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Getting organised....

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Georg:

Several ways to look at it. The advantage of shooting to a session is the images are grouped together within a session. Once inside a session, you can have C1 create subfolders that will share the session's output, trash and move-to folders. You can also create a master Job folder, and have multiple sessions reside inside it. So a few options might be,

1) Think of a session as a shoot within a job. In your National Park shoot, this may mean your job is the park itself, while each session is a day or specific location in the park.

2) Think of the session as the whole job and then import (or shoot to) a bunch of subfolders inside the session. Here when you import, C1 offers a few different options for creating subfolders within a session, one of which is by date.

3) Or a hybrid. Park is the job, session is a specific subject or location in the park, and if these sessions span multiple days, you could import or shoot to appropriate subfolders inside each session.

Bottom line is it is very flexible depending on how you want to sort it all out, and can even move things around later. With some experience, you can merge sessions and/or subfolders, or even spin subgroups off, but this requires care and knowledge of how to find, name and move the respective sidecar data files without corrupting them.

Finally, it is also fairly easy to copy your entire structure from one drive to another. So for example, when I'm in the field, I use my laptop and a portable external drive to house my images. These are stored using master, session and subfolders as required. Since C1 stores all associated data files together, I can copy that entire group of folders to my main desktop storage system and have full, uninterrupted access. When I open C1 on the main computer, I'll have to navigate to the appropriate session folder to open it, but when I do, any original edits, image adjustments, even session output, trash and move-to items are all just the way I left them on my laptop drive. I can even set that session as one of my favorites if I want. (Not sure LR handles moving between systems very well with its library structure -- ???)

FWIW, almost all of the above are items we cover on our workshops during the C1 training modules.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
:) You guys have no idea.... LOLOL I sat here until 3AM and again scine 9AM...

Ok, here is my take after talking to phase one.

They do NOT work with my XMP sidecar files from other cameras like Olympus etc, these XMP contain all the metadata. Hence an entire asset management system approach does not really work that way with C1.

They even recommended to me not to use it for that purpose, apart from the lack of keywording. All this might come in future versions, and he thinks that certainly the XMP will be sorted, but at the moment this is no good to me.

There are other, but but to me very relevant, aspects in C1 that I can not live with on a daily basis.

Example: If I develop in C1 and I really should say I am not developing by numbers, but by visual reference, meaning I am not entering saturation +17, but move a slider and observe the picture changing.

Are you with me?

Now, in C1 this is extremly irritating and a deal breaker for me, you drag a slider and the picture blurs (this is a programming code issue) until you release the slider on a new parameter position, only then the picture is recalculated and refreshed on the screen. This is a clear :thumbdown:

Seriously, I could not look all day at blurred pictures and because of this, the whole notion of changing by slider in C1 is unsuable to me. Your mileage may vary, but I can not compromise on that part and find it very odd to say the least that this basic graphic routine handling is so bad.

In LR and you will not see this happening, the picture does not blur on changing any paramters and the slider movement is smoothly represented with no delay and certainly not constantly refreshing the graphic.

I understand now the session aspects and variants and so on. Remember? I slept on the manual. :)

But this has no comparison to a propper SQL database structure. I am not saying that LR has no gaps to fill, they certainly do, but C1 can not substitute what LR offers by a long way.

Having said that, there are very strong parts in C1 in terms of detail extraction, and while this is a very expensive exercise, I bought the pro version, mainly because of the alpha and of course phase one. Just, it is a pain in the butt to get that all integrated together with photoshop. This is what I am fighting at the moment. I think watched folders really might be the solution here, not sure yet.

Ok, after all, you need to keep in mind that I am using C1 only a few hours now, but what I found missing already or irritating in workflow, is enough to make me decide not to have C1 at the core of my work. I wish it could be only a single program, but the reality is that we have to manage more than one.

....back to fighting data.... and time for a guiness, might ease the pain. ;)
 

Frank Doorhof

New member
For what it's worth I do the following.

