Lightroom VS Capture One in 2022

kevin simon here and today i'm excited because we're going to do a video that i kind of wanted to revisit now for a while a few years ago i did a comparison of lightroom versus capture one and i've done a few of those videos because it's a big topic now we have a lot of great tools on the raw side we have things like lightroom like capture one some people are using on one or alternative tools but i would say lightroom and capture one are the biggest my conclusion right here is that lightroom has better ai tools lightroom is a bit more intuitive to learn the other thing to consider is price capture one is more expensive now i i love that you can buy a single license or you can buy an annual subscription but i love you can buy a single license on capture one the features don't change that quick on these that's why they want you to subscribe to cloud it's because they know they're not radically changing so you might buy capture 122 and use it for two or three years before you buy an upgrade but capture one is selling for like 300 whereas lightroom with photoshop is what 10 bucks a month 120 dollars capture one is going to cost you about 300 to buy in about 200 a year from now if you want to upgrade to the latest version so the cost of ownership in capture one is higher again doesn't make it bad a lot of us just do not want the cloud model and we're gonna go for it regardless capture one still sells a single license and props to them for that usability lightroom i think is has it a little bit lightroom definitely has more with ai tools lightroom definitely has more with the tools that we can save into a preset capture one has a bit of an edge with levels with its color editor capture one has a bit of an edge with its layers even though the ai and the masking is better in lightroom what you can do on a layer the amount of tools the way you can apply most of the develop tools in capture one to any layer and therefore stack effects more than you can in lightroom we just have these tools right here to edit our masks our gradients our brushes right and you can do a lot with these but it's not the same as capture one where if you go in and you add a layer you still have not all but almost all of the tools it's a whole suite of develop tools that you can use within a mast layer in capture one that's an advantage so there's points here for me i'm going to keep using lightroom as my daily driver because i feel like i'm generally speaking can get great results faster and the ai tools that adobe's introduced in the latest versions of lightroom are really getting pretty amazing the ai masking the ability to separate the portrait from the the subject from the background and then quickly adjust sliders to bring down our sky so again lightroom version capture one version of the same image lightroom version of the same image the ai tools are better in lightroom the big one that the fuji users argue is oh there's worms in lightroom guys i showed you examples there's very little difference so i have no fear as a photographer who's been doing this for 20 years who shot canon who has sony who shoots fuji when i shoot a portrait on the fuji or a landscape on the fuji or a street shot on the fuji i don't think in my mind oh i better edit this in capture one because i'll get a better result i used to because there's so much people that say that and then i started doing comparisons on these latest versions and realized there's really not that much difference so i might do a breakout video on this the bottom line here is the results in both are great you're not wrong choosing either one of these it's great that we have competition whether you choose lightroom or capture one you're probably going to be happy so i have here the latest versions of lightroom 2022 and capture one 2022 and i've been working a lot with these this week because i've been making the natural hdr4 style pack for capture one so it's already exists for lightroom for camera raw i launched that on black friday but i just finished building out that pack in capture one and i want to make a real honest like personal opinion yes that's a personal opinion but i'm not a fanboy of adobe in fact i love that capture one is pushing it i love that there's other tools out there because i don't love the cloud model what should you be using what's going to work best for you so let's not waste time let's actually jump in i'm going to switch straight over here i'm actually in lightroom right now i've been working with all kinds of images for natural hdr and so that's kind of the zone i've been in and let's actually come in here first and just start looking at a couple of different images let me go to this one and i want to show you what's happening in this image here's the raw file in lightroom for this image okay here is the finished natural hdr this is two or three clicks right i applied hdr earthscape and then you can see if you look up here that i've applied a couple of masks most importantly the ai masks that i've been able to create in natural hdr version 4 using the new ai tools and you can see that it's really bringing this sky back let's go to the same image in capture one 22 and i'm actually going to go up here you can see i'm in the capture one interface i find the capture one interface to be a little more clunky i'm working in one screen mode right now for the sake of recording this i do like that capture one we can drag the panels out and around and all that so i can actually put the panels over here and when i'm working and actually using capture one i tend to have a bunch of panels on my second screen like curves and stuff like that and then i'm over here editing the image and with that i do enjoy the interface pretty well in one screen mode we're always up here switching for every little thing whereas in lightroom i i find it to me to be a little more intuitive and i know that that's kind of a personal preference but we switch between color and tone and detail and all that styles and presets right up here and i'm gonna apply that same hdr landscape look okay and so you can see here's capture one and here's lightroom and this is the same raw file let's look what happens if i turn the masks off you can see they're actually it's amazing how much difference it makes when you turn those masks off you can