Heat mapping utility for common tools

[mattiaswinbladh]

A suggestion for the developers of Capture One:

I was thinking that a useful feature in Capture One would be to have access to a heat mapping utility for tracking the most commonly used tools, so that when you use the application you could see which tools you were de facto using the most and rearrange or hide the lesser or never used tools to reduce clutter and make for a cleaner, more streamlined working environment, while still preserving all the tools that you actually need in your style of editing. Perhaps there could be an auto generated workspace based on the information collected by the heat mapping utility, or perhaps just some manual way to view your usage.

I can't be 100% sure this doesn't already exist as of version 11, but I have not been able to find any information about this in any FAQ, Google et.c. Maybe there is some third party option for this function that someone knows of?

[cdc]

Seems like an unnecessary use of resources to me. Most people know what tools they use most and it doesn't take but a minute or two to set up a custom tool tab or two and workspace that works best for their workflow. Just my opinion on the matter of course.

[John Doe]

Same opinion here. Your brain should be enough to determine what tools you use most often.

[SFA]

Most often used or used for the longest time during editing activity?

If you open a tool, change a setting and then apply that in a batch to 2000 images, does that count as one use or 2000?

Many people who see this need create their own tabs - or a single tab that includes the tools they want to group as the most used - and simply keep adding tools or deleting tools from that tab until they feel that have the ones they need in a single tab or a small number of tabs depending on their preferences.

I'm not entirely sure how a heat map would help anything but I would be interested to understand what prompted the idea.


Grant

[mattiaswinbladh]

Most often used or used for the longest time during editing activity?

If you open a tool, change a setting and then apply that in a batch to 2000 images, does that count as one use or 2000?

Many people who see this need create their own tabs - or a single tab that includes the tools they want to group as the most used - and simply keep adding tools or deleting tools from that tab until they feel that have the ones they need in a single tab or a small number of tabs depending on their preferences.

I'm not entirely sure how a heat map would help anything but I would be interested to understand what prompted the idea.


Grant

Interesting question. It could be user selectable perhaps, whether you'd want it to register only by manual use or also by batch use.

I realize that there is of course an excellent function for creating and mixing your own tabs which is great, but to answer your last question, i.e. what prompted the idea, I am an amateur photographer and an amateur user of COP, so I do not use the program regularly or daily, so I like to try as many things as possible when I do work on a photo, and I'm curious about all the controls and possibilities that COP offers. Because of this I like to activate and work with as many tools as possible to see what results they produce, but this clutters up the workspace. As I use the application for a longer period of time, I assume that I will start using only the tools that I find useful for my type of photography and many of the tools will never or seldom be used, so I thought that it would be neat to just let COP filter these out for me. As you and others replied it is of course entirely possible to do this yourself manually, but then I just felt that I might be missing something. Maybe I'm overthinking this whole thing, but I would certainly enjoy this functionality

[SFA]

Ok.

Do you happen to have an IT or Data Analysis background in your chosen career?

When using C1 do you work with catalogues or Sessions?


Grant

[mattiaswinbladh]

No IT or data analysis, electrician by trade.

I work mainly with sessions now. When I started using C1 I came from Lightroom so i initially used catalogs since that was sort of familiar, but I've come to appreciate sessions more. It's not as unwieldy as catalogs I find.

[SFA]

No IT or data analysis, electrician by trade.

I work mainly with sessions now. When I started using C1 I came from Lightroom so i initially used catalogs since that was sort of familiar, but I've come to appreciate sessions more. It's not as unwieldy as catalogs I find.

Interesting.

A useful and important trade.

I agree with you about sessions vs catalogs. However it is a personal choice entirely dependent on needs.

I'm not sure about catalogues bit in session there are the .cos files that contain the edit information and from which it should be possible to identify which tools have been used to edit the image. Of course some will always be used and so the challenge might then be to know whether the use of the tool was "standard default settings" or changed to something non-"standard".

If default one could ignore it (probably). If not standard one might assume it was an elective use.

That is quite a simple idea BUT made more complicated where the default process mapping is dependent on pre-defined defaults - like levels of sharpening for the lens/sensor combination, lens correction activity (if any and also potentially different for different settings, sharpening applied (different for different cameras and sensors) .... and a number of other preset values used to create a starting point image for us just as the camera's internal processing does for the production of a jpg file to provide a preview for the RAW file.

I think some form of analysis that might allow a heat map or tree map or something else with graphical content to be made available would be possible but I'm not sure it would really be very informative. Combined with a complete changes history it might add something but even then I'm not really sure it would be insightful - beyond what one can already work out based on the "normal" preferences one has for how one chooses to apply edits.

So something might be possible but I'm doubtful the effort could be justified.

That said, across a wide spectrum of users the information might be more valuable and I wonder if usage metrics (by program and routine for example) already provide very similar insight across the product for the C1 developers.

Just guessing.

Grant

[mattiaswinbladh]

Oh that is interesting, so it should be possible to harvest the data from the .cos file in order to see tool usage. I will have to look into that. Even the tools changed by default would be of interest I think, since they are in fact changed, which means that even if it was not an active choice, you would want to know that the tool was used and have the ability to change it to zero. This discussion is entirely academic so far, and there is a very real possibilty that this and other metrics already are avaliable to the developers for other purposes, but it would be nice for me as an end user to gain access to it as well.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

[SFA]

Oh that is interesting, so it should be possible to harvest the data from the .cos file in order to see tool usage. I will have to look into that. Even the tools changed by default would be of interest I think, since they are in fact changed, which means that even if it was not an active choice, you would want to know that the tool was used and have the ability to change it to zero. This discussion is entirely academic so far, and there is a very real possibilty that this and other metrics already are avaliable to the developers for other purposes, but it would be nice for me as an end user to gain access to it as well.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

You can't really go back to nothing because some form of processing is required to make the RAW data human eye and brain interpretable and give the resulting image some sort of appearance that we would expect it to have.

This means that certain tools are very likely to be used with every image although the values applied may vary quite a lot.

White Balance would be one example. Also Base Characteristics and, more than likely, Sharpening. Lens correction is also likely - indeed with many of the small, recent cameras software adjustment is used to eliminate the almost impossible task of creating suitably small lenses with usable optical correction at any price.

even if you can sift what has changed by your hand from what the defaults would have been when the image was shot I'm not sure that it would especially useful for any purpose I can think of.

However if it helps the understanding of the effects of processing in some way you may find it a valuable exercise to undertake.


HTH.

Grant