Choosing between Capture One 20 and Lightroom Classic as studio portrait photographer

so in today's video i'm going to compare and contrast capture one with lightroom i started using lightroom in about 2013. so that's seven almost eight years ago um and i just started using capture one about a month ago and i was kind of forced to try it out because of something that i'll get into a little bit later uh with the r5 and the adobe applications but in today's video i'm just going to share what my experience has been like using the two programs and sort of how they compare and contrast and i'm going to sort of give you an idea of which one i think is better for which things and that'll be the general format of the review now in full disclosure they did provide me with a license and some style packs for free and you're going to notice very quickly that i didn't sell out for a whole 400 worth of free stuff i am going to tell you guys that some of the times lightroom is better and some of the times capture one is better now also just to sort of set this up i tend to be i tend to shoot in the photo studio almost all the time or on lights basically whether that's in an office or in my studio or what have you so i'm not going to really give you guys information today on how i feel about capture one versus lightroom when it comes to high iso images because that's just not really something i shoot it's very strange if i go over 400 most of the time i'm at 100. also i tend to be fairly meticulous in the studio and i try to get things nailed as much as i can in the camera i'm not a landscape photographer for instance and i'm not a product photographer and i'm not a concert photographer and i'm no longer a photojournalist so my perspective is going to be really geared towards somebody who gets things right in camera and i screw up like everybody but i'm not going to be evaluating these two programs based on whether or not capture one is better than lightroom at saving the day when i screw up a photo and blow the exposure by three stops it's not really something that i think you should use to evaluate the two programs it's just sort of like fun for that conflict and so really i'm just gonna give you my experience from a practical perspective and go over each feature uh one by one now if things with the two programs are basically the same or basically the same from my perspective i'm going to just leave that out and know that i don't know everything about capture one i'm just going to share with you my general impression after using it for a month in addition to that the order i'm going to go in is vaguely in the order that the tools appear in lightroom because i'm used to that sort of workflow and idea um and then after i go over sort of each area i will award a point let's say to capture one and i'll order and i'll abort a point to lightroom and at the end we can sort of uh figure out which one won and also know that like what does work for me and things that i prefer may not be things that you prefer and so you might prefer a different outcome and that's perfectly fine i just want to give you the information from my own personal experience so the first thing we're going to talk about is the user interface both of them do have really great user interfaces it just so happens though that capture one allows you to customize everything about the experience and if you're going from lightroom over to capture one you can set it up in migration mode and that will allow you to sort of make it look like lightroom but you can change uh the whole layout if there are tools that you don't use a lot you can just get rid of them in lightroom there were all sorts of things that i never used that i had to scroll past to get to the things that i needed so in capture one you can just make them disappear and you could even change the order into the order of operations for which you do your edits so because of that i would give this point for customization to capture one so let's talk about getting the pictures into the programs so as far as ingesting goes it is basically the same a lot of capture one evangelist would probably tell you that there's all sorts of collections and different things that make it different i don't really know what i normally do is i ingest the photos and i put them in a folder on my drobo backup system and i have the program point to that folder i don't do a lot of things where there's automated secondary folders and things like that happen and from what i understand that does exist in capture one and if that's what you're into that's an option there for you but it's not really a thing for me so this is sort of a tie as far as i'm concerned maybe it's better with capture one i don't know the next thing would be tethering now tethering i think that capture one i know the capture one automatically is great at tethering you connect the camera and the computer together they stay connected everything is great in lightroom if you stop to change clothing or the lighting setup or something like that the camera and the program are gonna disconnect from each other and you're gonna get and you're gonna have to go through this ballet where you uh restart the program or turn off the camera or disconnect the camera or restart the computer and all of that stuff and it's like a big pain and a waste of time now one thing that i didn't particularly like with capture one and please correct me if i'm wrong because i would love to be wrong in this instance is that by default the program and i don't know if there's a way to do it within the program only writes the images to the computer which i think could be a little bit dangerous now as an alternative you could tell the program to write the images to a backup drive system but that means you've got to have it on your tethering cart but it feels a little dangerous to me to write images directly to an ssd and then potentially have that ssd fail because as i understand it when an ssd goes down it's like the lights go out when a spinning disc goes down it sort of acts up for a while and you get a little bit of a warning usually so i came up with a workaround and i used canon's eos utility to get the pictures into the computer and eos utility still allows for the photos to be written to the cards in the camera at the same time this also will allow you with the r5 to look at your pictures automatically when they play back in the viewfinder you can also chimp on the back of the camera if you use capture one by the default method you can't do either one of those so after i have eos utility get the pictures from the camera into the computer then i had capture one pull those in automatically and everything's good to go and the whole process only took about two seconds for a raw file so i thought that that worked out really well and so because of the fact that lightroom has all those problems i would give this point to capture one um however i never use that eos utility method with lightroom and uh no actually i did use that eos utility method with lightroom and it seemed to take a lot more time for the pictures to ingest into lightroom that way so because of that overall