It seems only a short while ago when I was undecided on the RAW processing software that would replace Lightroom. I shortlisted several potential alternatives – Capture One Pro, RawTherapee, DxO Optics and Darktable among others – but was able to try out only Capture One Pro properly. A demo version 10 of Capture One gave me 30 days to test it, after which I was able to continue evaluation by signing up for a beta copy of version 11. After using Capture One for several weeks, I made a decision to stick with it despite its hefty price tag. Now seems to be the right time to publish this, with the last standalone version of Lightroom 6.14, having just been released. Needless to say, my attempts at using other software I listed earlier were quite lukewarm. So to the reader who is here expecting a comparison between different alternatives to Lightroom, this post is unfortunately not it. Instead this post documents my migration from Lightroom to Capture One.
Why Capture One Pro?
Several aspects of Capture One swung my decision its way.
The first impression Capture One made upon launching it was great. Its UI looks great and feels crisp & polished. Unlike Lightroom, Capture One doesn’t have fixed modules – instead it has so-called Tool-tabs, which are freely definable. Different tools, like exposure adjustment, color editor, histogram etc. can be freely placed within these tool-tabs. This gives Capture One a level of customizability that just isn’t possible in Lightroom. I should note however that although some tools in Capture One behave differently than their counterparts in Lightroom, they were intuitive enough for me to pick up rather easily – a prime example of this being the Levels tool.
I also found the the initial rendition of photographs in Capture One to be better than Lightroom. Despite having read about this in several articles, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed. This, in general, meant I spend a little less time making adjustments in Capture One than in Lightroom. In the comparison below, on the left is a crop of the default preview from Lightroom and on the right is that from Capture One. Capture One is clearer and sharper which makes the overall photograph look more pleasant, which in turn means I spend less time editing it.
Besides my trusty DSLR, I own a mirrorless Fujifilm X100S. Lightroom has a known problem with Fujifilm RAWs – the way it processes them makes heavily textured photographs look like they’ve been painted on. Worse still, when sharpening Fujifilm RAWs, Lightroom introduces wormy artifacts rendering them unusable. Capture One absolutely blew Lightroom out of the water in the way it handled these RAWs. Take a look at the comparison below, the crop on the left is from Lightroom and on the right from Capture One.
Lastly, in my experience, Capture One is faster than Lightroom 6. In general use, the initial import is faster (and doesn’t consume as much memory as Lightroom), jumping from one photograph to the next is quick and switching between tool-tabs is snappier than switching between the Library and Develop modules (the two I spend most time switching between) in Lightroom. Responsiveness when making adjustments is better in Capture One than in Lightroom – this is especially apparent when working with layers and drawing masks. The one step, admittedly critical, where Capture One is slower than Lightroom is the export of edited photographs. In a quick test I conducted, Lightroom took 293s to export 139 RAWs (Nikon, so .NEF files) to JPEGs while Capture One took 561s, almost double the time! But since I’m usually not sitting in front of the computer while exporting, I can to live with it.
Having been thus enamored by Capture One, I started a migration of old projects from Lightroom. But this is not yet complete – my catalog in Lightroom is far too big to bring over to Capture One in so short a time. So I now use Capture One exclusively for new projects. When I have to refer back to some old photographs or when I get the time, I bring over projects one at a time from Lightroom.
Sessions or Catalogs?
This was the first decision I had to make. Capture One has two ways to store and work with photographs – Sessions and Catalogs. A Session is a self contained mini-library with its own folder structure to store captured, selected, exported and rejected photographs. Each Session has its own database which tracks changes, edits etc. to the photographs in it. A Catalog in Capture One is conceptually the same as its namesake in Lightroom – a single master database tracks multiple projects and albums.
The self-contained aspect of Sessions initially appealed to me. I could copy sessions across disks without having to worry about Capture One not reading them correctly or back them up offsite and not have to worry about reimporting them into Capture One for rework later etc. In fact, several resources I looked up recommended using Sessions instead of Catalogs.
However, after a few days of testing, mostly by importing a few albums into a Catalog and into multiple Sessions, I knew that Sessions wouldn’t work for me – a Catalog it would have to be.
Capture One seems to be used more by professionals rather than enthusiasts (like myself). Professionals typically do a shoot for a client, select potential keepers, process them and generate final output photographs to hand over. They rarely revisit their photographs. They almost never have ‘smart albums’ pulling photographs dynamically from different shoots based on keywords or other metadata. Capture One’s Sessions work wonderfully well for this use case – they are self contained, well organized and easily ported.
I don’t work that way – I don’t have shoots, I photograph places or for occasions. That is how I manage them too – by where the photographs were taken or by the occasion they were shot in. I use keywords, color tags and sometimes even camera metadata to create Lightroom Smart Albums. A single unified library, such as Lightroom’s catalog, lends itself well for this way of photography and management. A freebie in terms of folder management afforded by Lightroom is in the way it organizes photographs. I typically create a folder for an event/place/occasion and within this folder Lightroom creates sub-folders by the year and date. So when I want to look at all my, say, Memorial Day vacation photographs, I just click on that folder and all my photographs, across years, show up. The way Capture One’s Sessions work breaks this – since there is no central database holding all my photographs, I’d need to jump across sessions when I’m looking for that one photograph I’m after. Sessions also render keywords pretty much useless.
