12 Capture One Features You Won't Find in Lightroom

how's it going everyone this week I'm going to share with you 12 ways in which capture one may be a better photo processing app than Adobe library good to see you again my name is Todd domine I make videos every week here on YouTube on the topic of landscape photography I do product reviews a photography gear and I also do photo processing tutorials as well so this week I'm going to be talking about capture one after last week when I did a video highlighting ten of my favorite tips and photo editing techniques using Adobe Lightroom I have been using Adobe Lightroom since the very first beta when it came out and I mean I've been using Photoshop since I mean it's yeah it's it's a very long time I mean I guess you could say I'm kind of a die-hard Adobe user I've been using Lightroom and Photoshop for so long I'm so comfortable with them and I'm just quite frankly never seen the point of trying out anything different but all that changed a few weeks ago where I've just been hearing things over the past you know two to three years about capture one and I decided you know what I'm gonna download it I'm gonna give it a try and you know just out of curiosity and just see how different it is from Lightroom and Photoshop before we start talking about capture one though there are a couple of small items of business that I want to get to I've had some people contact me and ask me about prints people who are curious to know if I sell prints of my landscape photography work and up until this point the answer has always been no not out of a philosophical thing or anything like that but just simply because I just wasn't selling them at the time I wasn't creating them well I just want to announce here and let people know that I am currently building out a new portfolio website which is something I've been wanting to do anyway and as part of that sites I'm going to be selling a limited edition prints of my work this is one in particular that I'm going to be selling this is one I I think I yeah I showcase this in a couple of videos now this was shot out in Death Valley California another image here's another one that I'm going to be selling this is one that I shot out in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico this is a black and white print obviously very minimalist one of my favorite sand dune photos that I've captured so if you're interested in prints I'll be talking more about that soon okay one last item of business I apologize for the delay I just had a lot to talk about in this video I need to give away one of these nd filters a month ago I shared a review where I picked up eight solid neutral density filters all three stopped 82 millimeter compared them all head-to-head ran them through a whole bunch of tests in that review I mentioned the fact that you know as a way of saying thank you to those of you who've been leaving just really wonderful insightful comments been asking questions I thought the least I could do would be to give away one of the top and D filters from that review so to pick a winner I took all the comments from that video and I put them into one of those online random picker applications believe it or not it's a thing and the winner the one that came out on top the one that has their pick of one of these three nd filters is extra gesture 1975 now because diem is not a thing with YouTube there's no way for me to reach out and get in touch with you ex gesture 1975 great name by the way get in touch with me my email address is down below in the description ok sorry for the long intro but let's get into it let's talk about capture one if you've never heard of capture one capture one is not made by Adobe unlike everything else in the world but capture one is made by a company called phase one phase one is the company that manufactures those crazy expensive high-resolution digital medium format cameras you may have seen one here are their before the thing that's really interesting about capture one is that typically when a camera company makes their own proprietary software for their own camera equipment the results typically aren't that great and people tend to ignore that software and use industry standard tools like Photoshop and Lightroom instead now as I said at the beginning of this video I have not been using capture one for very long I just downloaded a trial a couple of weeks ago but I've been using it a lot to edit images with and I've come up with twelve ways that I think are very compelling ok feature number one and it's a big one layers you can see them by you know opening the layers palette here and the first thing you see here is background and background is just basically like the single layer and Lightroom but if you want to add additional ones you come over here to this plus symbol and you can add an empty layer a filled layer a clone layer a heal layer and by doing this then you're able to more effectively separate your work you could separate things like color edits from exposure you could separate any of your cloning or healing or you know removing dust and scratches and you know think about it especially if you use Photoshop and if you divide these things up across multiple layers you can do the same thing here in capture one ok feature number two RGB values now I guess it's because I've done a lot of digital design in my professional career but I just love being able to see numerical RGB values when editing a photo so when you mouse over the image here you're able to see up here in the top toolbar and capture one it displays the numerical RGB values of whatever is underneath your pointer it's fantastic because a lot of times your eyes can deceive you when you know trying to accurately judge color of an image but numbers don't lie and being able to see it an RGB numerical RGB form is really helpful this actually goes one step further into you know something that I think is just really brilliant so if you go to this drop-down and select add color readout you can drop these little RGB channel displays wherever you want them so I can put one there and I could put one there where there's you know a strong highlight happening on these trees here the reason this is useful is because if you're doing product photography or really any kind of work where you want to make sure that not only is your white balance correct but you want to make sure that your your shadows and your highlights are color neutral as well because sometimes you can get color cast in one of those areas you can drop one of these color readouts over that space and then I can be making adjustments to white balance I can adjust the tint and might changes update in real time with these readouts okay feature number three presets in capture one are contextual to the controls what does that mean well if you currently use Lightroom you are undoubtedly familiar with presets you know presets are a way of saving settings from the develop panel and the way that Adobe design presets is that a preset in Lightroom can include you