Lightroom Classic VS Capture One 20 for Wedding and Portrait Photographers

what's going on everybody welcome back to my youtube channel I am Michael Anthony and today we are going to be taking a look at Lightroom cc 2020 versus the brand new capture one 2020 is it time to make the switch for you professional photographers from Lightroom to capture one well with this new release there are certainly some things inside capture one that make it look like it could be a better alternative to Lightroom finally let's go ahead and get into it we're gonna be looking at a couple of different things to see and compare the two of these these pieces of photo editing software and and see what could be better for you and now guys I'm talking specifically to the people here that are utilizing Lightroom or capture one a Rob conversion some rock conversion software in order to edit a large amount of images right if you guys are editing single off photos then a capture one will probably be a better choice right out of the gate as a rock converter but now with all of the new features that capture one over the last couple of years has implemented we actually may have a raw converter that can not only do one off photos better but also be able to convert massive amounts of photos as well especially for you wedding photographers out there so let's get into the computer right now we're gonna check it out and we're gonna see if it is going to live up to the hype alright what's going on everybody so here we are on our desktop here we're gonna be comparing these two pieces of software and I'm gonna start by showing you guys some of the features in Lightroom that make it an amazing program for photographers who are looking to edit massive amounts of pictures so I got a couple of test photos here that we have and I just want to start off by going through a couple of things the first thing that is evident in Lightroom are gonna be the metadata adjustments so you're able to obviously add your keywords you have key word sets if you you know currently are actively add keywords to photos in all of the metadata associated with your images and all of this stuff here can be edited pretty simply pretty easily actually right and then going into your develop module obviously you have your presets over here on the left on that panel and then you have all of your adjustments over here on the on the right side of the image right now as you go down here all of these different adjustments are pretty easy to get to right there in one place there's not they're not very confusing to find it's just pretty simple to use right up here you obviously have your crop your spot removal your redeye reduction which I never I don't think I've ever use this because we don't shoot with on-camera flash that often and you have your gradient right here your radial filter in your brush you know what I want you guys to notice here is this when you first look at this this profile right it applies this Adobe color now you have a lot of different profiles that you can apply by opening this up right here the ones that are going to give you the closest to in-camera are going to be these camera matching and camera standard is usually the one that we use that's that's one of my favorites right there but I want you guys to keep in mind if you look at this image right here this is not the exact color that comes directly out of camera and this in my opinion is where Lightroom is at its weakest right because you you buy a camera because you like the color that comes out of that camera right especially with Canon in Lightroom even after the big profile updates a year ago it still doesn't give you perfect cam color directly out of camera one thing it does do though is when you use these Adobe Adobe profiles right here it does unify the color somewhat a little bit better than a program like capture one but let's just say that you're using this as a single photographer and maybe you work with your second shooters but it's pretty consistent or you're hiring people who shoot with the same cameras and that everything is pretty much equal here right so going through this up here you have your map which I don't like anybody uses book which I don't think anybody uses slideshow which could be useful for things like in-person sales but there's a lot of different tools that do this I actually do print from Lightroom but I can print from Photoshop just as easy and web nobody uses but really guys at the end of the day we're looking at library and develop these are really the two things that are what we are gonna be using the other thing that people tend to use often are the export features and this is where I'm really touch starting to talk to you portrait photographers so when we pull up our export dialog right here right we have a whole lot of different things now you can create your own presets and profiles here and you have control over all of the different types of exporting that you're gonna do and up till a couple years ago it was very hard to get the flexibility that you have here in Lightroom in capture one and they added that functionality I believe it was about two years ago to be able to create presets and have have the ability to control your exports a little bit better and then the last thing that I want to focus on that photographers really like here are going to be the plugins right so one of the things that you can do in Lightroom that you still can't really do in capture one is have the ability to utilize the plug-in functionality and a lot of your software makers will utilize plugins that will plug directly in the Lightroom so you might have things like your gallery and I I don't have it here to show you because I don't use these things but but things like you know the Nik collection right if that's something that you use or portraiture if that's something that you use all those have Lightroom plugins that you can export directly to these programs and you can you can integrate a little bit easier if you will it just makes it a little bit more simple and the last thing that you can do that people like in Lightroom is if I were to push ctrl or command E and bring this image into Photoshop any adjustments I make will be saved and