Catalogs
Having decided on Catalogs, I now had to build one. The easiest option was to point Capture One to the parent folder that houses all my photographs and import them in one go. This I tried. However, a seemingly insignificant difference in the way Capture One displays folder contents than Lightroom forced me to change plans.
My Lightroom catalog is on my local SSD but all of my photographs are stored on an external drive. The folder hierarchy for these photographs on the external drive is Event -> Year -> Date. For example, my Memorial Day vacation pics from earlier this year are in Memorial Day -> 2017 -> 2017-05-29.
To avoid duplicating photographs on the external disk, when I first imported a few folders of photographs into Capture One I chose Destination as ‘Current Location’. However, unlike Lightroom, when Capture One looks at a folder it doesn’t read all the way down the folder hierarchy to display photographs from nested folders. For example, within the Memorial Day folder I have 2017 -> 2017-05-29 and 2016 -> 2016-05-30 as two branches of nested sub-folders. Clicking on Memorial Day in Lightroom shows me all my vacation photographs across 2016 and 2017. However, the same action in Capture One doesn’t display anything since these folders themselves do not have any photographs. To see them, I’d have to expand Memorial Day and control click on 2017-05-29 and 2016-05-30 and select them both. This isn’t workable for me.
This told me two things:
- I’d have to flatten out the folder hierarchy in my library. Because of this, I couldn’t continue to store my photographs in the Lightroom created folder hierarchy and simply reference them in Capture One.
- I’d have to migrate one folder into Capture One at a time as I couldn’t find an easy way to automate this process for all folders at once. My approach now is to name folders as Date – Place/Occasion. So the Memorial Day vacation photographs are now stored as two separate high level folders 2016-05-30 – Memorial Day and 2017-05-29 – Memorial Day. This is a painful manual step, and a regression from Lightroom where it was basically a given.
On the performance front, I should note that Capture One version 10 seemed quite slow at opening catalogs. As a test, I imported several folders, containing about 35000 photographs in all, into Capture One. After generating the catalog database and image previews, I quit Capture One and relaunched it. It took Capture One about a minute to launch completely; a similarly sized catalog in Lightroom opens much faster, in about 10s. This was my experience with Capture One version 10. I did not try this with version 11, and anecdotally I’ve had no such performance issues opening my new, in process, catalog that contains about 12000 photographs as of this writing. On the positive side, however, the catalog was much smaller – 7.5GB as compared to 30GB in Lightroom. This is great news for me, since I always store the catalog locally. My hunch is there is a lot of cruft and cobwebs built in my Lightroom library over the years and that a new similarly sized library would have a much smaller catalog.
Capture One Setup
My workflow to process images is pretty much standard – Import, Cull, Select, Edit, Export. I set up dedicated tool-tabs in Capture One, with the right tools to help me run through this workflow as quickly and efficiently as possible. That Capture One allows the same tool to be put into multiple tool-tabs is a feature I leverage.
- During import, I copy all photographs from camera or from a Lightroom folder into a new target folder on an external drive. The first tool-tab has the Folders and Keywords tools. Neither helps me directly with the import, but helps me navigate through my library before moving on to other tasks.
- Culling photographs is the next step. The main idea here is to get rid of out-of-focus photographs, hopelessly exposed photographs and poorly framed photographs. Another use case for culling, one that has become increasingly critical in the year past, is to choose the one in-focus shot out of 10, 15 burst shots. The first tool-tab, helpfully named Cull, has the tools Histogram, Focus, Exposure and Keywords. Histogram allows for a quick exposure check. The Focus tool works like the loupe in erstwhile Aperture, giving a magnified view of a section of the photograph which helps in checking critical focus. The Exposure tool comes in very handy while culling, since I can quickly increase the exposure by a stop or two to check focus in dark and moody photographs. The Keywords tool is here so I can start adding keywords to related photographs en masse. Rejected photographs are sent to the catalog trash with a tap of the ‘X’ key. This works just like rejecting photographs in Lightroom, so I don’t have to relearn an often used shortcut.
- Next, I select the photographs to process further – a quick scan of the remaining photographs is all it takes. Selected ones are tagged Green (mapped to ‘7’). Usually when I’m doing this, I have the Library tool-tab open. It shows me an overview of the folders in my library, so I can switch between them. I also have the Filters tool here, which I use after selecting photographs, to narrow down to only the ‘Green’ tagged photographs. The Keywords tool is duplicated here.
- I Edit photographs in three broad stages – Cropping & Exposure, Color Adjustment and finally Sharpening/Clarity/Noise Reduction. Each stage gets its own dedicated tool-tab. Exposure has the Histogram, Exposure, Levels, HDR, Curve and Layers tools. Color has the Histogram, White Balance, Base Characteristics (I’ve not needed to play around with this yet, maybe I’ll remove it and reduce clutter), Black & White and the Color Editor tools. Finally the Adjustments tool-tab houses the Sharpening, Clarity, Noise Reduction and Vignetting tools. Often I’ll interchange the sequence of edits, depending upon the photograph and what I consider to be the best starting point. Once I’m satisfied with my edits, I change the color tag to Blue (mapped to ‘8’ on the keyboard). Instead if the edited photograph doesn’t quite make the cut, I remove the color tag entirely (mapped to ‘9’).
