Capture One vs Lightroom (Which is Really Better?)

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12 Best Lightroom Alternatives in (Updated Weekly).Lightroom vs Capture One: Important Differences You Need to Know

Capture One seems to be much better at sharpening photos in a non-destructive way. It also has a special Structure tool that can help you bring out the textures. Capture One is a tool more focused on capturing the professional photography market and hence has primarily been designed as a professional RAW processor.

Lightroom 6 vs capture one pro 11 free

Do you want to use the best RAW image editor and digital asset manager for your images? We compare Capture One vs. Lightroom on some of the key features that might make a difference to the picky photographer.

Capture One has been on the market for more than a decade, however, in recent years it catches up to the functionality of Lightroom has become a favorite photo editor for professional photographers. Aside all the RAW processing power both products offer, a big part of digital asset management is the ability to catalog, filter, rate and sort all your digital images.

Like Lightroom, Capture One can open files from your hard drive s and work on them directly without moving them anywhere, however. Sessions are typically used for a per-shoot basis like client assignments where you want to sort, select and output the images loaded into the session, without wanting to access them regularly.

Catalogs are more designed for containing your entire body of photographic work. In Capture One you can also work with a combination of both sessions and catalogs. Capture One also features the standard Digital Asset Management DAM tools to help you categorize your images in folders, albums, smart albums, searching filters, and keywords. But you can find those pretty much in all organizational software pieces. Both apps allow you to add tags and star ratings when culling images. However, if you are used to flagging photos in Lightroom , you will miss it, if if you switch to C1.

Now, when we start talking about exporting from the catalog things get more interesting. However, in Capture One you can select multiple recipes to run at the same time. I find that really useful when exporting for different social media channels or providing clients with full-size images for print and images for their social media. Something really clever Capture One is the annotations. Everything you do is completely non-destructive.

Moreover, now you can apply styles equal to presets in Lightroom to layers and tweak the opacity for lower intensity. Something else Capture One offers is the creation of masks from selections through the color editor and the use of refine edge tools.

Both applications offer gradual filters and with version 12, Capture one introduced radial filter just like the one in Lightroom.

This tool really saves you a lot of time, since it allows you to limit your masks to certain luminosity ranges in your image and only work on them. This is a really powerful tool, because it gives you the option to copy those adjustments across all images from the same shoot with similar light conditions, regardless if your subject moved or the composition changed!

You paint your adjustments with a filter or a brush. If you want to go back and correct things — you can with the only real downside being that you cannot name the adjustments.

Color has always been a subjective topic when it comes to photography and photo editing. Adobe is the leader in the image editing and processing software, so their color game is top-notch, but Capture One is developed by Phase One.

Phase One is not just a software company. They are a camera manufacturer company and one that produces top of the range medium format cameras. Capture One uses image color profiles designed for each specific camera model. You can switch between those ICC profiles and the different Curves they offer or choose the Linear Response which is your true RAW file, without any adjustments added by the camera whatsoever. It has a few different modes of display and is especially a group of sliders for each of the main colors — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, and Magenta.

With those sliders, you can adjust the values of these colors changing their intensity, lightness, and hue. Something very useful Lightroom offers is the HSL color picker which allows you to alter colors with directly clicking and dragging on the picture. Capture One, on the other hand, has the Color Editor, which is more or less the same thing with the main difference being it is visually presented as a color wheel. But here comes the advantage of the Color Editor.

In the Advanced tab, you can use the color picker to select the color you wish to edit and narrow it down with smoothness and then change the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. This really helps with removing some colored skin spots and differences in hue on the skin.

When comparing Capture One vs Lightroom, I dare not say which software is better in editing RAW images, they both have their pros and cons. However, overall Capture One offers more in-depth color editing and finer refinement tools.

You can apply styles directly to the image you see on the screen before capturing it. You can also send the live view from the camera directly over to the Capture Pilot App letting others see instantly what is happening, and let them rate each shot as well.

