Capture One: How to View Only the Cropped Version of Your Photos in Capture One when Browsing your Photos

Here is a simple trick for Capture One users if you want to view the cropped version of your photos within Capture One’s browser when the browser is in either the grid mode or the list mode, similar to Lightroom’s library view or grid view.

As you may know, when viewing cropped photos in Lightroom, you only see the cropped version of the photos (the part of the photo that is within the cropped area). Not so in Capture One! In Capture One, with default settings, you see the whole un-cropped photo when using the Browser to view your images in a folder, even if the photo has been cropped!. The part of the image outside of the cropped area is a little dimmer than the part of the image included in the cropped photo as shown below:

Capture One default browser grid mode view

This can be distracting when viewing your images, especially if you only want to see the cropped version of your photos without including the area outside of the cropped area while using the browser.

To only show the cropped area of your photos in the browser, do the following:

Select Edit from the top menu and choose Preferences from the drop down menu as shown:

Change the default browser view to show only the cropped part of a photo

A dialog box will be displayed. Choose the Crop option at the top and the following options will be displayed as shown:

How to change the default browser view in Capture One to show only the cropped part of a photo when in Grid mode or List mode.

Next, slide the Opacity all the way over to the right so that it shows a value of 255 as shown above. Now, this is the tricky part, slide the Brightness slider to a value so that the part of the photo that is outside of the cropped area matches the color around the photos. With my color settings, the value that hides the un-cropped area is 46 as shown above.

The result is shown below:

Capture One now showing only the cropped view in the browser

Now, when viewing the photo using the Capture One browser, only the cropped area of the photo are shown when in grid mode or list mode. The one shortcoming is that the cropped thumbnails do not expand to fill the full amount of space allocated to the thumbnails, leaving a space around the thumbnails that varies depending on the amount the photos are cropped. The more a photo has been cropped, the more unused space around the thumbnail. In other words, the cropped version does not fill the whole thumbnail area like it does in Lightroom.

I wish Capture One would have an option in the settings or browser window where you could select your browser viewing preferences for thumbnails to either show the whole photo (including the area that is outside of the cropped portion) or just the cropped part of the photo.

Let me know in the comments below what your preferred view is when using the Capture One in browser mode.