- Capture One’s exporting options are more powerful than Lightroom’s – I can kick-off multiple export batches for a set of photographs, each with it’s own group of settings, at the same time. This comes in very handy when I’m exporting an album for backing up (full resolution, highest quality), for web-uploads (smaller file-size, with watermark). I use the default Output tool-tab for this.
Besides these, I use two other tool-tabs on an ad hoc basis – Lens and Metadata. Both are untouched and are mostly used for informative purposes only.
Cropping and horizon leveling are such common actions that Capture One keeps them accessible at all times, outside of tool-tabs.
Adapting to Capture One
All things considered my transition to Capture One has been quite smooth. The decision to migrate over time seems to be working…so far. However, given the differences inherent between Capture One and Lightroom, I knew there would some give and take in terms of usability, flexibility and features.
The Levels tool in Capture One is a definite positive. This is among my favorite and most often tools in Capture One, one that doesn’t have a direct equivalent in Lightroom. Levels allows you set cut-offs for Black(0) and White(255) levels in a photograph. Changing them allows me to stretch the histogram, in a way adding dynamic range to the photograph. The example below shows how adjusting the black and white levels to 17 and 188 respectively changes the look of the photograph. Note how the histogram, in the top right, spreads out. The Levels tool has been especially useful to me because a lot of photographs I’ve been taking in recent times don’t have a great dynamic range to begin with.
The Clarity tool is quite different in Capture One from Lightroom. For starters, there are different kinds of Clarity adjustments. It will definitely take some getting used to, but I already like this tool in Capture One more than that in Lightroom. Besides being more restrained in its application, Clarity in Capture One is better in its processing of photographs. This is a good thing. Take a look at the comparison below – while the Lightroom’s clarity makes the photograph look artificial, Capture One truly makes the distant mountains clearer.
And here is how Lightroom handles it:
Things aren’t all rosy though.
Watermarking photographs upon export is an area where I’m struggling a bit with Capture One. There isn’t any way to scale the watermark depending on the degree of cropping, there don’t seem to be options to save different watermarks and its application in the exported file isn’t quite as good with strong aliasing around the watermark text.
In Lightroom, Highlight Recovery works by reducing highlights which makes sense. In Capture One, however, you increase the Highlights to recover them which is not intuitive. Overall recoverability in Capture One seems reduced too. A -100 Highlight in Lightroom recovers way more than a +100 in Capture One. Shadow recovery is comparable.
There isn’t any way to create Panoramas in Capture One. Stitching multiple photographs into a Panorama or creating a HDR photograph was a headline feature of Lightroom 6 and I’d come to rely on it heavily over the years. I suspect this is the feature that I’ll miss most in Capture One. Thankfully I have my still-working copy of Lightroom to load when I need it.
This article has been submitted by Adarsh Hatwar. To see more of his work, please visit his Instagram page.
Thanks for the great article. There are many wondering about where to go after Lightroom 6.
One thing you don’t mention in migrating from Lightroom to Capture One is how you deal with all the changes you already made in Lightroom to your thousands of photos. Did those changes automatically replicate in Capture One on import (which would be surprising)? Did you have to recreate them all again from scratch (a huge undertaking)? Or are you exporting photos with your edits “baked in” (definitely less work but a major compromise)?
Thanks for your comments John.
Yes, that is an aspect I didn’t touch in my article. There isn’t a way to move over edits between the two software. I’m living with the final high quality jpegs I exported originally from Lightroom.
Raw HDR and Panorama. :D That’s all :D
Hi Adarsh, thanks for the article, it’s very informative.
I’m still unsure about changing from Lightroom, but it does seem to me, that Capture One is the best choice at the moment.
I’m using Lightroom Classic with the subscription service and I was interested in your “clarity” comparison.
I find I am using “dehaze”, or a combination of “dehaze and clarity”rather than just the clarity slider and getting better results with landscape images.
Your results with Capture One are very impressive, does your version of Lightroom have the dehaze adjustment?
Regards,
John Taylor
Hi John,
Thanks for your comments.
My version of Lightroom doesn’t have the Dehaze slider – I use presets (I think I downloaded them off petapixel.com) which expose dehaze in 5% increments. I used it sparingly, just like Clarity, it made the photo look artificial with high mid tone contrast and a kind of halo around edges.
Regards,
Adarsh
Thanks. Did I understand correctly that Capture One can not generate hierarchical catalogues (i.e. folders inside folders)? My LR catalogue is currently organised by Year, with events or places underneath. In the towns I live there even more folders inside for differnt events. It would be disastrous to have to flatten out this totally. Thanks.
Hi Carlos,
Thanks for your comment.
You can explicitly put your images wherever you like. The only aspect it lacks is the auto-organization by date. Lightroom does this automatically for you. If you rely on that, then it will be painful to migrate to Capture One.
Regards,
Adarsh
As a note, at least in CO 11, you can recursively search nested sub-directories for importing by checking a box inside “Import From”. For established directories of old photos it makes importing nested catalogs from LR a LOT easier.
Also, Adarsh, if you exit CO with a folder selected that has only a portion of images (like a single date or event) then CO will start up a WHOLE LOT faster than if you have a large catalog selected. Generally speaking, once I figured out this little quirk my CO always, always, always starts up faster than any version of LR I own. Just a quick tip from another CO convert… :)
Hi JW,
Yep, C1 can replicate an already existing nested folder hierarchy. But two problems here:
1. When you click on a parent folder, it doesn’t show photos from nested folders. You have to expand the parent folder and individually access the nested folders.
