Capture One 23 is on its way: here are the new features

There’s no definite date yet for the release of Capture One 23, but the company is running a special offer for new users where, if you buy Capture One 22 now, you’ll get Capture One 23 free. This looks like it’s for new users only, and existing license owners will have to pay an upgrade fee. If you’re on a subscription, you’ll get Capture One 23 automatically.

So what are these new features, how excited should we be and will it be worth existing users paying to upgrade? Let’s have a run-through.

Smart Adjustments

“Reduce editing time massively with Smart Adjustments. Get a similar look across photos that are shot under different lighting conditions by automatically adjusting Exposure and White Balance – optimized for portraits, weddings, or other jobs featuring people.”

So it looks as if you can edit one shot in a sequence to perfection and then apply it across a whole batch to achieve a consistent look with minimal effort. This looks a bit smarter than regular copy/paste clipboard adjustments, so it will be interesting to see how effective this is.

Faster culling

“Cull your images even faster. Rate and tag images directly in the importer or using the dedicated cull view once your images are already in Capture One Pro. Get an easier overview of similar images with automatic group view, letting you choose your top selects even quicker. Plus, instant browsing allows you to click through your images with zero delay.”

This does look interesting. Capture One is already flexible enough in its display options to make culling relatively easy, but anything that can make it quicker still would be great. Commercial photographers can come away from an even or a shoot with thousands of images, many of which are ‘just in case’ variations on the same shot. Even if you’re quick at culling, it can be a tedious, time-consuming process.

Layers in Styles

“Have more control over editing and full flexibility over your Style workflow with the ability to include Layers in Styles. Apply your edits to multiple Layers from a single Style, allowing for easy opacity control and versatility. Save your own Styles with Layers in them or get layered versions of Capture One Style Packs.”

Well this is interesting. It’s hard to imagine the same local adjustment mask working effectively across a range of different images, but it could still be a real time-saver to have a gradient filter already set up in a preset, for example, so that all you have to do is adjust its position to suit the shot – and it’s easy to think of lots of other situations where layers in Styles would be useful.

Change capture time

“Ensure accurate order of photos for easier culling by changing capture time. When shooting with two or more cameras that are out of sync or capture time is set to the wrong time zone, easily adjust the time on each image so they appear chronologically. Culling is made easier by being presented with all images from certain moments or similar shots in the right order.”

Capture One’s description, above, tells you everything you need to know. I would add that I have lots of images with incorrect capture times because I didn’t set the camera clock correctly and I would LOVE to be able to put them right.

Variants in albums

“Easily sort different variants of the same image into separate albums, allowing for more efficient photo organization.”

AT LAST! If this is what I think it is, it means that you can now separate Variants to put them into different albums, something you’ve always been able to do in Lightroom. It drives me mad that Capture One (so far) has insisted on keeping them locked together in a group.

Reviewer Management in Live

“Control exactly who is invited to your Capture One Live session and what they are able to see or do, whether that’s allowing a user to only be able to view images while giving another the ability to rate, tag, and comment.”

I don’t use Live, so I can’t comment on how useful this would be, but I can see that if you have multiple stakeholders in an ad shoot for example, that you might want to control what they can see, say and do individually.

So that’s all we know about Capture One 23 right now, but it looks like there are some seriously useful features in there that will make it worth the wait.

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