- Capture One Lightroom Workflow
- Lightroom Presets To Capture One
- Capture One To Lightroom Download
- Migrate Capture One To Lightroom
- Capture One Import Lightroom Catalog
You cannot currently use Sony & Fuji with Lightroom. You’ll need to use Capture One or another tethering software. It’s important to note that the older your camera or computer is, the more tech issues you might face. Very old cameras might not be on the list of cameras that can tether. If you have a brand new camera, Lightroom can take a. Capture One doesn’t have that level of integration with these specific cameras as Lightroom does. And I like not being stuck with the standard profile provided by the program if I feel it doesn’t accurately reflect the original scene. I saw some youtube videos related to Capture One and after a few tests using the Fuji-only express version of Capture One I abandoned Adobe and went all-in on Capture One. Ironically, the last time I started Lightroom Adobe had patched it and now it worked much faster in my enormous catalog, but it was too little, too late. Capture One certainly has the professional-level tools to produce great-looking images, but Lightroom users shouldn’t be sidetracked by claims for Capture One’s superiority. Fundamentally, the two programs aren’t as different as some might have you believe.
Introduction
I use Capture One 20 to edit all my photos, both my old ones taken with Nikon D70, Nikon D90, Panasonic G7/GH5 and Sony A7II and glorious new photos taken with my Fuji cameras.
Capture One has a special Fuji version, which is cheaper and only works with Fuji cameras. They offer a similar version for Sony. I own a full license for the Capture One Pro 20, which handles all cameras, paid once, but they also offer a subscription-based version, similar to Lightroom.
After years with Lightroom – why change?
In mid-2019 my Lightroom catalog contained approx. 350.000 images, the first taken back in 2000. I never deleted anything and due to some failed attempts at re-organisation I’d imported lots of photos multiple times. It was a mess, a huge, overwhelming mess. Navigating this catalog was a nightmare as well so I started looking at the alternatives, but few solutions had good catalog performance and similar features, like rich metadata handling AND post-processing abilities. They were either good at metadata handling or mostly focused on photo processing (like Luminar), not both.
I’d just sold all my old photo gear and bought a Sony A7II, but trying my neighbors Fujifilm X-T2 made me switch completely to Fuji, which Lightroom didn’t handle very well, so another nail in the coffin for LR.
At the same time, Adobe did some strange changes to their subscription-based Lightroom plan, like suddenly doubling the cost for some users or telling owners of a license to old software that they might be sued if they tried to use their old software. They also seemed to focus mostly on their cloud-based solutions and lots of longtime Adobe users started looking elsewhere. All in all, they seemed to handle the whole thing rather poorly and this also strengthened my desire to find some non-Adobe alternative.
I looked at Luminar, and even bought a license for Luminar 3, but it didn’t have a catalog function at all. Later I tested Luminar 4, which had catalog features, but some of the editing features didn’t feel right, like switching out the sky in one click and adding artificial sun flares. Trying to catalog my huge amount of photos caused the software to crash after a few days of chewing through the files and when I tried to start Luminar again it never recovered.
I saw some youtube videos related to Capture One and after a few tests using the Fuji-only express version of Capture One I abandoned Adobe and went all-in on Capture One.
Ironically, the last time I started Lightroom Adobe had patched it and now it worked much faster in my enormous catalog, but it was too little, too late.
Untangling about 20 years of bad data management
I’m going to write a separate post about how I manage my photo collection, but in short, I use Capture One sessions, one for each photo event and all events sorted by year, but have planned a Master Catalog, which will contain only the selects from the separate sessions. When I consider a session to be done, I’ll import the selects into the Master Catalog and then move the session into an Archive-folder. Everything is stored on a Synology NAS, which is backed up to another local Synology NAS in addition to a cloud-based backup of everything.
I’ve imported old photos by year into sessions and are going to work through each year, sorting photos into groups/collections based on event, deleting bad ones, adding metadata, and rating as I go. Hopefully, I can export those collections into separate sessions somehow later, but as I’ll go into details below, Capture One has a few missing features and performance issues when it comes to session and catalog handling. Even if there are a few hiccups performance-wise, Capture One has nice organizing features and I feel I finally have a chance to get control over my enormous collection of photos.
