My Time with Capture One
Published: February 02 2023
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As either a hobbyist photographer or a professional you know the right editing tool can make all the difference in your workflow process. Since the start of my career a few years ago I have been a Lightroom suite of applications user because well every where you look most people utilize the Adobe suite for editing purposes. Over the last couple weeks I’ve had the pleasure of trying out Capture One and let me tell you I am extremely impressed. Both Lightroom & Capture One have their own set of benefits and advantages which can obviously making choosing the right one for your needs difficult. Deciding what is a benefit or an advantage from a software perspective for your own personal workflow can often times be extremely nuanced and specific to your own needs. I’m going to tell you a few reasons why I really loved using Capture One over the last couple of weeks and why I’m likely switching.
First, Capture One offers exceptional color correction capabilities. Its color engine is highly accurate and provides seemingly greater control over color grading, which is particularly important for professional photographers who need to match their images to specific color standards for their clients. I also found that Capture One has a wide range of tools and features that allow you to fine-tune the color and tone of your images a little bit easier than Lightroom, giving you the ability to create images that are maybe more unique and able to create a personal style easier for yourself.
I had a lot of fun using Capture One’s tools for high dynamic range images (HDR). Capture One allows you to combine multiple images with different exposure settings to create a single, high-quality image that has all the details and range of light in for one single scene. In my experience with Lightroom, it has limited support for HDR and does not offer the same level of control or flexibility that Capture One has. I also found the editing process with Capture One to be a bit faster than Lightroom. You can read about their different processing engines in their software but I just found Capture One to be a bit snappier with shorter load times and editing times. For me who spends hours glued to his desk editing working on huge numbers of photos at once, it felt like a huge time saver.
Having used Lightroom for a while, I always found their organization and cataloging process to be a bit clunky. I don’t like how restrictive it is for sorting through your library. My Lightroom has 40,000+ photos in it so the ability to find what I’m looking for quickly and efficiently doesn’t happen very often. With Capture one, I liked the layout for their library system a lot more. It felt easier to categorize and sort my library and search for the images I was looking for faster. It may be a case of my Lightroom library being disorganized and utilizing a new software allowed me to create a more efficient workflow but it did feel better from an organizational perspective.
Tethering. Utilizing the tethering feature for Capture One in my experience was a breeze compared to Lightroom. First of all whether using Lr or Lrc the functionality of the tethering process can be a lot different and its success can vary greatly. A lot of times I find myself abandoning my decision to tether shortly after and shooting straight to my camera. I’ve always wondered whether this was a simple case of user error or technical processes in the tethering but it is what it it is. I found the process of utilizing Capture One’s tethering process a breeze. It worked without fail and did not impede or slowdown my shooting process at all and I would consider that a win for Capture One.
At the end of the day, which editing software you use boils down to personal preference. My experience with both of these softwares show distinct benefits and advantages to each even if you’re a professional or hobbyist. Using Capture One has given me the opportunity to try out something new that I hadn’t used before and I really enjoyed my experience with it and can recommend you give it a try as well.
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