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.
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?
Dodging and burning isn’t just an old-school black and white darkroom technique. It’s just as useful on color images, and Capture One’s Style Brushes update this classic technique with powerful digital enhancements.
Recreating the look of analog films is a surprisingly subtle job that can require several different tools. There are of course magic filters for mobile apps that attempt to achieve the analog look, and desktop applications that have powerful and effective analog presets, like the DxO Nik Collection or ON1 Photo RAW. For this project I’m creating my analog effect manually in Capture One – though you can do the same in Lightroom (see the brief instructions at the end) and other photo editors.
Verdict: 4.6 stars Capture One Pro is not cheap. It’s not designed for beginners, and it doesn’t have Adobe’s cloud-based ecosystem – yet. But it’s excellent for tethered shooting, it offers both session-based and catalog-based workflows and its editing tools and output are superb.
DxO PureRAW integrates really well with Lightroom. You can send a RAW file to PureRAW from within Lightroom for processing and it’s returned to your catalog ready to use. It will even have any edits you’ve previously applied in Lightroom. Capture One does not offer an equivalent workflow, but there is still a simple way to send raw files to PureRAW and get them returned to your catalog.
Sensor dust is an issue with most interchangeable lens cameras, and some more than others. My old Sony A6000 was particularly badly affected, as this landscape image shows. The closer you look at the sky in the top left region, the more spots you see. In fact they are everywhere, all across this image.
The Capture One Pro October 2023 update has brought a new AI masking (AI Select) tool to compete with Adobe Lightroom’s own AI masking options. So how does it work, is Capture One’s AI masking as good as Lightroom’s and will it really save you time and effort?
Well, there’s quite a lot, as it happens, and it affects the way you store, access and organize your photos
You can read the full details in Capture One’s official bulletin, though this offers so many alternative scenarios for existing users that they do become a little hard to follow – but perpetual licenses will no longer offer feature updates or even traditional upgrade discounts.