2. You replicate this folder hierarchy when importing over from Lightroom. But for new imports, from camera, C1 will not create a similar hierarchy automatically. It has to be done by you upon import each time. This becomes much more complex when you import photos for an album you shot over several days. Flattening out the hierarchy as a rule works much better in C1.
Regards,
Adarsh
With little play i managed to revive same folder hierarchy as in Lr. With first import C1 imported all folders including subfolders and showed every folder separately, including subfolders. Since i like to see folders in usual hierarchy where lets say you have year 2017 folder and under it 2017-january and 2017-february, i just right clicked in the catalog the root folder of the photos and then chose “show folders hierarchically”. One backdraw is that folder which has subfolders will say 0 photos in that folder but if you open that folder in the hierarchy tree, you will see subfolders that have photos in it.
Guess that 0 is meant only for photos and does not include subfolder photos.
Hi Bogdan,
Yes, this was my experience as well. While Capture One can retain nested folders over from Lightroom its behavior while displaying folder contents is different. Also, for new albums/projects being imported from camera, Capture One doesn’t create this folder hierarchy automatically.
Regards,
Adarsh
Thanks for the article, I particularly appreciated the time spent comparing how Fuji raw files are dealt with in lightroom v capture one since I’m strongly considering getting an X-T2 and since I currently don’t have either software having one that works best with Fuji would be ideal, obviously. All in all, very well written, thank you!
Thanks for your comments Tamas!
Regards,
Adarsh
Sorry Tomáš. Autocorrect typo.
hello Tomas, I opted for Capture One as my first post processing software after research. And I am very happy with the choice. At that time, I did not have the Fujifilm camera, X-T2, so I did not know of the issues with Lightroom. Photos processed with CO 11 are absolutely beautiful. There are now also great resources on CO 11. CO 12 is now replacing CO 11 which I will get. CO is simply fantastic. Go for it!
All the best,
Odile
Hi there, thanks for the great and very explanative article.
I have used CO since its version 6. I made also decision for it after making comparisons between CO and LR. As a nature photographer I e.g. made many tests about rendering hazy sceneries. There CO clearly won hands down.
Now, the use of CO in my case is very simple, even minimal, in the sense that I use a separate DAM software (iMatch) as a master, and from that master I can call CO when converting selected raw-files (I simply draw selected set on CO-icon in iMatch Favorities-list). There are also several other softwares, like Photomatix, PTgui etc., that I call in same way. In my CO all takes place in sessions, but I do not care anything about that (e.g. I do not name those at all). All image management (originals, versions, keywording, rating, etc. takes place in DAM software.
But, speaking about CO, yes, I have also been satisfied with results.
Hi Markku,
Thanks for commenting.
Yes, going for a pure asset management software is an option too. It has its own pros and cons…
Regards,
Adarsh
Ardash, nice review. While I was not a LR person; I did transition from Aperture to CP1 a while ago. With the release of CP1 Pro 11, I again saw an import dialog box for LR. There may have been some updates/improvements for the transition. Also, I understand your concerns about the “Folder” hierarchy. You might want to check out this section from the CP1 Pro 11 User Guide.
help.phaseone.com/en/CO…aspx#item2
Thanks again for your review.
Adarsh..sorry.
Thanks for the comment John.
The problem I have is if multiple nested folders sit within a root folder, Capture One doesn’t show the contents of all the nested folders when I highlight the root folder. The user guide you linked talks about folder management, creating/deleting/renaming, not about Capture One’s display behavior.
Regards,
Adarsh
I have never used Lightroom and I am not interested. I just don’t like the way Adobe messes with my PC.
I have been using Capture One since version 6, before Catalogs existed. Capture One Sessions was and still is a great tool. I do not know any better RAW processor. But when it comes to Catalogs I have a big problem with Capture One. Basically Catalog is the same thing as a Session. You store all your images in one database but otherwise it is the same as a Session.
I am a photographer like you, not professional, but mainly travel and events photographer (with some 40,000 RAWs). And I would like to organize, search and view all of my images from one place in a Catalog. But I will process my images in batches as I shoot, typically by day and place. Sessions are perfect for that. Sessions are my master copy of the images.
I do not want to process images in a Catalog. That is not what a Catalog should be for. A Catalog is for managing images. So after I process in a Session I want to import into a suitable Catalog. Capture One has a very poor interface and workflow for moving images from Session to Catalog. There is an Import Session feature, but the way it works is ridiculous and the results are messy.
Phase One does not care about Catalog, they only care about professional photographers who are using Mac (Mac version has more features than Windows version) and they do a great job for them. But Catalog has not been developed significantly since it was cloned from a Session in version 7. Just a few glaring bug fixes. I call the Catalog a SuperSession. I am a data management professional and I can tell you that Phase One does not understand (nor care) about data management. So beware……
That is my big bitch about Capture One….
This comment makes me very nervous about C1. Saying they don’t care about data management is a huge red flag for me.
Not to defend Adobe here, because they are being rightly criticized for many shortcomings, but I am comfortable with how LR handles my photographic assets. I also like their future direction toward a cloud based system that will provide (eventually) even better data management.
It seems like everyone wants a real competitor to LR but they all seem to have some serious shortcoming.
Do things work out better if you use Media Pro SE in tandem with Capture One Pro?