What I like #1 – Small adjustments
In Lightroom I found small adjustments in a slider made huge changes to my photos. It’s probably a common problem with inexperienced user like myself coming into photo editing software to overuse tools like shadow- and highlight-recovery, clarity and sharpness. So the problem is certainly a user error, but I feel Capture One makes it easier to make small adjustments and keep my photos from looking over-processed than Lightroom.
In short, Capture One makes me feel like I’m still working with photography and not digital art.
Capture One Lightroom Workflow
What I like #2 – Layers
Capture One has great support for layers, making it easy to adjust only parts of the image and keep the adjustments separate. After lots of adjustments, you can still remove or reduce or increase the opacity of a given layer to fit the final goal.
What I like #3 – Color editor
The color editor in Capture One is more advanced than the one found in Lightroom. For a nice introduction to the color editor go here.
What I like #4 – Customizable user interface
You can customize the Capture One interface to better fit your own needs. I especially like defining my own panel with the tools I use the most, in the order of how I edit my photos so my post-processing workflow is manifested in the editing software.
What I like #5 – Support for Fuji film simulations
I’ve writtena separate post about Fuji film simulations and these are also found and applied by Capture One on import, which is a great starting point for additional processing.
What I like #6 – Tutorials on YouTube
At least in the past months, there has been new official Capture One related live streams or youtube videos every week. There are already lots of tutorials available on PhaseOne’s (the publisher of Capture One) website, but the live streams with guests are on youtube are especially nice and is a great way of building a community around a piece of software.
What I like #7 – Helps me focus on producing a few good photos
Lightroom Presets To Capture One
That might sound strange, but when you use Capture One sessions it will build a folder structure with one folder for all your imported photos, on for trash, one for output, and one for selects. The folder called selects are meant for the few, the best of the bunch and they’re kept separately. This mindset has made me more aware of sorting out the really good photos and setting those aside. If I take 1000 photos at an event I want only 10-15 in my selects folder (ok, sometimes a few more 😉 ) – that’s where to gold is.
I also like that my finished photos are processed and the produced JPEGs, or TIFs, are placed in the output folder. It keeps the folder structure simple.
Capture One To Lightroom Download
What I don’t like
- Capture One 20 has crashed multiple times. It seems to hang some times, especially when closing one session to change to a different one. This is very annoying and will hopefully be fixed. Keeping the catalogs and sessions small in size seems to cause fewer problems.
- When importing large numbers of photos Capture One 20 becomes very sluggish after about 15.000-20.000 photos. We’re talking 2-3 photos per second on import. It also seems to be very harddrive dependant and a fast SSD is required for larger sessions.
My whishlist
- Be able to export a collection in a session or catalog to a new or an already existing session, optionally removing the collection from the source. In my workflow, I cull all my images, then process the selects and when done I want to export the selects into an existing master catalog.
- Support for automation and scripting, preferably using processing recipes, perhaps using Python as scripting language instead of AppleScript. AppleScript is very limited and using a more popular language would make more people use it. Like in point 1, I have a specific workflow, and after the processing of the selects are done (and they have been exported to the master catalog), I’d like to archive the current session and move it into a specific archive location. I want to be able to do this in one operation (export to master catalog, archiving the original session). This is just one example, but good support for automation like this would be great.
- Merge & stacking features for HDR or panorama, similar to Lightroom.
- More plugins! I tried submitting a plugin request, but the provided email failed :-(. An open standard or at least a easy-to-use SDK for the development of plugins would be great.
- Plugins for direct upload to Instagram, 500px, Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, SquareSpace, WordPress sites etc from inside Capture One.
In conclusion
I love Capture One for the editing features. I almost love the organizing features if the performance can be fixed and add a few features for organizing & automation. Capture One has been a perfect fit for my transition to a more mindful photography mindset, with a better focus on producing a few good photos. There seems to be a nice community among the Capture One users.
Further reading/watching
Capture One Facebook resources
Migrate Capture One To Lightroom
There have been many articles been written comparing Lightroom (LR) and Capture One (CO) and favoring one over the other. I have been using Lightroom for years and have been using Capture One for about 1 year now. In my experience both have their merits and problems. In the following overview I like to highlight the strength (in no particular order or claim of completeness) of each application to show that both tools can complement each other.
