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.
Capture One lets you save adjustments for re-use in the future, but it can be confusing because it offers user ‘presets’ and user ‘styles’ without being terribly clear about the difference. In other programs, ‘presets’ usually refer to sets of adjustments applied all at once, but Capture One presets are subtly different. So to make…
Capture One Pro has some very good localised adjustment tools. You can create gradient filter effects and paint on manual adjustments, just as you can in Lightroom, but I think Capture One Pro’s system of adjustment layers and masks works a lot better. I’m going to show how simple and effective they can be with…
Keystone correction is usually used to fix converging verticals in architectural shots – that’s the most obvious use for the Capture One keystone correction tools – but this vertical keystone correction isn’t the only kind you’ll need. Keystone distortion happens when you tilt the camera relative to your subject, and this can mean horizontal tilt…
Newcomers to Capture One may be confused by its talk of ‘Sessions’, which are an alternative way of browsing, selecting and editing pictures that’s still available, even though Capture One Pro now offers Aperture and Lightroom style image catalogs. ‘Sessions’ exist because Capture One isn’t just another image cataloguing and editing tool. In fact, its…
Export sharpening is a setting that’s often overlooked when you generate images for online or on-screen viewing, but it makes a big difference to how sharp your pictures look. Every time you resample an image, you introduce a degree of blur because the software has to interpolate new pixel values – and this applies when…
The Capture One Color Editor is designed for subtle manipulation, not wholesale colour substitutions. It has much in common with the Replace Color tool in Photoshop and Elements, but restricts itself to modest hue shifts rather than complete colour changes. It’s really useful where the image as a whole is more or less right, but…
If you use a digital SLR, it’s hard to avoid dust spots on the sensor. But if you’re using Capture One, you can fix the dust on one image and then apply the same correction to a whole batch. You can do this because sensor spots don’t move. Once you’ve got a spot, it’ll be…
Capture One provides a system of internal adjustment layers so that you can make localised adjustments to your pictures. These aren’t directly compatible with the adjustment layers in Photoshop and Elements – they just share the same name – but they are saved with your images in the Capture One library, so you can go…
Capture One, Aperture and Lightroom combine image cataloguing, browsing and non-destructive editing in a way that makes it possible to enhance whole batches of images both quickly and consistently. In particular, they let you choose the perfect set of adjustments for a single representative image in the batch, then copy them across wholesale to all…
Like Aperture and Lightroom, Capture One Pro is one of the new wave of all-in-one image cataloguing, editing and RAW conversion programs that use completely non-destructive editing tools to enhance your images. This means they all have a very special ability – they can create any number of ‘virtual’ versions of the same photo without…