Capture One vs Lightroom - Which is BEST?

hi everyone anthony morganti here today i'm going to talk about the major differences between capture one version 21 and lightroom classic with the hope that it will help you decide which one of these applications is best for you [Music] [Music] both of these apps are feature-rich so it would be impossible for me to talk about every single difference between them in one video so i'm going to talk about the major obvious differences and the differences that i think might matter to the average photographer but do me a favor and help me out if one of these apps has a feature that you absolutely need and it is the reason why you're using that app over the other app let us know in the comments below now first of all let's talk about how they're marketed lightroom is available as a subscription only you could subscribe to what they call the photographers package which gives you lightroom classic lightroom mobile photoshop some space in the cloud to put images to share with other people and something they call behance which is another way of sharing your work and getting comments and suggestions and things from other photographers they also have um packages where you could subscribe to like every adobe app there is that of course costs considerably more and with that package of course it still includes lightroom photoshop lightroom mobile and space on the cloud and and whatnot so lightroom classic subscription only you cannot buy it outright when they come out with a new version you automatically get the new version as part of your subscription capture one on the other hand uh is available as a subscription product so you could pay for it monthly and when they come out with a new version you automatically get the new version or if you prefer to own the software outright you can buy capture one outright and it's yours to keep you could just use it all the time when they come out with a new version you will have to pay an upgrade fee to get that new version or you could just keep using your old version and it will keep working also there's different versions of capture one available they have capture one pro which will work on just about every raw file there is but if you're a photographer that just uses one type of camera like you only use sony cameras there is a version just for sony there is a version just for nikon and there is a version just for fujifilm so if you're a photographer and you just use one brand or one manufacturer cameras and you never gonna use a different manufacturer's camera you could either subscribe to or purchase outright the version of capture one for that camera and it will work on those raw files from that camera only so again if you uh purchase or subscribe to the fujifirm version and somebody gives you a sony raw file you won't be able to edit it in it it will only work with fujifilm raw files but those versions that are specific to those manufacturers are considerably cheaper than the pro version so you could save a lot of money whether you subscribe or buy it outright so you have a lot more options for purchasing uh capture one than you do lightroom now the other kind of main difference is if we just look at lightroom we have all these modules across top right library develop map book slideshow print web map book slideshow and web are not available in capture one there's nothing similar so if you often do slideshows or make books or use a map module or if you're one of the few people that use the web module in lightroom you won't find an equivalent type of functional function in capture one period now at first glance the print module in lightroom might look to be more robust than capture one but in my opinion it isn't uh it is very good the capture or the um lightroom classic print module is is awesome but capture one if you hit command p on a mac control p on a pc bring up the color printer or the printer dialog box what you'll find if you take the time to look through here is it has pretty much everything the print module of lightroom classic has just kind of condensed down a little bit but it's very robust and you could do a lot with it so i would say the in my opinion you could disagree me with me of course in the comments i think the print modules are pretty equal uh between the two apps or the print functionality is equal between the two apps so those are the main difference when you go across as far as modules now library module of course you have that's what it's called in lightroom but over in capture one you just kind of have this tab it's library tab and the way both of them work is you import images into the application and it's called the catalog right so you have the capture one catalog and you have the lightroom classic catalog and when you edit they're both non-destructive raw editors so when you edit a raw file none of those edits get written to the file they get stored in the catalog so in that way they're identical but capture one has another feature it's called sessions if you don't want to use the catalog feature you can instead use sessions and sessions is more meant for the working professional who has a lot of different photo sessions so if you're doing senior portraits let's say and you do a senior portrait for natalie and then later that same day you do senior portraits for thomas and then the next day you do senior portraits for laurie you could do you could bring those images into capture one in a session for each of those three people so that they're separate for one another unique to each other so you could just work on let's say natalie's images without being confused and looking at the other two seniors images so that's another way that you could do things in capture one of course you don't have to be a professional if you're just traveling and you know when you were in milan and you have images from milan you could have those in a sessions and then you have a different images from paris you have those in a session and so on so you know it's it's whatever works for you so capture one has that additional functionality that you won't find in lightroom now of course in lightroom if you did we're doing senior portraits you could have individual catalogs for each but you could do that in capture one as well so that's one difference in the library modules or library functionality let's say also both of them have collections so you could uh take images from multiple folders and put them together in a collection in both capture one and in lightroom classic they each do the type of culling that you might be used to you know star labels our star ratings color labels fly pick flags things like that so all that is pretty similar so in my opinion the library module of lightroom is pretty much the same as the library tab in capture one so very similar sessions is one thing though that is available in capture one that isn't available in lightroom classic now let's talk about editing of course we have the develop module in lightroom and we have the kind of more or less standard controls i think uh people might argue so you go to the basic tab and you