you get. While this is something you probably won’t need to do 99% of the time, you may come across a situation where you have your laptop and need to get a photo, but you don’t have the external drive with you. In this case you can still export an image from Capture One without having to reconnect the drive first. It may be a bit more compressed but if it’s a job critical situation it will be better than nothing.
I was recently in a situation where I was away from my office with just my laptop, and I didn’t have my external drive on which some of my photos were stored. I needed to send a photo to a client for approval, and I was surprised when I was able to carry on as if the original was still attached. I was even able to preform a quick adjustment on the photo. The exported photo was just for approval, so compression wasn’t an issue but to be honest I couldn’t tell the difference anyway. I was really impressed.
As I said earlier, depending on your workflow, it might not be a situation you come across that often, but when you do it can be a lifesaver.
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