know values for everything in the develop panel I mean like every single setting or it could just include like one settings change it's literally a one-size-fits-all approach the way that capture one did it however the way that that makes this app different is that presets are contextual so for example I could come down here to film grain open this preset drop-down here and I can see that capture one comes pre-built with some built-in presets that I can choose from to be applying film grain but then as you can see I can also create my own value from film grain I can save it as a preset I can then share that preset with someone else is it better to have presets contextual and localized to the controls or is it better to have all your presets in one panel that you can go to as they are in Lightroom I mean I guess it depends on how your own brain works and what your what you're comfortable with but I have to say I'm very surprised how much I like having presets just right where I'm actually doing the work and that way I know where they are feature number for superior handling of highlights now I have to say this really took me by surprise when I started editing a raw file an image that I was already very familiar with in Lightroom and seeing how it would be processed by capture one let me show you what I'm talking about this particular image here that you're looking at this was shot in Banff up in Canada last year and it's intentionally a bit blown out this is actually one frame of three separate exposures that I shot in order to create an HDR image as you can see back here in the background these Peaks are you know rather blown out you know it's it's actually almost clipped if I mouse over the highlight clipping up here you can see this little red patch down here now what you can do in order to you know help normalize the image and bring back some of the detail there is to drop the highlights down now let's take a look at the exact same thing exact same technique and capture one I'm going to switch over to capture one and now this is the exact same raw file if I come over here to where highlights are which is in this panel called high dynamic range and then drop highlights down again to let's just go all the way to negative 100 there is a noticeable difference between how capture one handled the highlights in this region versus Photoshop I'm going to show them side-by-side here for you so that you can see the capture one on the left and Lightroom on the right and I think you will agree that I mean there is a real difference between the two if it's hard to see on your screen because you know you're looking at it on a phone or something like that what I would recommend doing download capture 1 opening opening up a file do something very similar to what I'm doing here and judge the results for yourself because based on what I'm seeing in this image and other images that I've been testing this out with as far as dropping those highlights to see how they behave capture one by and large does a better job the results are always clear there's more detail and it just looks nicer and it's kind of hard to describe but you just have to see it for yourself okay feature number five annotations this kind of reminds me of like the old darkroom days where a photographer would write on a on a print or on a contact sheet with a grease pencil really really cool there's a little toolbar up here at the top where you can select the annotations tool and they can come in here and you can draw on things you can circle things you could I mean especially if you were doing like a demonstration video like this and you wanted to talk about perspective lines or about leading lines or whatever this little annotations tool is just so cool because then you can just draw right on top of the photo you can erase your lines get rid of them it's just a really handy little tool that capture one provides which is not in Lightroom feature number six the luma curve in capture one you have a combined RGB view which you know when you pull this curve down colors become more saturated I talked about this last week in my Lightroom video and then when you push it back up colors become less saturated as the image gets brighter but the one thing that capture one provides which is very unique and usually you've needed Photoshop to do this not with its curves tool but with other tools and that's too complicated to get into but what capture one provides is a luma curve and what luma does luma is a lot like the RGB curve in which if you push the curve up then the image gets brighter but then watch what happens when I pull the curve down the shadows in the darker areas of the image get darker but the colors are left alone the colors don't become more saturated unlike the RGB view or rather the RGB curve where everything just gets really dense and muddy and then you have to go into your HSL panel and start pull saturation luma is you know just it only affects the luminosity of a pixel it doesn't change the underlying color that's associated with it feature number seven graduated filters have access to every setting not just a subset of them so here we are in Lightroom here and let me just draw a graduated filter on top of the image here now when you do that the filter has its own little submenu here that shows exposure contrast highlights shadows but the thing is though is that this is only a subset of what's available in the develop panel there are certain things missing like you can't be making adjustments to vibrancy you couldn't use a curve or anything like that with a graduated filter you have to use one of these values as part of this submenu of options whereas in capture one the way that it does it if I come up here and select a linear gradient mask and then draw this on top of the photo you'll see that in the left column over here all of the values reset back to their default value and that's because I'm now editing a mask so masks you can go in and change exposure saturation clarity curbs whatever it is you want to do you have access to everything in this panel okay feature number eight visual color adjustments if you've ever watched someone else to do a Lightroom tutorial video in the editing color chances are you've probably seen them do something like this and they'll take a slider in the HSL panel and they'll move it all the way to the left they'll crank it all the way to the right and the reason that you know people are doing that is because when you're moving these sliders it's not immediately apparent you know what in the image is going to be affected when you start moving a slider now there is a way to be a little more targeted you can select this little targeting tool here I could click on click and hold in the sky and then move up and down and that'll push the corresponding hues sliders left and right over here in the hue panel so what's brilliant about capture one is I'll switch over here and use a different image so it's a little bit easier to see on a video in the color panel any color editor panel inside