see the process is almost identical the dynamic range i will say for capture one that if we go here to the the tone tools the high dynamic range tools in capture one particularly in the latest most recent versions the highlight and shadow black recovery white recovery they're actually really good and i can actually pull this sky back more and get more control here i find that the highlight lift and the shadow lift you can overdo it very easy in in capture one because it is very very powerful so i can pull my highlights back a little bit more and get a little bit closer this by the way is a sony a7r ii file and i can get a little bit closer this is iso 400 23 millimeters okay so nothing crazy with noise let's zoom in and just see some details here between these two okay so i'm gonna go into develop mode oh sorry i'm in the i'm in the masks panel that's why it's not responding let's zoom in right into here kind of a one-to-one look okay we're in capture one again i'm gonna keep telling you uh in lieu of if i don't have x over the top of this to make sure but you can also see the capture one icon there up in the corner here's capture one here's lightroom i feel like in this particular image i've sharpened a little bit more in lightroom which we can of course do in capture one let's actually look no i haven't sharpened that much it's just the default sharpening um but what i think we're actually seeing let's go to the detail panel in capture one capture one by default puts in my opinion in my experience more noise reduction if i turn this noise reduction down you're going to see this sharpen up if i turn it down to zero in this image that's not a problem because it's not a high noise image so i can turn my sharpening up a little bit and my noise reduction down and let's be honest when we're looking at these these are very very similar now i will say when i'm making presets and i actually just finished a training video for capture one to go along with the training video for lightroom for specific to these natural hdr presets that i was working with so if you guys are interested in that you can check out those videos and see how i'm getting so much dynamic range out of a single file but in practice even though there's slight differences because i deal with there's a lot capture one reads files a canon file a sony file a fuji file it shows them even if i reset and it's zero that file is going to look a little bit different in capture one than it is in lightroom just due to the nature of how it's interpreting the raw files so what are the differences in practice one of my big complaints and i know this might seem silly but if we go over here to capture one and go to the folders i can right click now okay and i can say let's go to my folders and take this media catalog folder and synchronize it and this is a big deal and one of the reasons that i actually didn't use capture one for a lot of my workflow stuff is because this was so inefficient because i shoot and i copy my images from an sd card or from the camera into my folder structure that i use to keep myself organized for projects and so now we can include subfolders and i know this seems obvious but for years and years we couldn't include some folders this may came out last year and i haven't done a comparison side-by-side of these in a while so i don't know that this is new to version 22 but we can include subfolders or we can only include previously added subfolders and this is really good it does seem honestly a little buggy and i'm i'm assuming that they will fix that up for me lightroom's still my primary editor because i just like the the way it functions in terms of organization and stuff better i find it a little more intuitive and fluid but i use capture one a lot because i make this channel i'm making style packs for capture one okay so if we look here and i put something like hdr waterscape on here right you can see it's doing all these channels and always i love presets and native tools because we can see what's actually happening in our image it's not like a flattened layer like a plugin creates and we can just go in here and you can customize this yourself so i can say hey i want to go and dial back my green saturation even more right but in lightroom we pretty much have these sliders we have hue saturation luminance and that's great but we're kind of limited to that in practice it's not that limiting i have to say pretty much any edit i want to do i'm able to do just fine with this no problem okay and that's the practical reality of it in practice lightroom you tend to get there quicker i think if you're tinkering okay if i go to capture one and take the same image and then put the same hdr waterscape preset on it and then i go over here to the tools you can see i have a color editor in capture one that's on a different level right you start with the basic which is very similar but then you come in here and you can have an eyedropper so you can make your own custom color to this list and then control the hue saturation and lightness of it or i can say hey give me these greens for example but what you have here is you have the wheel up here so i can not only control the smoothness which is basically the feather of this notice how it's feathering the edge in and out as i click this and then control my saturation my lightness right let's say i want to darken up my greens i can tell capture one i want this to be greens here's what i see as greens today right and so i can change what's being affected by controlling what is green what is yellow and this is a very powerful tool because i can expand this on either side and move it around this little dot in the middle by the way is just changing what the color shows up in the palette here as the representation of that color i can add as many of those as i want another tool that we have in capture one and we have levels and in lightroom we don't have levels so does it mean you can't get the look you want no in practice not at all i can edit and i do edit because i'm making styles in capture one and presets in lightroom and working with the same things and testing on different images to try and get consistently across my products and i can usually get very very close so i can come in to here and i can say let's tweak our shadow lift our high dynamic range our highlight let's