May 13,  · Capture One has more editing tools than Lightroom. But it’s not better than Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is much more advanced than both Capture One and Lightroom. Is There a Free Version of Capture One? Capture One is not free to use. But it offers a day free trial. You can use it to test the replace.me: Roshan Perera. Should you switch from LR Classic to Capture 1 version 12? You can also check out my C1 styles here replace.me Capture One Pro’s photo editing software provides fast and easy tethering with a lot of options. Migrating from Lightroom to Capture One: Practice practice practice! Export a high res file from Lightroom into your desired Capture One Pro Session and try to recreate the replace.meted Reading Time: 8 mins.
 
 

Capture one pro 12 or lightroom free download

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.

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 what so ever. 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 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. 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 also a new addition to Capture One 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. This tool allows you to create speed edit keys, that once you press them allow you to drag your mouse left or right to change the slider, that you assigned the speed edit key to. This could be the contrast, or exposure slider, that you assign to a specific key. It also works in browser view, so you can lift the exposure of several images using the speed edit-key, without needing to synchronize the images afterward.

Capture One photo editing software.Capture One photo editing software

This is a review of the latest version of Capture One Pro. In this Capture One Pro review, we look at its new features.

You can follow along the steps I take and try the software yourself by installing a free Capture One Pro 12 Trial. It does almost everything that you would come to expect from an advanced photo editing application plus the cataloging and organizing bit all built into one. That said, every application has its own advantages and disadvantages. And so does Capture One Pro. In this Capture One Pro review, we shall take a look at some of its features and functionalities.

In this process, we shall try to understand more about the application and its plusses and minuses. By the end of it all, we will come to a definite conclusion about how the application fares when compared to Lightroom.

You now have enhanced support for third-party plugins. Something that brings Capture One up to speed with Lightroom. Though I must add that it is still some years from having as much functionality and compatibility as Lightroom.

The interface of Capture One Pro has definitely improved since the previous version. This includes a new tool tab with new icons. These icons now more closely resemble the functions that they serve. You can now use round masks and elliptical masks.

There are also more options in variable feathering in Capture One Pro The gradient tool is very useful for adjusting exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation and a bunch of other details, particularly when editing landscape shots.

This tool has now been upgraded to give you options to choose the degree of feathering, the angle of the mask, as well the position. When you launch Capture One Pro 12 after download and installation it gives you an option to choose which workflow would be best suited for your nature of work. They both have their own advantage when it comes to editing and organizing.

Though subjectively speaking, old school photographers who are familiar with the folder structure of their computer would prefer Sessions for their photo organizing tasks. And for backing up purposes too. Ultimately, the path you choose is based on how you are going to use Capture One Pro for image organization. There are two ways of doing that in Capture One Pro The two paths are Sessions and Catalogs. It is imperative to know which option does what before you choose.

If you are going to use Capture One Pro as your secondary photo editing application then Sessions is the way to go. Sessions allow you to import your RAW images one project at a time. Sessions treat each import as a new project. Whist Capture One Pro is a very useful photo organizing software , many users may not want to use Capture One Pro for their file management.

They may already have a system in place. Every time you start a new Session, Capture One will create a new folder with the exact same name as the session name. Underneath that Parent folder Capture One will create an additional four folders.

Oh, and you will also notice that Capture One has opened a new database file under the parent folder. Each session has its own database file and that is why the system is faster than what you typically experience with Lightroom database. After about 6 months of using Lightroom and provided you have about tens of thousands of images cataloged, Lightroom will get sluggish.

The Capture folder is the one where your raw files will go. So, every time you make a tethered capture or import any raw files they will go to the Capture folder.

Selects Folder is a sort of work in progress. This is the folder where all your selects are going to be located. Next comes the Output folder. By now you must have got a hang of how these folders have been named. Finally, the Trash folder is where all the junk will reside. This includes images which you have rejected. Bear in mind that this is all just naming. It is not a recycle bin. The images are still very much in your hard drive and can be used on-demand.

The major advantage of this system is that you know exactly where your original, in-process and final output files are. Many a time we tend to get lost in our filing systems. This offers a much simpler process. You can simply copy and paste the directory structure the five folders and their contents to your external hard drive or cloud storage to make a backup copy. You could create a Catalog based on the year of the shoot. Alternatively, you could create Catalogs based on each of your assignments.

Basically, it works the way you want it to work. Sessions, on the other hand, do. If you are migrating from Lightroom you would find the Catalog approach very similar to what you have been doing all along. For an average Lightroom user, the Lightroom Catalog is a database structure of the path where their images are stored. But beyond that Lightroom Catalogs have a much wider application.

Lightroom and Capture One catalogs are very similar. They both use a database design that stores the paths leading to all your images. Regardless of where they might be, a local or an external hard drive. The problem, which some may be aware of, is that if the database gets corrupted and you can lose all your information. Information such as edits which you may have done, the location of the files along with other details will be lost.

Both systems are using a layer-based editing system. Normally, when I edit images in Lightroom the first thing that I look for is to do a quick correction of chromatic aberration and lens profile correction.

Followed by a crop of the image if my composition is off. With any software review, usability is key. Which is why in our Capture One Pro review we are testing out the navigation.

First things first, Capture One allows you to customize your toolbar. You can add and remove icons or change their location just by clicking and dragging the icons on the dashboard. You can find an array of icons on the top left corner of the dashboard. This is where your technical tools are located.

Exposure, contrast, white balance and so on. There is another panel right at the top center where you can find a majority of the other tools you will need when editing your images. These include the Pointer tool, the Hand tool, the Crop tool, the Straighten tool among others. Note that there are keyboard shortcuts for almost everything in Capture One Pro. Plus, you can change the keyboard shortcuts as you feel.

The Straighten tool is located in the middle of the center panel. Click that and you can draw a line to correct the horizon. This is very similar to the way you would use the straighten tool in Lightroom.

Capture One Pro has a similar layer-based editing option as Adobe Photoshop, and this is where you will find it. Here you have the Histogram tool, which gives you a clear indication as to what the exposure is like. You will also find a High Dynamic Range tool. This makes it easy to adjust the highlights and shadows exposures to make a more compelling HDR image. The Curve Tool can be found under the exposure tab. This offers a more fun way of editing your images.

Not only that, but it is also an easier method because you can pick your highlights, mid-tones and shadows and adjust the exposure without having to do too many separate adjustments with Exposure Sliders. As a big fan of black and white photos, this function is super important to me.

Lightroom offers simple and effective ways to develop black and white images. Similarly, Capture One Pro does, too! Their Black and White development mode can be found at the very bottom of the color tab. Whilst these were available in previous versions, their performance left something to be desired. This brings the tools on par to that of Lightroom. I definitely liked the Sessions concept in Capture One Pro Between Lightroom and Capture One Pro the latter is definitely the better in terms of file organization.

I personally find the default catalog system of Lightroom quite cumbersome to use. Backing up the Session folders is a whole lot easier and if you name them methodically it is easier to locate images from an old shoot in a matter of seconds. As a photo editing platform Capture One Pro 12 is definitely a very powerful tool that will give Lightroom a run for its money.