have tone right and you have presence and that includes some color adjustments kind of standard but i think what you find if you start using capture one pretty much pretty much everything that is in lightroom as far as editing an image is in capture one in one form or another now you won't find a texture slider in capture one but you will find clarity you will find dehaze you'll of course find vibrance and saturation they're in individual tabs and if you're coming over from lightroom or any other app for that matter you may find capture one a bit confusing at first because stuff is kind of spread around in different areas so we could go to this tab here this is for tone and if you see the high dynamic range section of it we have highly shadows whites blacks just like lightroom we have a clarity section you have a clarity and a structure slider there's no structure in lightroom but we have clarity but we don't have texture in capture one so mine you know difference there exposure contrast saturation all three sliders are in lightroom as well we have a brightness slider here that's not available in um lightroom classic so if you often need to use a brightness slider you have it here i'd say white balance is pretty much comparable between the two pretty much identical in my opinion we have dehaze now we have curve see it's called curve in in capture one and over here we have the tone curve pretty much identical functionality uh there is maybe a slight difference if we click on this tab in lightroom classic we have what's called the region curve for the parametric curve and with this parametric curve you could just move sliders if you'd like and that isn't an option in the curve that is in capture one so if you're used to using sliders instead of using the point curve and actually putting points on you know on the curve itself if you're used to using those sliders you may find it a little more difficult using curve in capture one but capture one has levels and those of you that use photoshop might be familiar with levels and many of us like to use levels myself included that is not available at all in lightroom classics so you won't find levels equivalency in lightroom classic um there is vignetting in my opinion the vignetting tools which are in the effects tab of of all lightroom classic are a little more robust so then here i mean here we have basically a single slider and you have a drop down where you could kind of control how that vignette is applied whereas in lightroom classic you have more control over the actual vignette itself and how it's applied on the image so that is slightly different uh so that's kind of the tone part of it if we go to the color part of it uh you'll see it's pretty much the same i mean we got profiles we have white balance again here again white balance controls and both are pretty much identical here we have color editor that's the exact same thing as the hsl color tab in lightroom classic and it functions the same exact way so that's the same we also have color balance in capture one and over in lightroom that is called color grading it pretty much has the same functionality there's some sliders there that allow it to blend maybe slightly differently than over here in capture one but overall they're very similar to one another we of course could convert and process images in black and white and both and both have black and white mixes so that is nothing different we have some additional tools here that aren't in lightroom at all this normalize is there and you'll find if you go through the tabs individually and look at all the different tools there are a few more tools in uh capture one that aren't in lightroom granted some of the tools many people wouldn't use but they are here and available if you need to use them so pretty much the developing is is maybe 80 similar and then there's a like i said there's like might be a couple sliders in lightroom like this texture slider that are in lightroom but not in capture one but capture one has entire kind of tools that aren't available in lightroom for instance the levels uh tool the normalized tool down there and maybe some others now real quick let's talk about tethering i'm not sure how many of you may tether tethering is available in both i haven't tethered in several years since i moved to my new studio i don't have a monitor in there and i it's kind of a smaller studio so i i haven't tethered in a long time and when i did tether i only tethered with lightroom at the time but i've heard from other photographers that both tether usually works but the tethering is a little more robust in capture one so if you're in a studio situation where you're tethering to a monitor from what i understand capture one is a little more robust and a little more reliable if i'm wrong on that feel free to correct me in the comments below and let me know what you think about tethering in either app but tethering is available in both and it just seems like there's more functionality in tethering in capture one all right one thing that lightroom has at the moment that capture one does not have is if you right-click on an image you could go down to photo merge and you could photo merge an hdr image or create a panorama as it stands right now you cannot do that with capture 121 there is no hdr functionality or panoramic functionality but coincidentally i received an email this morning from capture one saying that hdr and panoramas are their most requested feature and they're going to be adding it to a future update so we should see uh the ability to create hdr images and create panoramic images in capture one very shortly but as of today you can't create those in capture one but you can do those in lightroom now um real quick let's talk about the tools well before i do that let me mention something real quick about layers capture one has layers lightroom doesn't have layers at all period but capture one's layers are kind of unique to capture one so if you're a photoshop aficionado uh you probably um will you might be a little disappointed in layers in capture one but they are pretty robust once you get into them mainly you're going to use a different layer for your adjustment tools so when you do a healing brush or a spot tool or a clone all that will be on its own layer also when you're just doing some type of masking so you're going to let's say put a gradient in the image that will be on its own layer or if you're using a brush tool that will be on its own layer so all that gets done on different layers also there is a luminosity mask available in capture one there is no luminosity masking in lightroom so if you're often doing luminosity masks in let's say photoshop you could do luma they call it luma range here it's just a tool that comes up i obviously it's great out now because i just have the single layer but it's just a tool that pops out that allows you to um pick what tones you want to mask so you could add something to it do some adjustments to it so that is nice that that is available in capture one not available in lightroom but lightroom does have masking in the local