Yes, I agree completely. I’ve used Photoshop since it was created, and Lightroom for the past several years. However, I got fed up with the fact that you can’t own it, and they nag you if you are on the road and do not have constant connectivity. I was out in the wild (marginal to no connectivity much of the time) and all my Adobe softwre timed out on me and then couldn’t use the software, despite the fact I was paid in full for the period. So, I said the *&$#^% with that and started looking around for better options. I tried many raw and related workflow systems and associated imaging software and settled on Capture One 11 for raw production and tethering, and Affinity Photo for image work.
Anyway, there is so much that is better with Capture One– not the least of it is that it does not force you to endure multiplicative artifacts, and the 50 MB images from my tethered Canon 5DSR show up in 2 seconds or less, rather than the 1-2 minutes it took for Lightroom. Also, since it is transparent to the underlying OS, you can use a wide range of free and commercial database driven media management tools for collaborative management, sharing and workflows. Finally, it enables you to create much better print or web-ready images in less time. LR has good metadata and tagging, but it is bloated, archaic and slow. I love Photoshop, but the truth is that Affinity built such an amazing piece of software, which treats things non-destructively, without the need for Smart Objects and related one-way kludges. I am a fairly advanced Photoshop user, but in less than 3 months, I can do many things almost as quickly in Affinity, and many something quicker, and other things better and easier.
So, assuming that Adobe doesn’t go back to offering the ability to purchase rather than rent again, I will soon drop PS and the remaining Adobe software completely.
Thankfully, Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve 14 and Fusion 9 are also much better and more capable in most respects than Adobe Premiere and After Effects related to video post and CG work, so there is nothing left from Adobe that I really want or need anymore. I paid for the version of Resolve that enables multiple people to work on overlapping elements of a production at the same time in a collaborative fashion, but the free version of Resolve is more than most probably need.
I am sure I am far from alone in terms of switching from Adobe to alternatives, and I just hope that Adobe gets a clue and goes back to properly supporting its customer with own or rent-to-own offerings again.
Hi Jozef,
Thanks for your comment.
What you describe is an interesting workflow – create Sessions, process photos export outputs. Import these outputs into a master catalog.
I have two concerns:
1. My outputs sit in Photos (Apple) so that they are available on all my devices. I dont want to lose out on this convenience. So, I’d have to import into a Catalog in addition to Photos.
2. A use case I have is to search across my catalog for imported and unprocessed images by keyword. Recently, I wanted to share an Osprey hunt series of photos. It was a burst of some 15 photos of which I had originally exported just 1. But since they were all in one catalog and keyworded, I could simply search for the entire sequence and export them out ad hoc. With the Sessions+Catalogs, I’d have to search for the right Session manually.
Regards,
Adarsh
“Vive la difference!” We each handle our work in our own way, Adarsh. One of my main reasons for leaving LR behind was the catalogue system – it drove me nuts, and served no useful purpose – useful to me, anyway. Other ‘togs swear by it – good luck to them, but it’s not for me.
I’ve been running trials over various programs – so have other people – seems Adobe has set off something of a stampede of people, looking around to see what else there is.
I’ve found Capture One Pro is vastly quicker, and the results are comparable (without the pain of fighting through LR). One area that impressed was noise reduction – making similar adjustments in LR created a rather milky result, which didn’t appeal to me at all.
I will say one thing – I’d barely started using COP before they launched an updated version – and wanted roughly half what I’d only just paid, if I wanted the upgrade. Sorry Phase One – do that to me, and you’ll be waiting a very long time before I get any upgrades – that kind of stuff is one of my main reasons for deciding to quit depending on Adobe’s products. I do still use PS for a few mechanical things – such as cropping, re-sizing and (for the time being anyway) sending stuff to the printer. But I can barely remember the last time I used LR.
Hi Jean,
I agree, C1 has a great look.
“I’d barely started using COP before they launched an updated version” – its a shame when that happens. I think if you buy 30 days before a new version comes out then you get a free upgrade (I read this while researching online). The feeling is especially worse if you are just outside this window too!
Regards,
Adarsh
This to me is quite critical for working photographer needing to get images out quickly:-
“The one step, admittedly critical, where Capture One is slower than Lightroom is the export of edited photographs. In a quick test I conducted, Lightroom took 293s to export 139 RAWs (Nikon, so .NEF files) to JPEGs while Capture One took 561s, almost double the time! But since I’m usually not sitting in front of the computer while exporting, I can to live with it.”
I am using LR Classic and find exporting RAWs to JPEGs in large batches is painstakingly slower than before (although I cannot quantify). just judgement. It took me 13 minutes to convert 160 D850 RAWs to 2.5MB JPEGs. I would definitely not be able to wait approx. 26 minutes if this was C1, but also I would suspect the longer processing, would also drain the laptop quicker. This slow exporting mounts up into time being wasted for those pros wanting to move onto their next task. With social media pressure, speed of conversion from RAW to JPEGs is becoming more critical. You could say shoot in JPEG, but some work is better done with RAWs, eg. concerts where highlights are easily blown out, even weddings where the contrast is extreme between the white bridesmaid dress and the black suit of the groom. Anyway that’s my thoughts. Hopefully with LR being worked on by the software developers the exporting will become faster.
Hi Kit,
Yes if you are exporting on the go, then the time really becomes critical – doubly critical as you point out due to battery consumption.