of the color column over here if you go to advanced and then use this eyedropper tool here let's just click on the sky and at first it doesn't seem like much is happening but if you keep scrolling down you'll see this check box for view selected color range toggle that on and you can see that now it's almost like a mask has been applied and while I'm here I should also point out it has this really awesome color wheel here and this is somewhat similar to a video editor tool where you can decrease or rather expand the range of hues that are selected here you can compress it as well you can come down and make all kinds of adjustments - hue/saturation and by the way this is getting back to my earlier point about layers well that pattern resurfaces here in the color editor because I can then let's just say let me toggle this off really quick I can then use the same color picker I can pick blue and now the blue tones in my image have been selected and the reason this is so helpful is because it's then it's the selection is already saved so I can go back later if I made adjustments of color and then started doing some things with exposure or whatever and then felt a need to go back and change those colors again maybe shift their hue a little bit or their saturation I can do that really easily because it's saved as one of the layers here in this panel feature number nine skin tones now I am not a portrait photographer so this isn't really applicable to me but if you do portrait work and you find yourself spending a lot of time editing skin tones because skin can be really difficult to edit you might want to give capture one a try because down here in the color editor panel there is a dedicated section for skin tone and what's really interesting is that you know like I did before you can select a particular hue and then you can adjust you know smoothness hue saturation lightness all of that but then there's this additional box here for uniformity and the reason uniformity is a thing is because with skin tones oftentimes you can get kind of darker patchy or areas like you know say like under a chin or somewhere where the lightness isn't quite as even and the hues may shift and what you want to do is create some uniformity in the color of your skin tone that you're editing and that's exactly what this tool here is with available options for hue and saturation and lightness feature number 10 the loop tool if you remember back in the day when Apple had a program called aperture that was a competitor to Lightroom for a time it had a really fantastic loop interface where you could just quickly you know pan over an image and zoom into a particular area and get a closer look at it without having to manually zoom in you know as you would like in Photoshop or Lightroom well capture one has a very similar type of loop interface and you can select it up here in the toolbar click and hold on any region and a high-resolution a preview of that area loads into the loop tool so you're able to see what's going on with that specific region of the image now one other thing I notice about the loupe tool in capture one is the fact that when you move this around the image within the histogram the levels and the curves over here on the left side of the panel you'll notice this vertical orange line and what that is showing is that you know whatever is currently underneath the loupe tool it is showing you where on the histogram that specific area lines up feature number 11 normalize now this panel is invisible by default in capture 1 so to find it you have to go up here to the window menu go to create floating tool and then select normalize now what normalize allows you to do is this is you know particularly important if you're doing any kind of product photography or something where color and getting exact matches of color between images is is important to you because well say for example there's a particular shade of red and you want to make sure that that specific value of red is exactly the same across a an entire range of photos you can use the normalize tool here to pick that color and then to be adjusting your white balance and the exposure of the image in order to make those colors match okay final feature number 12 guides now again maybe it's because of my design background I don't know but I just love the ability to see what's happening in an image by adding guides to it especially if I'm trying to you know level an image or do some kind of transform to fix some distortion in it guides are not visible to by default in capture one so you just come up here to the View menu scroll down here to guides turn them on and then go to customize guys and you can add a horizontal guide you can add a vertical guide and you can also change the color of these guides all right so that's going to do it if you are like me and you've been using Lightroom and Photoshop for years and you've never checked out capture one I would highly recommend you do just to take a look at it just see how it's different from Lightroom and Photoshop no pressure to switch or anything like that I mean this video is not sponsored by capture one I wasn't paid to make it I'm sure there is more to capture one that that I have yet to find in the limited amount of time that I've been using the product so if you are a longtime capture one user if you've been using it for far longer and you know and you know of things in there that it can do that make capture one a better editing tool than Lightroom or perhaps even Photoshop by all means please leave a comment below and share your knowledge share that information and tell me what should I go check out I'm especially liking how RAW images are being processed by this app there's just something very different about its processing engine and perhaps even better I haven't had enough time to really dig into it but I mean from what I'm seeing on screen it's pretty incredible and it's really worth checking out so congrats again to ex gesture 1975 for winning one of the three ND filters that I'm giving away this week hope you enjoy it get in touch with me my email address is below in the description if like this video today please remember to give it a thumbs up and if you haven't already subscribed please do so it does make a big difference in the growth of the channel and and if you want to be notified when new videos go live I post one every week click on the the bell icon below and that will pop up a notification and let you know the moment anything new goes live so at any rate I appreciate your time and attention thanks so much for being here see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 44,355

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, todd dominey, capture one, phase one, capture one 20, capture one pro, photo processing, raw processing, capture one versus lightroom, capture one versus photoshop, adobe lightroom, adobe photoshop, capture one features, capture one tips, capture one tutorials

Id: JVwaPp_qMf0

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2020