play with our clarity i can do all this stuff right but i have levels here as well as the curve so i can tweak the curve lift it control my highlight roll off all that kind of stuff but then i might apply that to an image and say oh well i want to control just the blacks right i want to punch a little bit in those black contrasts or in my mid tones or in my highlights and it's cool to have that extra added level what's really happening is capture one has some more tools but let's go back to this image right because what did i show you in lightroom let's go to this image in lightroom and turn on the masks again because these masking is really powerful because we can use it like a neutral density a gradient neutral density filter we can darken our skies things like that so if i come in here and i turn on the masking on this i've done a huge amount to bring in this sky and just do an incredible amount of dynamic range on a single file which i love doing because working with dynamic range on signal files gives you more natural results generally speaking i rarely need to bracket and merge i'm usually going for a natural hdr look okay so this is beautiful i think this works great i'm gonna go to another image and i'm gonna go back to my snapshots that i've saved raw image pretty flat but there's a lot to work with here a lot in this so i'm gonna go here and i could do all this manually but i'm just gonna show you guys how quick this can be to edit this image i'm going to do hdr ocean escape to really bring in my richness in that foreground i'm going to go down here and do the mod i'm going to click the super color mod to bring some more light the only thing we're lacking now is the sky and so i'm doing all this with just three presets now i'm going down here to xai sunsets guys okay and this is using the ai tool why did nothing change because i need to go over here to the mask tool and you can see that the mask is there but it says update it's got the exclamation mark i need to update it i'm going to click update it's going to find the sky and then it's going to apply the settings that i've applied okay that was like four clicks guys and we went from this starting point right here to this single raw file now let's try and do that same thing in capture one let's go and apply it a preset right so i'm gonna do the ocean scape preset and the super color preset it's looking pretty good and capture one does have really good shadow and highlight recovery so i could even pull it back a little more and it looks good but i don't have those ai masks in fact i can't even build a mask into a preset and capture one which is a favoring in favor of lightroom and what i can do though is i can apply a mask a traditional mask right drag it and then i can say hey let's do some highlight recovery here let's boost the saturation and let's tweak with the color a little bit make it a little warm maybe we can do whatever we want to this right and i can control this clarity all these all these things that i might want to do to this all right and so there we have a pretty good looking sky and i could tweak the colors and work with it a little bit so we're here but it's not this ai auto mask that's automatically separated yes i could go in here and i could use uh luma luma values i could use the the luma separation to actually right click on this and say let's use a luma range and that would allow me to do a limit this mass based on luma range similar to what we can do in lightroom again very good tools so there's nothing here right i'm a little more intense on my edit maybe some people maybe some of you think it's too intense but i could go in and in this mask i could turn my saturation down a little bit but here's my lightroom edit and here is my capture one at it both of them are very good at it arguably capture one is actually pulling more dynamic range out of this really bright point in the sky so that is really good i think we're getting a really good pull out of that and i think that's great both of them are working well but those new ai masks what we can do with those new ai masks is pretty incredible look at this image here let's look at our raw file here here's what we started with right here's what we ended with and what did i have to use all i did was use the dyna portrait preset and the ai skies which here right and then we in in the portrait preset we have subject and background separation so i'm able to enhance the sky i'm able to enhance the subject and do all of this if i go to capture one now this is a lot harder because i can go in and i can get a good dynamic range i can get a look like this let's do natural blues on this and let's go over here and darken the exposure down and then we can do highlight but see what happens look what's happening when i do a similar process to this in capture one i'm just making a gray sky i can't get this amazing blue sky that i effectively was able to paint in using lightroom in capture one without doing a lot of mask because i can't just drop a gradient on this one i could do i could do a mask like this right and then i could limit it by using a loom range okay so i could go like this let's display the mask let's see if we can get it to select but see what's happening it's not the same level of precision i might be able to get close here though let's do that now we've got a luma range separation now i'm going to pull back the exposure but no it's affecting her face i can put some blue in the sky but it's affecting everything in that luma range and yeah it does look better i'm not doing bad here honestly considering we started right here but in here i have true separation in each one of these masks look at how how that auto masked the subject from the background and not only that in lightroom i'm saving these and you can save these into presets so you can say hey this is a good combination of foreground subject right so this i have masks like this in my belladonna presets i have masks like this in natural hdr that i've started implementing that basically puts everything in place you just update the mask and boom just like we saw with these skies that's a huge advantage the ai tools in lightroom are more yes i know i make presets so that's relevant to me but even if you're making your own presets this i think is relevant to you because making formulas is