Capture One v21 / Worth Upgrading To?

capture one has just released version 21 of their photo editing software and it includes some interesting new features that we're going to take a look at in this video but the big question the main question that i think needs to be asked and hopefully we'll find an answer in this video is whether this upgrade is worth the money because if you were using capture 120 or earlier this is a paid upgrade unlike the subscription version which you can download for free and install and start using right now but for everyone else you have to buy it so is it worth buying let's find out how's it going everyone my name is todd domini always a pleasure to see you before we begin i just want to quickly point out that the version of capture one that i'm going to be using in this video is the very very latest beta version of version 21 and i'm doing so because i want to make this video get it produced get it edited get it uploaded and out to help you make a purchasing decision all of the features everything that i'm going to be demonstrating here are exactly the same as what's in the final release so as far as new features goes there's some pretty interesting new stuff there is a new dehaze slider which will sound familiar if you are a user of adobe lightroom or adobe camera raw there's something new called pro standard camera profiles going to take a look at that there's also some new keyboard shortcuts called speed edit keys which sounds pretty cool going to give that a try and there's also just some some general usability user interface changes as well which we will cover in this video [Music] so let's begin with this image here this is shot in the dolomites region of northern italy up in the mountains and as you can see i mean there's a fair amount of just atmospheric haze kind of hanging around in the background behind this building here in order to help remove some of that haze what i'm going to do is just push dehaze over here to the right it's targeting a very specific range of tonal values in the image unlike contrast which just kind of parts the ocean it just it just pushes everything from the mid tones out towards uh white and black in a linear way in a very even way dehaze on the other hand targets the mid tones in the shadows and pushes just that region down but it does so while preserving your blacks and preserving your highlights and your whites so by adding a little bit of positive dehaze we are bringing some extra clarity into the background back here and in case you didn't know one of the ways that you can also use d haze is to use dehaze in the negative and to be honest i mean when i used adobe lightroom and camera raw more i found myself using negative dehaze quite a lot because instead of bringing those shadows and mid-tones down towards black it actually lifts those those values and pushes them further up they have something here called shadow tone and this is kind of like an intelligent way for capture one to target a specific region of the of the image based on its uh color value so it's already automatically guessed that this kind of light um slate blue color which is what you see back here in the peaks that's pretty accurate you don't have to keep auto you can actually do your own thing here and you can do so by clicking this eyedropper here and what capture one recommends doing is picking a dark shadowy region of the image where you're you're seeing the most haze in the most atmospheric haze so i'm going to come over here to the far left into this kind of like pocket back here in the in the mountains it's actually adjusting the color temperature a little bit it's injecting a little bit of warmth a little bit of color it's a subtle difference but see this is auto here and it just looks a little bit bluer whereas with this i think the results look a little more natural and a little more like what i was expecting it to do now if you are familiar with the dehaze tool in lightroom and camera raw you may have noticed something when i pushed that day slider into the positive so if you didn't notice let me point it out to you you see the foreground here and how it's it's starting to get kind of muddy and kind of splotchy and there's some saturation and uh it it just doesn't look particularly good i mean what's behind the building is looking better but what's in the foreground really does not and let me just push it back and forth it's affecting areas of the image which which really doesn't need help and let me switch over to lightroom so that you can see the difference so here we are in lightroom same exact raw image and let me increase dehaze here and watch what happens here you see how it's targeting just this area behind the building and the sky behind it it is almost as if it's using some kind of luminosity mask behind the scene in order to bring down the luminosity of that particular area and it's doing it without affecting the foreground as opposed to capture one which it just doesn't quite look as as nice i think quick tip though if you are someone who has been using negative dehaze in lightroom in order to lift those shadow values like i talked about before and you want to do so uh without increasing saturation or without affecting saturation an easy way to do that in capture one is to not use this new dehaze tool but rather let me just draw a radial mask on top of the image here i'm just going to bring out a little bit of inject a little bit of light here into the center of the image and instead of using dehaze what i'm going to use is something that is actually unique to capture one and that is the luma curve this is a tone curve that does not affect saturation and the results look natural the colors do not shift let me just turn that on and off so you can see see how subtle that is let's take a look at another example here now this image here was shot on the coastline of uh i think this yeah