Why I'm Moving From Lightroom To Capture One

While Photoshop will always be my main editor, I've never really LOVED Lightroom for RAW processing..

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My good friend, local photographer Dave Kavanagh has been hounding me for months about trying Capture One, so I finally gave it a try recently when I upgraded my computer. My first impressions were not good. Everything can be shown/hidden/moved/resized. The interface is highly modular and customizable, and at first, it can be very daunting. Luckily Phase One have a ton of great training videos on their website and after watching a few and experimenting a bit, I wrapped my head around things.

Here's a session I'm working on at the moment:

As you can see, it's quite different from Lightroom. If you've been using LR for a long time, the change might be too much to warrant a switch, but it's worth exploring for a number of reasons. For starters, Capture One has layers and masks. Let me repeat that.. Capture One has LAYERS AND MASKS. This is a huge feature for many of us, as it essentially means less jumps to Photoshop.

Another feature I love is the "Focus Mask". It makes it so much quicker to dump OOF shots and whittle down to the good stuff. Fantastic if like me, you tend to overshoot. It also features some very advanced color editing, including a handy skin tone tool which evens out tonality with ease. Again, saving you work in Photoshop. These features are quite straightforward, especially once you go through some of the training videos.

I've still only scratched the surface. Capture One has a myriad of great features I really wasn't expecting. You can batch process photos in the background while you work on other things. It supports dual screens really well. But one of my favorite features is the "session" workflow. If, like me, you find the idea of a catalog restricting, you can work in single sessions with Capture One. This means you can move your RAW and image files around on your computer, and still open the project in Capture One without worrying about lost aliases. It takes a bit of getting used to, but some people will love this style of working. If you hate Adobe Lightrooms catalog system, be sure to check out Capture One.

It's not all bad for Adobe though. Lightroom is getting lots of features added over time, and with the competitive pricing of Adobe Creative Cloud, as well as the tight integration with other Adobe products, many will simply overlook Capture One, and I can't completely blame them.

So, if you want a highly advanced and powerful RAW editor, with an insanely customizable workspace, be sure to check out Capture One. I recommend it without reservation. Phase One offer a 30 day trial, and with so much video training available, you could be up and running in no time at all.
https://www.phaseone.com/en/Download.aspx

Oh, and those pics of Steph in the bath. Stay tuned!