Capture One's Focus Mask - RAW Workflow On Steroids

Whittling down your RAW photos can be a tedious task, but Capture One has a nifty trick up its sleeve ...

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Before I switched to Capture One from Adobe Lightroom, checking focus was very time consuming. Ones ability to check focus effectively with Lightroom depends on various factors, most importantly, the size and resolution of your monitor. For some large jobs, such as weddings, the simple process of checking focus would add many hours to my workflow. Capture One has a "Focus Mask" feature, which is similar to "focus peaking", something familiar to anyone who shoots DSLR video. It will overlay green highlights on areas where prime focus is detected.

I'm editing a set of photos at the moment where the lens missed critical focus quite often (thank you Nikkor 28mm) and indeed, I was probably shooting a bit wide at f2.5. There's a couple of hundred to get through and whittle down, but thanks to Capture One's Focus Mask feature, I'm able to dispose of those shots lacking critical focus very quickly, without having to zoom in on each individual photo.

Here are my top three reasons to consider Capture One over Adobe Lightroom for your RAW workflow:

• Focus Peaking speeds up workflow on big jobs
• Working in "sessions" rather than catalogs allows you to move your image files freely without worrying about broken links
• Highly Customizable interface. Everything can be shown/hidden/resized to your liking.

You can download a one month demo of Capture One, from their website.