this is up in washington state so obviously plenty of haze plenty of atmosphere there and when you increase that dehaze it really starts to bring it out and let me just zoom in here really quick and show you i mean look at what's going on with this c-stack here you see the the color and the tonality in the rock that is starting to come out if i look at the same image in adobe lightroom and let's take a look at the difference so let me just park it right around 25 come back here okay so that's what dehaze and capture one give you one more look at it and then back to lightroom i mean you see all the color and the tonality here and then if we come back over here to lightroom it's really interesting isn't it i mean it's not just the day slider i mean there is something about how raw data is processed in capture one that is just different from lightroom and and how adobe does it and this is one of the reasons why honestly i switched to capture one because it always seemed to bring something and bring some kind of character out of the image that just did not exist that i just wasn't able to see in lightroom which i think this is a very good example of the two so i mean comparing capture one to lightroom i mean i think it really comes down to it's a subjective call it's a matter of personal opinion what you think looks better what you prefer and i think in some ways it really depends on what image you're editing as well because i have noticed that sometimes dehaze looks nice and sometimes it just like that first one that i showed you it just doesn't quite work as well but in this image it seemed to seem to do a much better job okay i think we covered dave's pretty well so let's move on to feature number two and we're going to be talking now about the new pro standard camera profile now in case you've never noticed when you import a raw image into capture one or any other raw photo processing app there are correction profiles both for the lens that you're using and there are profiles for the camera itself and these profiles help the software know how to interpret that raw data how to turn the zeros and ones of that digital data into uh an actual image so this one okay i already have pro standard turned on so let me go back to generic and then go to pro standard generic pro standard and you notice what's happening in the in the trees in the lower left hand corner down here you see the reflection in the water the green actually looks a little more correct there's not as much of that bluish kind of color cast that's going on there and you can actually see some of it in the trees on the side of the mountain as well and what capture one claims this is for is that it's most usable or most useful rather with uh product photography with portraits and with anything where color accuracy is is super important like especially if you're doing any kind of brand work and things like that it's really designed to be a more color accurate version i think than than the generic is it a huge change no i mean could you be making changes like these anyway just with the editing tools in capture one yeah but does pro standard give you a better place to be editing from i think so it's not a huge difference but it is something all right feature number three in version 21 is something new called speed keys it's a rather hard phrase to say when speed keys are enabled in capture 121 what they allow you to do is to quickly access the sliders from the panel directly from the keyboard it's almost like like playing a pc game or something on a keyboard where everything is within the left side of the keyboard over here and you're using a mouse over here on the right all of the speed keys are kind of grouped over here on the left which allows you to quickly with one hand you know pull up exposure pull up contrast pull up brightness whichever ones that you want then with your mouse you click and hold and then drag the mouse left and right so you don't even have to click on the slider itself at the bottom of the screen and this is really nice because i've actually used this on a trackpad as well on my macbook pro and it's just it's it's super intuitive just to hold the key down and just move the your finger back and forth on the trackpad by the way speaking of preferences if you come up here to preferences and then go to general at the bottom you'll see the new speed edit row and what this is doing here is that well you can toggle it on and off for one thing but there's also this sensitivity slider here and if you crank this all the way up let's just put it up to 100 and then drag left and right you can see that it's it's pretty pronounced and i'm not moving the mouse that much brings sensitivity all the way back down press and hold exposure and now see how it's like a micro adjustment like it's just very very slight very small so as i mentioned before you can edit these keys by the way just come up here to edit edit keyboard shortcuts and then you have speed edit keys here and you can't assign them to everything i mean it's only like the major ones i mean not every slider in capture one is available to you [Music] so that covers d haze the new uh pro standard camera profiles and speed keys the rest of the enhancements that are part of version 21 are like user interface usability improvements up here in the top toolbar you will notice that there is a new learn icon up here kind of looks like a youtube icon and if you open that i think this is probably some kind of web view that is loading in this content remotely so that capture one can be um like remotely promoting uh you know new videos new tutorials the other thing that they have made some improvements to is the import modal the import modal is different i mean they've done things like you know like this little text here that says your files will stay where they are when you are adding to a catalog this is something like i think that