adjustment tools that is the brush radial filter and graduated filter so if you wanted to do something let's say a radial filter and you wanted to just affect the bird or just affect the background or something you do have range mask and let me just like put um just a radial filter right there for the heck of it right and let's all right so there and let's say i just want to like uh darken that background not anything else or certain you know parts i could go to luminance and i could get the eyedropper and just click and it will just um mask itself to those tones or i could use the color and mask it to specific colors if this was an heic image and it had depth information in there i could apply the adjustment just to let's say the bird because it would have that depth info but obviously it doesn't so it doesn't have it so those are some you know masking is available in lightroom but i think most of us would agree that it's just a little more robust in capture one um you could mask a little more easily with capture one compared to lightroom at least as it stands right now with lightroom classic um all right going across the tools um in i mentioned those local adjustment tools in lightroom you also have a red eye removal tool you have a spot removal tool which is uh consists of two different blush brushes a clone brush and a heel brush and you of course could crop so those are the tools that are in lightroom now if we jump over to capture one you can see that if we go across the top they have um as far as tools are concerned they have the crop tool all right that's pretty much identical to lightroom you could straighten an image that's in the crop tool in lightroom here we have a keystone vertical tool so if you have buildings that seem like they're falling backwards you could straighten them you of course could do that in lightroom there is an entire tab for that it's the transform tab let me close this down the transform tab in my opinion the transform tools in lightroom classic are a bit more robust than the um upright tools the keystone vertical tools that are in capture one uh you could still you know work they work fine it's just you could do a little more with lightroom in my opinion there's also like a brush tool allow you to brush specific parts of the image we have a healing mask so if you have sensor spots blemishes things like that you could use the healing mask tool next to that we have an erase mask so if you need again sometimes the healing brush might not work very well but the erase mask may work better so you could use that so we have a little few maybe a few more tools and options in capture one there's a white balance tool we of course have that same exact eyedropper in lightroom of course it's just not up with the tools it's in the basic tab and it's the eyedropper is right here so you could adjust white balance there so that is the same then we have um this thing here the uh annotations that lightroom doesn't have so if you have to make annotations right on your image you know notes right on the image for whatever reason uh you could do that in capture one you cannot do that in lightroom classic at all so there's a couple more tools specifically like an erase brush next to the healing brush which are slightly different than when you go over to lightroom and you go on the spot removal tool and you have a clone brush and a heel brush so functionality is a bit different but they probably you probably get similar results overall with what you're trying to do so those are the tool differences now workspace you have a lot more control over the workspace in capture one and this is one feature i do like because often you're not going to use all the tools it has a lot of tools or maybe you just don't like like the images over here on the right or whatever and if you go up to window workspace you could uh use one of their built-in workspaces like a simplified workspace it will re you know see it only has three tabs up there now we go to workspace or i have one called my workspace and watch this when it kicks in it's totally different right this tab here is my tab actually i should say that has everything in the order i like to do it so there's the histogram there's layers there's a lens corrections there's the crop tool keystone tool base characteristics that includes some profiles icc profiles white balance and so on so i i arranged this my way over on the far left you can see i have it hidden if i just go over there it pops out there is the film strip so you can't do that in lightroom lightroom is pretty much static the way it is you could change some of the way it works like if i open the basic tab then go down and open the tone curve tab you could see how the basic tab closed that's because i'm in solo mode if i right click on any of the tabs you can see solo mode is checked if i uncheck it you could have all these open at the same time depends whatever you know you prefer i prefer to have solo mode on you also could get rid of them if you just uh if you find you don't use one like you don't use the calibration tab go to customize develop panel and you could get rid of the calibration tab by just unchecking it click save and then it's gone um but that's all you really could do you can't you can't rearrange everything like i did in capture one so that is a nice feature of capture one that i like and i wish lightroom had i could really customize my workspace and i prefer to work in this workspace as opposed to the default workspace that we you know that you'll see when you first start using capture one that's the workspace i'll have on when i'm normally doing my videos because i want capture one that you see in my videos to look like the capture one looks on your computer um as opposed to if i use my workspace that i use and i you know have all everything over here and you're gonna have a hard time following along but when i work on images in capture one this is the way i do it with this workspace so anyway i think that's pretty much the major and significant differences between the two applications i'm sure i left something out so again do me a favor help me out mention it in the comments below what you think is a significant difference that i failed to mention because i would like collectively that means the video and the comments collectively to be able to help someone decide which one of these two apps is best for them thank you everyone watches my videos i really do appreciate it i'll talk to you guys soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 19,562

Keywords: morganti, anthony morganti, lightroom tutorial, how to edit in lightroom, natural light photography, lightroom portrait, lightroom brush tool, lightroom radial filter, lightroom graduated filter, white balance, lightroom vs lightroom classic, lightroom vs capture one, capture one vs lightroom, lightroom versus capture one, capture 1 vs lightroom, which is better lightroom or capture one, lightroom vs capture 1, is capture one worth it, is capture one better than lightroom

Id: jLYxu3NYGNA

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021