Regards,
Adarsh
When I last tried C1 on version 8 or 9, I found the quality of the JPEG output to be poor in comparison to LR and PS. That was a deal breaker for me. Has it improved any in version 12?
Thanks,
Spok.
Hi Adarsh,
Thanks for a great piece.
One question that bogged my mind when I used trial version of Capture One Pro is that if I migrate to CP 1 and unsubscribe from Light-room/Photoshop Combo, what will I use when I need to do some more touch up much more than jut RAW conversion when I don’t have Photoshop any more?
Apurva
Hi Apurva,
Capture One and Photoshop can work together – help.phaseone.com/en/CO…iting.aspx
However, if you rely heavily on Photoshop, then I’d recommend staying with Lightroom since you are already on Adobe’s subscription.
Regards,
Adarsh
Adarsh – I moved away from LR about a year ago. Since most of mt work is landscape, whether in LR or CO, I find PS is just better for certain things. But particularly with the expanded ability to use layers in CO, I can get more done there and then finish up in PS if necessary (i.e. luminance masking). Yes, I agree that it is annoying to not be able to click on a hierarchical part of the catalog and have all photos in the parent folder display, but CO works so much better for me in so many ways, that both buying CO (admittedly not inexpensive) and keeping my subscription to PS CC is just the best way to go, if your budget allows it. As a user of CO and a prior user of LR for many hears, I found you article very fair. The one area I would disagree slightly, is that I didn’t find the transition to CO to be easy or intuitive. Maybe too many years working in LR, but until I spent time working with it for a couple of months I didn’t find that things came easily. Love it now though.,
Hi,
Thanks for your comments JD.
Layers in CO are very powerful, coming from Lightroom at least. I’ve started to explore different looks with layers allowing me to turn on/off different effects as I prefer.
Regards,
Adarsh
I so agree, and am so glad I switched from Lightroom to Capture One. Also, CO enables you to keep artifacts from becoming multiplicative thanks to layers, so aliasing and other types of Nyquist noise don’t distort, soften and otherwise keep you from making things look their best and fix noise issues without introducing new ones! Also, the finesse inherent to the CO adjustments, the curves employed and how they interact with each other enable our teams to create much better looking images than we can with LR.
Also, working with printers like the Canon Pro 1000, 4000 and the Epson 600, we get better results much more easy using a wider range of mediums (canvas, glossy, pro matte, etc). I used LR for years, and had to use QImage to get reasonably consistent results that were as they should be. No need with CO– just consistent print, screen, Web and other output. Also, thanks to CO’s recipe workflow and that it rides on top of the OS (rather than having to use a kludgy database cataloging system), I don’t have to create multiple series of optimally handled and sharpened images, and instead just keep the one untouched raw.
Also, the fact that it uses a proper version of Adobe RGB and ProPhoto, rather that LR’s bastardized versions and “Melissa RGB” enables us to work with much larger and more intuitive/consistent color spaces and workflows, using a standardized set of LUT’s, color spaces and gammas, which are 100% accurate and consistent across all software that we use (i.e. DaVinci Resolve, Fusion 9 VR, 3D LUT Creator, PhotoShop, Affinity Photo, etc). I understand the reason that Adobe went with a proprietary color space in place of their own Adobe RGB, but then again… WHY did they do that?
The only thing we use still from Adobe that I really like is PhotoShop; but even there, the non-destructive interaction from beginning to end, the realtime previews of every menu item and effect, and the many other advantages of Affinity Photo point the way to a better, less kludgy approach than PhotoShop offers. However, given how important PS is to so many, maybe Adobe will take a clue from Affinity and replace kludges like Smart. Objects, proprietary closed lighting models and proprietary base color spaces like “Melissa RGB” with transparent and standards-based approaches like Affinity offers. Maybe?
Time will tell.
But then I will still have to retain LR/PS subscription plus shell out 300 USD for CP1 to be able to use PS!
For me The transition to C1 took quit a bit of time. It took me a lot of time to make my own styles to get the color rendering I like. I have not regretted and although for me C1 works less intuitive than Lightroom eventually the results are better. I do not really like the catalog function because I prefer to use a dedicated DAM program (Media Pro) and keep my photo’s organized in a clear folder structure. To keep the sidecar files together with the raw files feels like a safe option for me. Anyway, before changing to C1 I have nearly obsessively been comparing raw converters and C1 is now my basic raw converter. For moving, importing and organizing photo’s before editing and importing in Media Pro I found Acdsee Pro fantastic and for special effects and further processing after C1 I use On1 Photo. For checking the colors I use sometimes Capture NX (as a reference) and for quick processing Jpegs DXO does a great job (and for removing distortion if necessary). A lot of software but they all have their strength and fortunately the most are much cheaper than C1.
One thing I’d like to point out… it’s very easy to get Lightroom to have an initial look that’s very similar to C1’s initial look. You just need to set up a preset and apply the preset when importing images. Usually adding a bit of sharpening, a bit of noise reduction, a standard camera profile (not Adobe Standard) and medium tone curve gets it pretty close.
I like C1 but the cost is just a bit too high for my liking and the lack of good folder level support for images impacts me too much. I’ve been tempted since C1 v6 and have tested every major release but can’t pull the trigger yet. I’ll probably stick with Lightroom 6.14 until I have a camera need that forces me to change.
Yes, to each their own. I really liked the metadata and related workflow of LR ( I hope so, as I used it, and PS, since it first came out years ago).