re-imported directly back in the Lightroom when I hit save in Photoshop so you know it's not something that capture can't do by not having that direct integration but it just gives it it just makes you work an extra step a little bit harder right now that being said these are the things that people love about right Lightroom I want to show you guys now some of capture ones features because I think that this new version of capture one is the most usable that I have ever seen since I've been a photographer since I've been using this is 2015 right so let's bounce into capture one real quick nope that's not the right one I got the new version here somewhere and let me just open it directly there it is okay so one of the things I want to focus on for you wedding and portrait photographers is rather than shooting which sesh with catalogs I want you to focus on utilizing sessions and the reason why I think sessions is such a powerful tool is because it helps to keep all of your jobs a lot more organized right and the way that this works is let's just go in here and let's hit create a new session now you'll see here you're gonna name your session so let's just call this like test session number one right and where I would save this would be in the clients main folder so in this case because I'm just using a a test folder right here right and I'm gonna delete the one I made already here I'm gonna save it right here okay and what ends up happening is capture one will automatically create a folder structure for you so you have your capture folder your selects and you can easily name this like our naming convention looks something like this Roz for our raw files our selected rows will be something like oh one selects our output folder will be something like oh two edits and you get you get the picture right and then capture name this really applies if you guys are going to be shooting tethered which is something we'll talk about in just a few minutes right but let's just go ahead and open this up for a sec so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna choose the folder that I want to import the fold the photos from in this case on my desktop I have I'm saved here and I'm just gonna go ahead and import these photos real quick right so it imports these pictures it's gonna generate the previews real quick and the first time you run this it's gonna set up hardware acceleration which is something that is actually really good if you're using a newer computer now getting into these images I want you to see just right out of the gate right when I click on that same image that we had here in Lightroom you can see the difference in color immediately in capture one this is exactly what it looks like are almost exactly what it looks like when I look at the back of my camera right these colors are more true to form and color is the one reason why most people have adored capture one since its since its get-go right for the last few years now the reason why it hasn't been adopted by portrait and wedding photographers is because it didn't have the ability to edit a large number of files and export a large number of files quickly and those are the things now that it can do so let's get into some of the things that I had talked about in Lightroom so you can see here you have a star or a rating system you have a color label system and you have keywords in metadata now to be clear with you guys I don't use keywords or metadata I don't think they have a really big impact on SEO I really think that a few years back they were a lot more important but I don't think today that they are so this isn't a big deal for me but but being able to tag your images by color or by rating is a really big deal for me I think that that is incredibly important right the next thing I want to show you guys moving forward here is going into this exposure evaluation and your capture pilot this is like your tether station right if you were in a shoot tethered which I do for studio work you would be able to control your camera and all of the the abilities directly here and I have to tell you from a reliability standpoint capture one is much more reliable than Lightroom when it comes to shooting tethered and I don't think that that is something that is disputed I think most people who have used both can can definitely attest to that but let's get into the direct comparisons okay first things first I want to show you guys over here now you'll see things are not broken up as simple as they are in Lightroom in in capture one you have modules and they're separated by toolbars up here now it is important to note that you can move these wherever you want to go so if you wanted to put it here where you use it often that is something that you can do so just keep that in mind you can customize this a lot more than you can customize the tools in Lightroom but getting back into that you have your crop tool right here this is like your Keystone and your your transformation tools rotation and you know all of the other things related to composition but let's get in here here is where light capture one becomes incredibly powerful you have the ability to manipulate colors color balance direct colors and skin tones that a lot more of a fine detail than you can in Lightroom so if we go back to Lightroom for a second your color adjustments are pretty limited so if we go here obviously a vibrance and saturation you have HSL and you have your curves tool and encourage this great but you can't really pinpoint things like you can in capture one so when we get into capture one right here let's just talk about color balance for a second rather than going in Lightroom where you have your temperature in your tint in capture one here we can control the color balance between the shadows the mid-tones and the highlights right so you can do this using curves in Lightroom but it takes a lot more work and it's not you're not able to fine-tune it as much so if we get in here and let's just say that I want to add a little bit of like teal or blue or even magenta which is more our style into our shadows here and then in our highlight we want to go and add a little bit of yellow or orange something that we're able to do relatively easy moving