i'll give the tethering point to capture one so now that we've got the images into the computer let's start editing them and the first thing we need to talk about is the profile that you're applying to the image now some people have said to me that you shouldn't use profiles and it's because they're a little confused and they think that profiles are presets so first of all if you shoot a raw image and you were able to actually look at it natively it would look very flat and muddy and desaturated and then what happens is that every program that edits raw files applies a profile to it and then you see it now a lot of times you never see this happen it just is there and so you have to pick the right profile to match your camera and i've gone into this at length of the r5 and this is actually the reason why i started using capture one so in the adobe suite of applications in bridge and lightroom and photoshop the default color profile for any camera or any file basically is adobe standard or adobe rgb i'm not sure which i don't know that it matters so if you've ever shot jpeg plus raw and you've noticed that the images on the back of your camera look a lot better than they look when you get them into lightroom that's because your camera is shooting normally picture style standard and then when you get it into lightroom it's applying adobe standard and i don't know what adobe standard is based off of but i don't think it's great for skin tones especially with the canon cameras and so when lightroom and etc they all updated and they could handle the r5 files the color matching camera profiles or camera matching color profiles were missing and so i ended up finding a third-party provider which was color fidelity and they made profiles for this camera that were really great when i made a video about that people also suggested that i get an x right color checker passport 2 which i did which allows you to make your own profiles for your camera based on shooting pictures of the checker and then putting it through their software and then putting that profile into the editing software and that does work really well at getting you clinical uh colors they're not really the sort of romantic nice skin tones that i think that we're mostly into as portrait photographers and so the color fidelity profiles in lightroom were a lot better than anything else they're even better than the color checker profiles it just feels so much warmer and nicer but because there wasn't a native way for me to do this in lightroom it led me to want to check this out and capture one and that's when i got the program or i asked them to send it to me and that's when i started you know playing with it and so forth and so capture one's film standard i think looks really great with the r5 and there are other flavors in there too like shadow recovery and high contrast and that sort of thing there are different choices but i think the film standard really looks great and so given the fact that the adobe applications do not have camera matching color profiles for the r5 i'm going to give this point um to capture one because they do have a film standard for the r5 so now that we've applied our camera profile or our color profiles the next thing we need to consider are lens corrections both of these programs have tools for that however in lightroom you're able to remove both green and purple chromatic aberration and that's when you zoom in really close and you see around the edges normally when you're using a lens that's wide open you can see around the edges of white highlights that there will be discoloration on those edges that are either purple uh or green now in lightroom you can click on those affected areas with those two different colors and you can filter that chromatic aberration out but in capture one you can only deal with chromatic aberration overall and you can only deal with purple fringing there is no adjustment for the green fringing and so i had a particular image that i was trying to fix up and capture one and it was just not possible i was pixel peeping at like 200 percent and i'm sure my client's never gonna notice but maybe she would and so uh because of that i really do prefer these tools better in lightroom so i'm going to award the point to lightroom another global adjustment is grain now capture one has grain presets that you can use and they're really nice and easy and quick whereas in lightroom you just have throttles and you just sort of dial it in where you want it and i find that the capture one method is better so i'm going to award this point to capture one another area that's really important in any editing program are local adjustments and both capture one and lightroom allow you to make radial masks and gradients and brush things on and heal skin and those sorts of things interestingly enough in lightroom they have presets for all of these items and that can be really helpful but they allow you to make your own customized presets for different things and same thing is true over in capture one so if you're always doing skin smoothing the same way in capture one you just set up a preset and it's fine there are some defaults for that in lightroom but both of them give you the same functionality in general both of them allow you to clone things and heal things but the way that they work is a little different so in lightroom i can brush on like let's say i'm trying to take a vein out of my forehead and maybe what i'm going to do is i'm going to brush that on and then i'm going to have it at 100 opacity and i'm just not really going to like how that looks and i want to sort of decrease it well i can just decrease the opacity of that brush stroke after the fact and get it to match whereas in capture one i can only change the opacity of my layer for healing globally so in capture one i'm gonna have to brush it on at a hundred percent look at it decide let me try 50 so i'm going to delete that brush stroke and then i'm going to try another brush stroke with 50 opacity maybe that'll be right maybe i'll go to 30 and that sort of thing however there is an advantage to the capture one system because if my client comes to me after the fact and says you know you you really kind of overdid it and i want to look more natural well you just go to that healing layer and you just change the opacity to 80 and if you want to of all the healing adjustments there's no way you can do that in lightroom the same thing with the skin smoothing adjustment that i usually make or teeth whitening adjustments in capture one you just throttle them back and it works out great in lightroom you would have to go down and edit the individual settings for each thing like if you're doing the teeth whitening you'd have to decrease your exposure boost you'd have to add some saturation back in and that sort of thing but overall it's much easier to make those adjustments after the fact and capture one so i'm gonna give the local adjustments point to capture one now there's one feature that capture one has that lightroom doesn't have that's gonna be great for portrait photographers and that is that they have a color editor where you can go in