Capture One is an all-in-one image capture (tethered shooting), cataloguing and editing application first launched by Danish company Phase One but now operating as a standalone software publisher. Born out of its medium format studio camera products, Capture One is now a professional RAW conversion tool for DSLR and mirrorless camera owners too. It’s a premium Lightroom rival that concentrates on image quality, fast and efficient editing and a choice of workflows aimed at busy professionals.
I use Capture One’s Auto Adjust option a lot. I’m sure some will insist that professionals only use manual adjustments and Auto Adjust is for amateurs, but I’d like to explain why I think that’s wrong, and why Auto Adjust is actually a lot more powerful and useful than you might think.
Capture One and Lightroom both offer image cataloguing tools with powerful organization and search capabilities, but they both rely on an import process. And, if you make changes outside your catalog, you’ll have to synchronize or re-link your image files. Capture One Sessions are different. They are like ‘live’ browsing. And they are not just for tethered shooting.
Digitizing analog negatives is easier said than done. Black and white film poses no problems, but the orange/amber mask of color negative film is a real headache for photo editors, producing strong and unpredictable colour shifts even from one shot to the next. Capture One’s update promises to fix that with concrete digitizing advice and time-saving negative conversion tools.
So yes, Lightroom does have a Tone Curve panel which kind of does the same thing as levels adjustments, but you have to drag the black point and white point control points manually for each image – there’s no auto option. And yes, you can use Lightroom’s Auto tone adjustments, but these adjust eight different sliders at once, which is equally annoying. It’s why I keep going back to Capture One.
So far in this series I’ve looked at black and white conversion tools, basic black and white tonal adjustments and the different ways you can use digital dodging and burning to bring black and white images to life. But if you want to make them look actually old, there’s a bit more to do. It’s not one single technique you need, but a whole bunch used together.
I’ve had a fascination with the Leica ‘look’ ever since I first went on a shoot with a digital Leica M rangefinder. The contrast and colors were exceptionally intense, the M-series lenses added a subtle vignette at wider apertures and there was an intriguing shift in the color palette compared to the clinical accuracy of other cameras.
In this article I want to explain the difference between what I’ll call ‘image browsers’ and ‘image cataloguers’. Image cataloguing tools like Adobe Lightroom import your photos into a database and offer very sophisticated, very adaptable organizing and search options. But they bring their own limitations and complications. What’s the alternative?
I’ve been puzzling over this for a while but now I think I know the answer. This is how Capture One (and DxO too, by the way), can appear to ‘see’ a wider angle of view than the camera can. It’s a particular characteristic of wide-angle lens corrections that looks like it shouldn’t even be possible but has a rational and extremely interesting explanation.
There’s this idea in digital photography that your gear or your software must be at the heart of everything you do. That’s not true. The art of photography lies not in the tools you use, but knowing what to do with them.
Capture One can apply automatic lens corrections to fix all the common lens aberrations – distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting. But then why does it sometimes show Manufacturer Profiles or Generic profiles instead?