on past that going down into your color editor here okay you actually are able to choose individual and then manipulate them as you see fit so let's go ahead and just click advance for a second I'm gonna go ahead and click my eyedropper tool let's just say I want to change the color of like these greens so now you see it's selected these greens right here and I can go ahead and make these adjustments now you see how it's adjusting some of the yellows in the background let's just say I want it to focus more on the greens so now I could pull this out of the yellows and bring it down a little bit more and what I could do is I can click this now and it's gonna show me only the things that are being affected so I'm gonna uncheck that and I can go ahead and I can make these fine-tune adjustments a lot a lot more in-depth in a lot more detail than I can in a tool like Lightroom now this being said being that you're able now to copy your adjustment and apply them to multiple images it makes these tools a lot more powerful because let's just say I was shooting and I had seven or eight of these this exact image in a line okay I'm able to apply that same edit to all of them okay you can go ahead and adjust your skin tones here as well too so if I click my eyedropper tool and I click on what's supposed to be a skin tone right here it's gonna do the same thing but it's gonna control them independently from the color adjustments that I made on this tab so one of the things that I love here is a uniformity slider and in what you can do here and let's just say I click I selected my skin tone now and let's just say now I want to make sure I'm only adjust in my skin tones you see I have a lot more yellow in here I'm gonna pull some of that yellow out and now I'm really just dialed in on the oranges in my skin tones okay so now that I'm here if I want to adjust my hue and I'm gonna bring this back so I can see what the colors all look like together I can go ahead and adjust my hue left and right you can see she's getting a little more greening a little bit more red but where this gets even more powerful is here because you know sometimes people have blotchy skin well you can actually control the saturation and from a uniformity standpoint make sure that all of those colors kind of match up evenly you have to be careful here because sometimes it will affect things like lips but for the most part you're able to adjust things and if you fine-tune this and work on this a little bit more it allows you to really a dialed in to where you want to be right now going back here for a second in addition to that I one of the most powerful things that Lightroom does not have the ability to do is the ability to work in layers so going back to where I was a second ago here if I wanted to create a separate layer here all I would have to do is paint in the mask on where I want it to be so let's just say I'm going here and I'm gonna hit draw mask I'm gonna right click and I can make adjustments later so the auto mask tool by the way works really well in this software I'm gonna reduce my sorry my hardness a little bit and my flow sorry bring that up right about here and bring this down just a bit okay so now what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna go ahead and paint in okay what I want this to be and let's just go ahead real quick I'm gonna just kind of show you I'm gonna be a little sloppy because I don't want to take all your time here on youtube today but if I wanted to make that same adjustment now that I just made before and I need want the lips to be effective now I can hit my erase tool I can right click bring the hardness up the size way way down bring my flow all the way up and I can come in real tight right here and I can just erase that mask from her lips so now whenever I make those adjustments they're not gonna be affecting the lips right here okay so a couple things that are really really important okay when you're making these color adjustments especially for wedding and portrait photographers it's good to take the images like the portraits and things that are going to be important to your clients make the adjustment on a single image and then apply it to the rest of your photos and the way that you would do that is once you make all of your adjustments and let's just go ahead get into our adjustment panel for a second and make some quick adjustments here which I'm gonna talk to you about this in a second I got to get back to my background layer and let's get rid of this guy for a second just make a couple quick adjustments and let's just say I wanted these adjustments to apply to the rest of the image I can just go ahead and shift-click I'm gonna click copy and then apply and you can see it will apply to the rest of the images here okay but now going back to this now that we know that we can do essentially what is equivalent to sinking in Lightroom getting back here in to capture 1 let's go over some of the new features here the with the new capture one engine which i think is something that hasn't been talked about enough and i think that is really beneficial to the kind of work that we do so going into this real quick let's just make some basic justments right I'm gonna add just a little bit of contrast right here I'm gonna bring my brightness up but I'm gonna bring my exposure down now I want you guys to see what these do right if you look up here okay brightness is gonna focus on your mid-tones the exposure is gonna move the entire histogram okay so just getting that back to zero here okay a little bit of contrast a little bit of brightness bring my exposure down just to control some of the highlights just a little bit okay then what I want to do is I want to focus on the new HDR tools that they had in the past you had highlights in your head shadows and when you would adjust these especially the shadow slider it would adjust the entire mid-tone a little bit too much for my liking and this is where I felt like Lightroom was still very strong but now you can fine-tune it and while the shadow slider still behaves the same you have the blacks to be able to control the deepness of the black and get the left side of that histogram back where it needs to be conversely