and select the skin tones and sort of feather it off so it's very accurate and then you can make the luminosity more uniform or the hue more uniform so all of the times i'm sure it's true right now my hands and my face are not the same they're not the same brightness they're not the same color but if you want to neutralize that you can do it in capture one you can neutralize that using the color editor to get those two items closer together but lightroom doesn't have anything like that you'd have to be brushing onto the hands and then try to change the magenta green balance and try to change the luminosity or the saturation like individually and it'd be very clunky and so because of that i'm going to give this point to capture one so the next area we're going to discuss is vignetting and in capture one the vignetting tools are more basic than they are in lightroom essentially you can only make it oval or circular and you can have it be upon the crop or before the crop and you can change the intensity but in lightroom you can change the shape you can make it more square you can make it more oval you can make it more round and you can really control things so that that vignette doesn't end up between the top of the person's head and the background a lot of the times i've made this mistake where i end up having the background and the hair not be separated enough in their tonality because of a vignette but when you're using the vignette in lightroom you can really adjust it and get it just right and so that's why i would prefer this tool and so i'm going to award the point to lightroom now one thing that's important to many photographers are presets i do make my own presets and they sort of give me my look and it's great it's a very short form way to get things started however in lightroom when they give you presets that other people have made they don't really come in gradual flavors you just put them on there like a hammer and they're on and if you want to throttle them back you have to go in and figure out every single thing that that preset edited and change the sliders and sort of back that off and get it to look the way that you want it to look in capture one you can apply those presets or sometimes they call them styles you can apply those as a layer and then just like the normal layer adjustment mask you can change the opacity of that layer to whatever you want so the film emulation packs that they gave me those styles they're fantastic i really uh love using them so i've been using the kodak one for like 200 iso film supposed to emulate 200 iso kodak film and putting that throttle at 50 to 70 percent and that seems to really give me sort of a nice analog feel and snap in some images where i'm using green background i guess we'll find out when i do a real like full on test tomorrow i'll be using this a lot of the time you would use a fuji stock because fuji film usually accentuates greens now maybe legally speaking they have these listed as k and f i'm not sure but i'm pretty sure that was their intent when they named them and so i'm really loving the feeling that i'm getting out of these styles and it's really making me feel like i'm elevating my work and making it seem more analog and artistic so for this one i definitely have to give the point to capture one one of the things that i really miss about lightroom is the history panel if you make some adjustments and then decide that you want to go back in time you just click through the history whereas in capture one you have to hit undo multiple times and hope that you get there so because of this i'm going to award this point to lightroom now another feature that lightroom has which i don't believe capture one has is that you can lay out books uh when i would shoot weddings on occasion um and i still do get orders from time to time i think last year i actually did shoot a wedding this year of course no weddings but maybe next year there will be some and i'm not exactly excited about that but um but hey it's business right so in lightroom you can lay out wedding albums right there in the program and you can get images on the pages and you can sort of compare them side by side and then you can make decisions like oh this photo is too dark this photo is too yellow you can fix things so they sort of match i don't believe there's any sort of book laying out function in capture one so because of that i'm going to give this point to lightroom but this may not be a big or important thing to you so both capture one and lightroom have mobile apps and i think the intent of the capture one mobile app is to allow you to let your client sort of browse the images on an app while they're on set with you in the same room whereas lightroom is sort of made so that you can work off-site on their mobile app so when you sync images to the cloud you can call them you can make color adjustments you can make local adjustments you can do everything in the app and then when everything syncs back up with the cloud those adjustments are on your catalog in your computer and so because of this i just find the functionality of the lightroom mobile app to be much better and it really will give me something that i don't think the capture one app is gonna give me now i may under misunderstand this about capture one and please correct me if i do i really would like to have the functionality that i have from lightroom so if you guys have any solutions please put those in the comments but for now i'm going to award this point to lightroom so after all that and considering all those things the final score was seven to five in favor of capture one now you guys are just going to have to weigh which things are more important for you and which things are less important and sort of decide which program is going to be your go-to for the type of photography that you do for me i'm really going to enjoy switching over to capture one mostly because of those film emulation packs and the fact that i can get great color right out of the can so to speak from the r5 now for you uh lightroom might be better because you might really need to correct that green fringing or you might need the mobile app capabilities and that sort of thing but for me i'm gonna go with capture one if you guys have any questions or comments you wanna tell me that i got something wrong maybe share with me some great information as to how i can use capture one and do things better that would be great thank you so much for your time and as always stay safe wear your mask and i'll talk to you soon you

Channel: John Gress

Views: 11,997

Keywords: canon, R5, Nikon, EOS, Mirrorless, dslr, elinchrom, softbox, octabox, cloeup, close-up, close up, studio, color, x-rite, xrite, details, checker, passport, passport2, photography, photographer, Capture One, Capture1, Profoto, godox, Broncolor, 35mm, Lightroom, Adobe, LRC, LR, Cature One, Phase One, Colorfidelity, Profile, camera, C1, Mobile, Capture Pilot, 45MP, retouching, Film, Style Packs, Beyond Film, presets, portrait, flash, kodak, fuji, grade, looks, Capture One 20, 9.4, colorfidelity

Id: tr7xXSKpKSA

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020