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.
Color is a complex thing. It doesn’t get its intensity solely from saturation, but also from contrast. This can include color contrast with colors on opposite sides of the color wheel, brightness contrast between bright and dark colors, and another type of contrast we can call ’saturation contrast’. This is where you contrast strongly saturated…
Generally, those who object to subscription software do so on principle while those who embrace it do it out of practicality. That’s two different sets of reasons.
This is a great tool when you’re working with lenses that suffer from vignetting. Most modern lenses are pretty good in this respect and Capture One will usually have a lens profile that corrects vignetting and distortion and chromatic aberration at the same time. But if you’re working with older vintage lenses, or cheap lo-fi…
The new Dehaze slider in Capture One 21 shares the same name as the tool in Lightroom, and the same aim – to reduce atmospheric haze in outdoor shots and restore contrast and depth. Capture One 21 does this using some advanced algorithms and a ‘matrix’ of adjustments which aren’t disclosed. Lightroom appears to use…
Capture One 21 adds some interesting new features, many of which are aimed at improving the image importing and editing workflow. The new Dehaze tool may prove to be the most immediately useful, though.
The radial filter tool in Capture One, Lightroom and other image editors is great for ‘relighting’ scenes to add drama and depth.
I’m a big fan of LUTs (lookup tables). They are used in cinematography to give movies a specific ‘look’ but they’ve now crossed over into stills photography, where they are used for everything from vintage effects to film simulations.
You might assume your RAW processing software shows you everything captured by the camera, but that’s not always the case. Where the camera is applying digital lens corrections, there may be more ‘image’ outside the regular image area that you wouldn’t normally see.
Which is best for processing RAW files, DxO PhotoLab, Lightroom or Capture One? Here’s a set of eight image comparisons that aims to find out.
Global HSL adjustments aren’t very useful. If you shift the global hue of an image it quickly looks wrong. The real strength of the HSL system is the way it lets you separate and edit individual colors.