One thing I believe Capture One does have a rental option (like Adobe), and also, without layers you cannot avoid multiplicative artifacts, nor can you easily reproduce the adjustments– many of which operate in a perceptual 3D color space that is much larger (and thankfully is actually standards based, verses the proprietary Melissa RGB and their bastardized version of ProPhoto color space that LR employs).
If your needs and adjustments are modest, you can do fine with LR, as I did for years. However, just like 3D LUT Creator and how its output works perfectly fluidly and very intuitively with everything (e.g. DaVinci Resolve, Fusion, Affinity Photo, 3DLC, Photoshop and all other standards-based tools, C1 has engineered an amazing tool, just like Adobe did with PS.
Also, for anyone who tethers, it took 1-2 minutes for the images from my 5DSR to show up in LR (not useable nor acceptable for customer sessions, and not efficient in terms of workflow for anyone), verses 1-2 seconds for Capture One. However, not everybody tethers (although many should).
Finally, the fact that C1 uses the underlying OS, makes it 100% portable across drives and the network, and allows you to use any free or commercial automated or collaborative workflow system you want (Adobe stopped offering any of that with LR years ago, since there proprietary kludgy database cataloging system kept getting corrupted).
It is quite simply, the best pro-level tool out there for many users.
You can’t just replicate C1’s rendering (or anything’s rendering, really) just with a preset. That’s not how it works.
Good article. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between C1 since version 7 and Adobe LR since version 4. I cover multiple genres including sports, dance, fashion, etc. I found some of the generalizations in the article a bit off-putting such as the assertion that pros don’t revisit their older work. I most certainly do. Especially for college sports where it is quite common to do retrospectives when seniors are about to graduate and the client wants the best images of their last several years. Or when dancers are featured in press pieces and images are needed throughout their career. Similar situations exist for most pros when books are being put together or other kinds of media offering historical perspective.
Also I saw from the comments section some concerns about cataloging. I had to move all my RAW images over from LR shoot by shoot. It’s taken me 2 full weeks, but my C1 catalog is now at just over 378k. No issues thus far except for program startup which is slow. But C1 runs all the time and I don’t restart it often.
For sports work in the field, I have moved to DxO’s new PhotoLab. The RAW processor is excellent, the noise processing is extremely good, and it lets me get out a quality product post-game quickly. I use Photomechanic as a front end for all my work. I rate, metadata tag, GPS tag, etc. all my images there. And from there I choose my back end processor (C1, LR, DxO).
I also noted a comment about C1 being more fully optioned for Mac. I haven’t really found that to be the case. I have both Mac and PC. It’s slightly different, but the differences are quite minor. I suppose if you have deep reliance on a missing feature, that could seem like a much bigger deal.
Adarsh – I moved away from LR about a year ago. Since most of mt work is landscape, whether in LR or CO, I find PS is just better for certain things. But particularly with the expanded ability to use layers in CO, I can get more done there and then finish up in PS if necessary (i.e. luminance masking). Yes, I agree that it is annoying to not be able to click on a hierarchical part of the catalog and have all photos in the parent folder display, but CO works so much better for me in so many ways, that both buying CO (admittedly not inexpensive) and keeping my subscription to PS CC is just the best way to go, if your budget allows it. As a user of CO and a prior user of LR for many hears, I found you article very fair. The one area I would disagree slightly, is that I didn’t find the transition to CO to be easy or intuitive. Maybe too many years working in LR, but until I spent time working with it for a couple of months I didn’t find that things came easily. Love it now though.,
Thank you for a nice overview and the ideas on how you handle your process in Capture One. I’ve been a CS5 user for years and then went to Light Room CC. My interest is in Nature and Landscapes. I was looking at Capture One 11 and noticed the Subscribe vs the buy options. Its noted that if you buy the software are you limited to updates where like in LR and the Capture One your software stays current. Any comments on buy vs subscribe,
Hi Chris,
I’m biased towards buy, so prefer that.
Capture One costs $20/month to subscribe to so works out to $240/year. If you prepay for the year, you get a discount to $180/year.
Based on my research before choosing Capture, Phase One has released a major version every year. Each upgrade costs $120 after you’ve bought a major version for $300.
So, buying and upgrading works out cheaper if you’re planning to use Capture One for more than 3 years. Subscription may make sense if the initial cost is too high and in the case of multi-system licenses.
Regards,
Adarsh
Thank you Adarsh . Buying it is. I just seem to like having the software belonging to me, rather than a subscription or for a better word, renting it. I’ve always had that caution feeling with LR CC.
Many thanks, Adarsh!
I am also experimenting with LR alternatives due to their policy change.
Also more or less narrowed it down to CO.
Findings so far:
* CO produces better image quality!
* CO catalogue/ image asset management sucks–or I don’t get it. I also use LR to manage my (big) library of photography assets and it’s pretty good at that. What would I use with CO?
* I am missing good film presets. The ones I found are not so good…
Great article and one of increasing importance. One topic I wish were added to this great article was a caveat that CO does not support all cameras or brands; especially those that compete with Phase One (e.g. Fuji GFS, Hasselblad). If anyone is looking to move into medium format in the future, they will have to think twice about migrating to CO in the short term.