has always been a little bit confusing you know how do i leave my files where they are but use them in a capture one catalog or should i import them into capture one they've definitely improved some of the language and some of the copy in the app and they've also improved the import modal so that you're able to make selections from different archives and it's just like a little more a little more finished a little more a little more control now another thing you'll notice is that when you mouse over some of the uh some of the panels here you'll see that this you know this little tool tip kicks out other improvements in version 21 include support for the hef i think is how you pronounce it um h-e-i-f uh image format that uh apple you know uses is like the the default on iphones now you can import those 8-bit hef hiff whatever it is and then of course there is the usual list of bug fixes and improvements for both mac and windows there's also some new camera profiles in there for some recently uh released cameras and all that ultimately brings us back to hopefully answering the core question the main question that i wanted to answer in this video and that is whether version 21 is a worthwhile upgrade if you are currently using capture 120 or earlier well for me i use capture 120 i mean i only recently started using capture one i'm relatively new to the product though i would imagine there's probably a fair number of people about out there who've been using capture one for years maybe you've skipped a few versions so by upgrading to 21 you're not only getting the new features in 21 but everything that came in between as well if you are currently using 20 like i am i think it really depends on on how much like uh how much value you see in there being a the uh the new dehaze slider if that is something of interest to you if that is something you see using a lot in your type of photography because it is a contrast tool at the end of the day and there are other ways of achieving contrast and then there's the pro standard camera profiles and i mean i don't know i mean maybe it's a placebo effect but i mean it seemed like every time i switched from generic to pro standard no matter which image i threw at it there was just something about it which always seemed to look better and this is by the way on top of a raw processing engine that for me at least has always been superior in capture one compared to adobe camera raw in lightroom and then the third feature speed keys i mean i'm telling you once i started using it and once i started getting comfortable there's a fluidity to it and there's emotion to it and there's a rhythm to it that just feels really really nice i think it's a really smart addition and it's such a simple little thing that um such a clever idea but it really does help in a lot of ways it actually reminds me of the uh the loop deck product you've probably heard of that before you know using shortcuts and keys over here and buttons in order to you know in order to be making adjustments to things but with this there's no extra hardware to buy i mean you just use it with your keyboard and your mouse and then with everything else like the tool tips and the tutorial links and all that i think a lot of that is great for new users who were onboarding to capture one but for legacy people who've been around who know capture one it doesn't really add anything new so overall i mean that's basically it i mean and i have to say i'm i'm a little disappointed because there are some things that i really wish capture one could do that that it can't and it's going to be a while before there's another major upgrade including for example being able to blend multiple exposures into a single composite hdr image which is like the one thing that i have to go back to lightroom to do and i don't think it's just me like i know other photographers out there who always shoot bracketed exposures like they always do it because they always want to make sure that they have coverage they always have backup in case they blow out their highlights or something like that but they also have the ability to blend them into a single composite hdr which gives you all kinds of latitude personally i would love to see that feature added and i'm and i'm kind of disappointed that it hasn't happened yet however all of this of course is coming from someone who currently uses capture one who enjoys capture one who prefers using capture one compared to uh similar products from adobe so if you are a new person if all of this is new to you then i would highly recommend just downloading a free beta uh it's like a 30-day trial of capture one open up some of those raw images from lightroom see how they look see how the raw processing and capture one is different try editing it see what kind of results you get and see how they're different from lightroom and see if you prefer it i think i think it's definitely worth the time that's what i did and i ended up getting hooked to it so i would love to hear from you are you a capture one user if so what version are you currently using and are you planning on upgrading to version 21. if you are going to upgrade what are you most excited about what are you most looking forward to please feel free to leave a comment below as always i appreciate your time if you enjoyed the video please remember to give it a thumbs up and if you haven't already done so please remember to subscribe to this channel as well that's it for me everyone i'll see you next time you

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 9,170

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, todd dominey, capture one, capture one 21, capture one upgrade, capture one tutorial, capture one 21 tutorial, capture one 21 features, speed keys, speed edit keys, capture one dehaze, capture one pro standard

Id: pdCbVeVhuOA

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020