This is great if your clients are with you in the studio. A very big advantage for Lightroom is the popularity of the software. Building up a collection of Lightroom presets can really speed up your workflow. While Capture One has their equivalent — styles, the feature is still pretty new, and not that many options have popped up for sale, yet.

For better or for worse, when it comes to customization Lightroom has been known to almost not have any option, with very few things you can move around, show or hide.

Lightroom looks like it has always looked. Definitely, a perk if, for example, you share your computer with someone else, as everything will always look the same. Capture One is the opposite. Customizable everything. You can change the default workspaces, put tools anywhere on the screen and even duplicate tools to create new custom tools.

A prime example of that is the curves tool. In Capture One you can duplicate the curves tool twice and have a Red, Green and Blue curve at the same time showing each color separate and with their individual values. On top of that, you can also change the keyboard shortcuts and create your own workflow by changing the default values for each tool you use.

Straight from the camera, your images will look slightly better in Capture One, with a little more saturation, and with more vivid colors. It is only a tiny bit, but you will feel like a better photographer. However, this might not be your preferred starting point for editing your photos.

This is about how Lightroom and Capture One decide to interpret your RAW files, and it might also be a bit matter of taste. Even though there is no consensus about it, a lot of photographers who make a switch from Lightroom to Capture One, end up saying that they perceive the image quality to be better in Capture One. Especially photographers using Fuji cameras report that Capture One renders Fuji x-trans images much better than Adobe Lightroom does.

Performance is generally better in Capture One. In terms of performance and speed comparing Capture One vs. Lightroom, you will find that Lightroom is the slower one. It often lags when browsing images, which is not the case with Capture One. Also, during preview generation after importing photos, you will likely notice that Capture One is considerably faster.

Before making a switch from Lightroom to Capture One, it is also worth considering if you are dependent on specific plugins. Therefore the number of plugins for Capture One is still fairly limited. If you want to automatically upload client images to an online portfolio or client photo galleries as the final step of your image editing workflow, you are limited to using Format.

Compared to Lightroom, Capture One is maybe a little more difficult to master. This is mainly because there are more features and more things you can control in Capture One. However, for just a basic editing workflow , Capture One is not more difficult to learn. Lightroom Presets Pack:.

With Capture One 20 May update , some new tools were introduced. This includes a new clone tool, which replaces the need to take a roundtrip to Photoshop for cloning out artifacts. Your clone work will automatically end up on a separate layer.

This allows you to undo everything or change the opacity and so on with a few clicks. The healing tool is a new addition to Capture One 20 in May It works as expected, just like in Photoshop, and does a great job. In most cases, this tool also saves you a roundtrip to Photoshop. A popular selection tool in Photoshop is the Select Color Range tool. Just select a color range using the color picker tool in the advanced color editor tab and click on the action menu …. Using styles in Capture One is also more flexible vs.

Presets in Lightroom. Because of the possibility to add styles to layers in Capture One and the ability to stack multiple styles , you will find more ways to use styles in Capture One than you can for presets in Lightroom. Spot healing works better in Capture One. One of the most important points about spot healing is that the result looks better in Capture One.

Capture One allows you to save default values for almost anything. Not only that, you can save default values for each tool in the interface for each camera you use. This can be a big time saver when using different cameras. One of the really awesome things in Capture One is its focus mask feature. When you enable the focus mask, a mask overlay will appear, showing which areas are in focus.

The focus mask even works while browsing in grid mode or comparing images side by side, showing a focus mask for each image.

The Loupe tool also works from grid view, in browser mode, or on a single image. The new heal and clone tools in Capture One 20 make it less likely that you will have to take your image into Photoshop to remove complex artifacts or objects from your images.

In the May update, Capture One introduced a new before and after viewer. It allows you to see your image before and after your enhancements. However, Capture One takes this a step further by allowing you to compare multiple images before and after at the same time. With the latest version of Capture One , you get a new speed edit tool.