Hii,
First of all, happy new year! That said, i would like to know how can i enable a flat profile in Capture One Pro. Several months ago, i found out how to emulate Nikon Flat Profile in LR6 by using the “Flat Profile” at “Camera Calibration” section. So, if i find the way to enable a Flat Profile that emulates Nikon Flat Profile, i will probably switch from LR6 to C1.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thank you very much in advance.
Best regards,
Javier
Hi Adarsh,
I had problems importing my LR (6.14 standalone) catalog into C1 10. I have a lot of sub-folders, and sub-sub-folders and they all had to be added one by one after importing my LR catalog. I finally got it all worked out but it was a challenge. I’m still adjusting to C1 after years of LR. I moved to C1 after Adobe made LR subscription-only after years of telling us that they had no plans to do so despite the rumors.
Since C1 doesn’t show the contents of sub-folders when you select a folder (unlike LR), I thought I’d try creating a (virtual) album in my catalog and searching for all items, for example, the keyword “Texas” (which I had already added in LR over the years). This would let me see all of my Texas images in one place without having to search all the Texas sub-directories each time I wanted to browses those images. Unfortunately, when I started dragging-and-dropping images into my album, C1 would eventually crash. This happened numerous times. I may try Smart Albums instead and see if they work better. I agree with those who say C1’s catalog management leaves a lot to be desired.
You mentioned the highlights slider in C1. It is a little weird since you can only reduce the highlights with it. If you need to increase the highlights, I guess you have to use some combination of exposure, brightness, and shadows adjustments. I do find that the highlights slider works better for me than the one in LR. If I adjust the highlights in LR to reduce the brightness of the sky, it also seems to adjust brightness everywhere else too, including my subject. It seems like LR divides the light range into highlights and shadows. If it’s not one, it’s the other. In C1, I can reduce the brightness of the sky via the highlights slider without affecting much of anything else in the picture.
I fairly often use the “Auto Adjust” feature to adjust exposure, contrast, dynamic range (but not white balance) to get a starting point on images that need some extra work. I find that it gets very me very close to a finished product much more often than LR. LR’s auto-adjust ends up with heavily over-exposing my image about 99% of the time when I use it.
Despite the problems I’ve run into, I like the way C1 works. It drove me crazy when I first switched from LR since the UI and workflow are quite different but I really like how it works now and love the image quality!
thanks for a great review. I’m currently on LR5 on an older Macbook Pro. I have issues with Adobe’s Cloud tax, and I have issues with Apple’s lack of focus on the MacBook, so I’m now considering moving to C1P on a PC. There’s a few comments on C1P for Windows to be lacking features or functionality. Is that something you’ve come across?
Thanks again / Klaus
Klaus:
I’m using Capture One Pro 10 on a PC having switched from the Mac six months ago. The Mac and Windows applications seem exactly the same to me. I’m not aware of any features unique to the Mac version.
Thanks. Taking the plunge. New hardware and software it is!
Hi Adarsh –
Great article I found while researching Lightroom! I’ve had Phase One backs for several years starting with the P45+ and now up to the IQ180, and thus have been using C1 for a long time. It has been improved significantly over time and until recently was the only RAW conversion and complete image editor I’ve been using. But then last year I bought a Hasselblad (X1D) and found C1 will not even recognize Hassy files much less allow for editing, and likewise, Phocus will not recognize/process P1 files. I assume because Phase One and Hasselblad are direct competitors in the medium format space.
So given the limitations I found in Phocus I recently started using LR Classic CC to edit and process the Hassy files and started searching to determine if I wanted to revise to LR CC and utilize the cloud – I’m still not sure about that. But, I can say that LR Classic CC handles both the Hasselblad .3FR and PhaseOne .IIQ files really well, and includes the camera and lens profiles for everything I’ve tried in my kit thus far. In fact, I’ve found LR handles the Highlights and Shadows of a P1 .IIQ file better or more easily than C1.
That said, C1 is a much more robust program in terms of customization (especially for workflow), layering for local adjustments, and many other detailed tools and capabilities, but other than the customization of workflow being unavailable in LR, and because I must use something other than C1 to process Hasselblad .3FR files, I’ve been pleased with LR’s capabilities.
In the end its like most tools, nothing is perfect and fits every circumstance, so having a quiver of programs provides more potential options.
Maybe LR CC provides the ability to create a custom workflow in the Develop panel??? If so that might help move me toward its cloud-based system.
Thanks for the article :)
I’m using Capture One Pro version 11. I have used various Adobe products except lightroom. The Sony A7R3 I purchased recently includes a limited functionality version of Capture One and I quickly upgraded for a fraction of the retail price. The learning curve is significant, but not unreasonably so. Once you master the basics, Capture One is very easy to use and then continue to build on what you know. My most significant complaint is the program crashes quite often. Every day. Sometimes, many times in a day. A crash report is sent to Capture One, but so far I have not received any feedback from the company on any of the many crash reports sent. This does not leave me with a positive feeling that the reports are being analyzed and resolved. The database gets corrupted when the program crashes, but so far the repair tool has been effective so far. These crashes do impact my workflow, however. I am wondering if other readers are having the same problems.
Can you provide some info on your machine? Mac or PC? Processor / RAM? What steps have you taken, i.e., have you reinstalled Capture One?
I’ve run Capture One Pro 10 and now 11 without incident on a pretty robust PC but also a Surface Pro 4.
Presumably the problem with the highlights recovery not being as stron as in LR could be remedied by using layers in C1. With three layers you could apply 300% of recovery. Is that right?
Spok.