- The Library module in LR is great for organizing your images. I am currently having about 40k images in my catalog without any problems. There have been reports of people using several 100k images without any performance issues.
- LR Mobile is a great way of synchronizing your pictures from your mobile devices to your LR catalog. It is also a great way to having your portfolio in your pocket or doing some basic editing of your image when you do not have access to your computer.
- LR has a huge library of lens profiles that allows it to correct almost every lens you come across. If there is not profile for your specific lens, Adobe provides a free tool to create your own lens profiles.
- In LR you have the ability to fine-tune your camera profile and select between the ones which are already build into your camera.
- The spot healing brush in LR works like a charm. Especially with the possibility to draw custom shapes.
- Generally it seems that LR is a bit snappier than CO (note that my computer does not have a dedicated GPU) - Everything is stored in a single catalog. This makes backups quite easy.
- LR smart previews are a great way to store your images in an external HD but still be able to access them (also at a lower resolution) without having to access the external storage. This is useful for organization task or for simply experimenting with some new processing ideas on the road.
- LR built-in book module is extremely convenient. While it has less features than comparable tools and it is mostly tied to one publisher (unless you export a PDF version), the ability to quickly switch between the book module and the develop module is priceless. For instance when you notice that you have overseen a sensor dust spot and quickly switch into the develop module to fix it and jump right back out to the book module.
- The image quality of the RAW conversion in CO is definitively better than in LR. You might be able to tweak LR default conversion but generally speaking you will have a hard time to achieve the same quality that CO provides out of the box.
- Many adjustments in CO can (for better or worse) be pushed much further than in LR and generally speaking do not look artificial when pushed to the extreme.
- The color editor in CO beats everything you have in LR and even can compete with Photoshop functions. In particular the uniformity feature is quite useful when retouching portraits.
- Besides catalogs, Capture One supports also sessions. Sessions are a great way to organizing individual shoots and are self-contained.
- CO supports layers. While the layer support, in particular the healing and cloning support, is somewhat limited in CO, the possibility to group your changes into layers is very useful.
- The latest version of CO introduced a new tool that makes color grading a bliss.
- CO has a tool called Capture Pilot which allows you to see and rate your image on your mobile device. The way it works is by CO staring a server on your computer and Capture Pilot connecting to it via the local WIFI. Unlike LR mobile which needs to sync everything through the cloud this provides a serious performance boost. This is particular useful if your internet connection is slow or non existing. Additionally Capture Pilot allows you to zoom into the pictures at full resolution. LR mobile only synchronizes lower resolution files and you are stuck with them.
- CO has a manual distortion correction tools that require some manual intervention but generally are more precise than LR's upright function that either works or not. Best of all CO allows you to specify how much the distortion should be corrected. Sometimes a 100% correct distortion looks weird.
- CO lens correction tool. Wait was this not a point in LR favor?!? Yes, LR has more lens profiles but CO provides finer control how those profiles are applied to your image. For example you can control to what degree the vignette or the sharpness falloff should be corrected.
- CO vignette tool. It consists of only one slider for applying either a darkening or brightening vignette. Compared to LR, which provides 3 different modes and 5 different sliders, this seems awfully limited. Yet, at least in my opinion, CO vignette looks better, more organic and less artificially.
- Another great feature in CO is the loupe tool that allows you to inspect part of the image without having to zoom into the whole file. Best of all, this works on all thumbnails views and really speeds up your workflow.
- The tethering support in CO is outstanding and outperforms LR tethering support by orders of magnitude. Not only allows CO to control almost every aspect of your camera it also supports live-view to check your focus and composition. In particular I like the ability to fine-tune the focus within CO.
- CO noise reduction seems to produce better results than LR. This is especially true for extreme cases with lots of color noise and hot pixels.
Capture One Import Lightroom Catalog
As outlined above both tools have their merits and I keep using both of them. At some later point I will post an overview on when and how I use both them. If you need to choose between either you must weigh your personal preferences: which user interface resonates more with you, which features are more important for type of photography and workflow.