same thing works with highlights and I do believe in working with this that your highlight slider is on par now with what Lightroom was doing and sometimes even better in some cases which I'll show you in an image like this right here that has a lot of bright bright tones right if I bring that highlight slider down sorry that's my exposure slider than me reset that real quick bring my highlight slider down you can see how much detail I'm able to get back in that dress and that is a really powerful tool so you can do something similar in Lightroom I'm going to show you guys real quick coming back into Lightroom similar image here okay and let's just reset this for a second if I go ahead and pull this back you can see now how much more detail I'm able to get out of the highlight slider in capture one that is an incredible feature guys and that is something that I don't think anybody yet has talked about or at least I haven't heard people talk about with this new software now for me as most of you know I outsource my editing my editing team uses light room so light room is gonna be a staple for our client workflow but for me when I'm editing my own sessions I feel like the the benefit of capture one now are starting to outweigh the drawbacks significantly and I can see some of the post-production houses starting to get on board with this as well - there is one crucial feature that from what I believe is still missing in capture one that I have in Lightroom and if I'm wrong here guys please correct me in the comments because I would love to know if it exists here but with Lightroom you can let's just say you have five images that look like this right but you were adjusting your exposure as you were going through those images so let's just say I bring my exposure up here I correct it slightly right and I want all of the images to have a similar exposure right so what I would do is I would click both of these and I will go to settings and match total exposures right and what that will do is it will essentially match the exposures from the two images in for people who are editing weddings that one feature will save you hours of time every single month and which will obviously translate into into thousands of dollars so I do know that capture one does have a normalized feature and it allows you to normalize exposure I'm not 100% sure if this is as efficient as it is in Lightroom so please again like I said correct me if I'm wrong in the comments below but I think that is one feature that I would love to see here in capture one moving forward right conversely guys when we get into our images here let me find an image got a little bit more dark tone to something like this right here when I bring my shadow slider up you can see the shadows affects the mid-tones more than the highlights does right but again like I said before you can offset it with your blacks and you can definitely get more detail out of these areas so I do feel that Lightroom personally is still a little bit stronger when it comes to shot retaining shadow detail resolving shadow detail but I definitely think that capture one has them beat as you guys can see when it comes to highlight detail lastly I want to talk about exporting okay because when we get into capture one exporting is something that is going to be really important right so what you can do these are your process recipes which are equivalent to your Lightroom presets when it comes to exporting so going back to this right here what you would do is once you create one that you like you do it right here you just go ahead and hit plus and you name it you might have one for editing you might have one for your blog edits etc etc but the one thing that I really love here is that it defaults to the output location that you set up so what I would do if I had a workflow here for weddings I would actually apply my same folder structure to every job and I would use a separate session for every single wedding that would allow me to just open up the catalog I'm not gonna have to worry about any speed or performance issues and we're able to get to where we need to go really quickly right so once you set this all up you export it you can set a subfolder if you want for things like you know creative edits or whatever it may be away you go right you can obviously make JPEGs you can open it with Photoshop if you want so on and so forth and I feel like it is a little bit easier to export especially TIFF files here because you don't have to set it up in the settings like you do in Lightroom you just do it here on your export function now getting it back in to capture one will require you to import it again using this feature as opposed to Lightroom which will automatically save when you hit the Save button so going back into this a little bit more presets on Lightroom are presets on the left side and capture one they call them styles right here so capture one actually has really good built-in Styles right really good beautiful built-in black and whites some like fashion or color ones right here as well too and obviously guys there is a marketplace for these just like there is with cat with Lightroom you can purchase capture one styles might be something we even look into creating for you later on if we tend to use this software a little bit more over the next year you also have the ability to sharpen your image reduce noise which just got an improvement this version of capture one and it actually works really well I think we can see a little bit of noise right here let's see how it works so yeah you can see how it reduces the noise relatively easily and obviously you can control how much detail you want to retain and get rid of just like you can in Lightroom Lightroom is still very good at removing noise okay lastly let's talk about local adjustments for a second here because I think local adjustments are an important tool we don't use them for our client client work right but if I'm editing blog edits I'm essentially utilizing the local adjustments that's how we're doing it right in the way that I tend to do this I tend to kind of get all of my light in contrast and all that stuff on my subject the way I want it to look and then I go ahead and I adjust