While shooting in the studio I'm using Leaf Capture (probably soon C1)
When I did my selection everything is copied to a fileserver.

From the fileserver everything is imported into Aperture on my photoshop Mac.
Aperture is using the database on a separate drive.
The files are stored on an external drive tower on e-SATA with 5 drives.
The files are stored by year and one drive with final results.

So when aperture would loose it's database or if I want to use something else I'm left with a nice structure on the drives.

A second tower is connected once every 2-3 days and is a mirror from the first tower.

Once every 2-3 weeks the fileserver is cleaned up, but by that time I have a good mirror backup and the files are delivered to the customer for the commercial work.

Once a year a total backup is made and this is stored outside.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Georg:

I think it is Adobe that generates the XMP sidecar adjustment files for your other camera files via LR or ACR and it is not generated by the cameras themselves -- and correct, C1 won't read XMP sidecar files, so you need to make an entirely new set of adjustments for the raw.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
Frank, yeah, sounds somewhat solid to me. Never used aperture, and I am getting too old to use new software every six months or so. ;)

Jack, yup, XMP sidecar files are not created by camera, but added for metadata.

I come to think, there is no perfect solution that can be implemented, just a perfect solution for anyones own needs, and that is highly individual. Having said that, propper backup strategies and naming conventions and seperation of files will help in either case.

Your drobo is certainly something I look into at some stage.

....back to shoveling data
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
(Not sure LR handles moving between systems very well with its library structure -- ???)
Two things about that:

1.
One feature is that you can take your entire picture catalog (1:1 previews) with you to Donegal and leave your pictures in Los Altos, say 50,000 pictures, hence the size is much smaller. While that means you can not do developing, you still can do keywording, metadata, create contacts sheets, create slide shows, and webgalleries on your flight to Donegal and when you are back home on your main maschine, synchronise it.

2.
As for synchronising your laptop, say you worked outside and shot files, worked on files on your laptop, metadata, developments etc. You export/copy then your laptop catalog, images and rendered previews to a harddrive of your choice.

On your maincoputer you open LR with your usual catalog of pictures then choose import from catalog and choose the just exported one.

A variety of options to fine tune that are available.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
Georg are you viewing at 100 percent to see changes when you are working with the sliders
:) This in deed was the first thing he asked me, but this was not the case Guy. It might be that this does not apply for smaller screens, but I tried it on my 24 Eizo and it was the same. He tried it as well, and confirmed it. The view slider was to the very left, FIT.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Re the blurring -- yes the preview blurs during the exposure and color slider adjustments, but you can still see the gross effect of the slider and it sharpens as soon as you let go of the slider. Note too that you can use the up and down arrow keys to adjust one point at a time.

Further, the preview does not blur when you are sliding the sharpening or NR sliders, only the exposure and color sliders...
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
It also takes a second or two to regenerate the correct preview. Something you have to get used too.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Hmmm, it's virtually instant on my desktop and I don't recall any inordinate preview delay on my laptop...
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
It does affects all these sliders here:

exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation, shadow, highlights, kelvin, tint, smoothness, hue rotation, saturation, lightness.

but not...

sharpening, noise, clarity and moire

Pretty sure this is a hint for the coders behind C1... if you happen to know them, you could just drop that info on their desk if you want.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
Side Rant....

Geeeze, looking since ages now how to do that in the Finder, which I thought is the "file management" of OSX.... DOH!

I dont believe it, you have to use the terminal to compare and highlight the delta between two directories.

Heck, I did that already in Norton Commander when windows was onyly a wet dream of Bill Gates. :ROTFL:
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Georg:

I hear what you're saying, and I'm sure they're on it already. But frankly I have never really been that bothered by it -- I mean I can get those sliders all properly set on the blurred preview regardless.

(In fact, having it blurred kind of removes the micro image detail from the decision and forces it more to the macro or global perspective, but I'm not going to go so far as to call it a feature!)
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
pheew... 2007 imported and now ranking.... Keywords over time.

This here is 1 star =just about made it and blue for landscapes. :D
 
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