huge for workflow it's huge for getting more creativity in your imagery because by having tools and presets and styles you can try all these things to fulfill your visualization i always tell people using styles isn't about your images looking like mine that's why i do mod presets so people can mix and match and do all this stuff it's about being able to try 20 different subtle variants in five seconds because you can't do that manually and get the same amount of control and variance okay let's close this off though by looking at one of the big debates that comes in for capture one and that is the fujifile so let's find a couple of different fuji files here's one here here's capture one i put the street class preset on this here's lightroom i put the street class preset on this on this underground scene in guanajuato okay we got pretty good range we got some dark shadow but yeah we got pretty good control and i could lift i could tweak i could bring some more into these and i could actually pull out a ton of detail again in this raw file but i like having some shadow i'm okay with that but what this image is a good test is it's shot at iso 2500 so it's a high iso it's a dark scene and we're lifting it quite a bit in both of these let's lift it a little more here even as well and just make sure we have lots of detail let's actually zoom in on both i'm going to zoom in right here where we kind of have a transition around this green flag okay this is capture one people are always saying oh capture one's not wormy well what they're talking about is these kind of little wormy marks here and this is capture one guys on a high iso file let's look at the same in lightroom and again we're like at 200 percent here in lightroom right now as it stands okay i just want to be clear what i'm saying here listen closely this is capture one fuji x100v file this is light the capture one's a little sharper so let's bring lightroom up to speed a little bit and let's sharpen a little more okay again you can see there's some differences here what we have is grain i'm gonna tell you a secret turn off the grain look at this okay and let's turn off grain in capture one okay now we're looking at the same here's the worminess people are talking about in light versus capture one versus lightroom now the lightroom version is actually more sharp so let's bring up our sharpening a little bit you'll notice if we actually sharpen these close to equal they both have artifacts from the sensor on the fuji camera and honestly guys i think the lightroom yes i see the worminess they're talking about but there's a lot of artifacts here on the fuji and it's kind of editing some of them out but you can still see bits and pieces i don't really think the fuji is that much more but the secret that i'm getting at is it doesn't matter that much because as soon as i put some grain in it looks natural i'm going to go silver rich and put about 30 points of grain in okay and it's now it's blending together right it's a little more filmic what happens i'm gonna go down here to the grain in lightroom now we're in lightroom again grain as soon as i add some grain the so-called worminess virtually disappears and you can say oh well you're taking detail away well maybe but i'm getting a very natural feel to this i can sharpen more if i want i can tweak it so i'm showing you with nothing right with no grain so you can see a real comparison between these two they both have some artifacts it's it's the life the other thing i can do in lightroom is i could right click and i can enhance this and it's going to actually do some ai enhancements lightroom is a lot ahead on its ai stuff and if i look here with this i can run this and enhance it and let's see what happens okay so you can see it's made of dng down here and this is the enhanced version now when i pull in here is it different um let's look at both this is this is the original and this is the enhanced so it's a little cleaner okay you can do that if you're really worried about this it's not perfectly clean remember this is a high iso shot but it's a little cleaner the reality is i usually put a little bit of grain on my output images anyhow because i want them to kind of have that organic natural feel and the moment i do that and add a little bit of grain and you can control your settings i have grain presets implemented in a lot of my packs there's really very little different the the truth is it's actually disappearing more in lightroom when i add some grain than it is when i add some grain in capture one but a little grain covers a multitude of sins blotchiness and skies things like that so a little grain i've taught for years put a little grain it's okay it's very filmic it's very nice it's good it's not rocket science bottom line let's look at a different image let's take a portrait here's a portrait shot on an xt3 so this is a lot more of a low-key situation here here's a lightroom version and here is capture one again edited very similar using both okay fine let's go into our details let's punch in this is 200 and we can see that this yes it has a little bit and i haven't even applied grain to this it's very clean at this low of an iso let's punch in on this one again they look good on both they both have look at this they both have some artifacts guys look at right above her head there back to lightroom you tell me i'm not seeing much difference and if i had a little bit of grain to this suddenly what was worminess is just now a part of my grain structure and i zoom out and i got a great looking image so lightroom capture one which do you like best i think that's what this comes down to guys i hope you enjoyed this i hope you'll like hope you'll subscribe leave a comment let me know what you think that's my feeling as we come into 2022 on the latest versions of lightroom versus capture one but both are going to work good for you let me know what you like and why and let's see all of these companies keep competing and making better tools for our photography we'll see on the next one

Channel: Seim

Views: 313

Keywords: gavin seim photography tips photographic school zones system, luminosity masking, photo tips, photos hands on, getting it in camera, lightroom, street photography, photoshop actions

Id: GW9T27LO7Sk

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021