my local adjuster so I'm just gonna open up my shadows a little bit just to get a little more detail back in the dark part right here and then I want to go ahead and bring down some of my highlight especially on her dress right there and I'm going to bring my whites up and my blacks down just a touch right here and lower my brightness just a little bit and then when I get into my color editor here I want to add a little more red to this area right here right so if I come back to my color editor I'm gonna hit advance I'm gonna come here I'm just gonna go ahead and click that I want to make sure that I'm applying this to the correct area right so you can see right now it's on her skin in all sorts of other places and because her skin in this are very similar tones right here it's gonna be tough to just pick it up without picking up the other one so I'm gonna adjust it a bit here and looks good let's go ahead and just bring that up a little no see it's adjusted her skin I'm gonna adjust like you a little bit and I'm gonna come up here and create a new layer on that layer I'm going to just brush in that particular that particular area right so coming up here and that's one thing you have to get used to see I slid up on my mouse to make my brush bigger like I would in Lightroom and it zooms in in capture one so that's just little things you have to get used to from a workflow standpoint right so I want to bring my my hardness down a little bit and I'm just gonna go ahead and paint a small mask in here just to give this a little bit more color and separate it as much I can from her skin remember I'm not trying to be super precise if I was gonna do that I would bring this directly into Photoshop right okay so now that that's there and I have I have that on layer one right here now I can come back in here and I can go ahead and adjust my mask here and you can see now how it's starting to change right and it's not affecting our skin tones as much bring my lightness down a little bit and back that saturation off just a bit okay so I like it right there so now let's get back into local adjustments for a second now when I go ahead and pick my first local adjustment it's going to create that new layer but any subsequent ones after that you're gonna go ahead and have to just create another layer right so let's go in here and let's pick our radial gradient mask and we're just gonna basically create like a vignette coming down in to her okay so with this you can see you can adjust this radial mask a lot easier than you can in Lightroom Lightroom has a similar function but I feel like the ability to control the feathering here it's just a little bit more simple right getting us here into our exposure you see how these are all flattened out now because I'm working on a brand new layer okay if you come back down here you'll see all the adjustments that I made are still here but up here on my new layer now I can just go ahead and make these adjustments right and I'm gonna pull out my saturation just a touch and I'm just gonna adjust my Kelvin temperature because you see down here it turned a little green right because of the tint on that window as is coming in okay so you guys can kind of see working through this how we just make these quick adjustments real quick right and how easy it is to do so I going through all of these different functions is this gonna be something that is a replacement to Lightroom for professionals for wedding photographers like me I think it absolutely could be and I like the fact that you have so much control over color you have better highlight control right here and and I like the fact that all of the adjustment layers have a much more usable usable functionality than they seem to do in Lightroom but because I'm familiar with Lightroom light is still much easier for me to work so what I would do if I were you is i would download the trial for capture one and i'm not affiliated with them at all but you guys can go to a believe it's phase one comm slash capture one or just google it and you guys will find it and and when you do download the trial you get it for thirty days i would use it for a good two weeks i would edit two to three sessions on it and see if your workflow improves one of the things that you can do to help that again you can't do in Lightroom is you can actually customize your keyboard shortcuts as well too so if you come up here and you click Edit keyboard shortcuts you can actually just like you can in Photoshop you can create keyboard shortcuts to match the things that are that you typically do day to day in Lightroom so that could be something that you do that could help you out if you're looking to switch to this software furthermore getting into this with your sessions I feel like this is gonna be a lot more of a lot better of a workflow for you to have an individual session rather than keeping one giant catalog full of all of your jobs it's gonna make things a little bit easier to find you guys know as well as I you then when you're running a massive catalog in Lightroom it tends to really slow you down slow down the performance of that tool so just something to keep in mind when you guys are choosing the software you want to work with so I don't know guys what do you think do you think that this is something that can that you can see replacing your Lightroom workflow or you think it's something that still needs a little bit of work prior to you jumping into it I know there's a lot that we didn't cover on this if this is something you guys are interested in I definitely am open to learning a lot more about the software and then doing a couple more tutorials on it but I'd love to hear what you guys think so when you guys get a chance just go ahead and leave me a comment down below let me know what you thought about this video if you liked it please give it a thumbs up that's all I got for you guys today and we'll catch you next week talk to you later

Channel: Michael Anthony

Views: 30,462

Keywords: photography, photography business, wedding photography, photography lighting, strobes, post production, photoshop, lightroom, canon, nikon, sony, panasonic

Id: abKNx-e98_Y

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019