Lightroom VS Capture One - Should you switch?

in all honesty this is a video I wanted to make for quite a while concerning Lightroom vs capture one hey guys Gavin here I just wanted to interject really fast this video got kind of long talking about my feelings on capture 1 and Lightroom and what I've learned from it so what I've done is I took the end of the video and I'm putting it right now so that you can get an overview of how I feel about capture 1 vs. light Road in like 4 minutes then if you want to keep watching see more examples see me talking about interface differences and ins and outs you can keep watching capture 1 my conclusion is it's very good for most people for most people capture one is a very viable alternative to leaving Lightroom but also for most people that are used to Lightroom the struggle is gonna be giving their head around and in their face that is just different that whether you argue it's less intuitive or not it's gonna feel less intuitive most likely because you're used to Lightroom which is simpler there really are less sliders and less controls in Lightroom than in capture one the processing in both is good on some things in my tests the processing is better in capture one in more nuanced particularly with colors and that can be a good thing these are both quality processors but there is a nuance to the enemy there's an artisanal feel to the editing almost in capture one and maybe it's just the nerdy side in me maybe it's just the Fuji user using profiles in capture one capture one feels more powerful and we could go into more ins & outs we could compare things like export modules side-by-side we could compare RAW processing in side-by-side but today was just my thoughts from someone who uses both of these programs a lot who has actually tried to switch entirely to capture one except for developing new products for Lightroom and there's not quite got there yet largely because of the file management limitations within capture one the principles of the catalog and capture and then you have a catalog and and you can import images or you can add folders on another location those things work mostly the same but they're more elegant I would say in Lightroom they're more intuitive the management is easier for most people I think in Lightroom which is not to say that you can't get good and be perfectly satisfied in capture one other than the inability to drill down into folders I would say that's the only glaring omission from capture one that makes me scratch my head and say well I'm gonna go use Lightroom for this because it's so much better at dealing with it it's so much better at okay I want to look at the images for the entire year and scrub through them and if I go to capture when I can because I can't just select the parent folder and see everything inside it and I'm hoping that the next time I come back with a video this will be addressed but considering I've found threads going back 3 4 years of people saying please why don't we have this and capture one has ignored them phase 1 has ignored them in favor of features that advertise better on their new versions I'm not sure is capture one better than the other alternatives out there I don't know because I don't actively use all of them but I can say that despite my honest complaints against phase one for some of the lacking capture one it is a very powerful software once you get the basics down it's very nice to use and it can do everything in terms of developing that Lightroom can and honestly more so if you're looking to get away from Adobe and the Creative Cloud I absolutely don't blame you the cloud model is a bad model for the consumer the cloud model is meant to make the software company wealthy not to give more to the consumer and I think that we've seen that I think we knew that going in years ago but Adobe is proof of that okay so there's my overview hope you guys got something out of that you can stop here or if you want to talk more let's continue on and get a little more in depth one has been talked about for a while it's been around for years but Adobe's been the king and there's been a lot of talk lately dare I say an exodus from Adobe with things like sending out threats telling them not to use all versions raising the price on people by substantial margins I remember back in the days of the Profoto show when creative cloud came out talking to colleagues about this and we discussed the fact that Adobe will take advantage of this they will raise the price once they got us locked in in the past Adobe would have to regularly do substantial updates like the normal software world and to get us to want to purchase those updates they had to be notable well now we have to pay to use it anyhow so while new features are released they're done rather slowly and often times in a lackluster sort of way Lightroom for example has seen very few significant updates in quite frankly years sure there's an extra slider here and there some new features but let's be honest Lightroom has not been innovating it's getting more and more blody dare I say it sometimes feels terribly slow even though our computers are faster than ever and so a lot of people are looking at tools from from companies like phase one on one software and and others that are out there and you can let me know your favorites down below but I would say one of the leaders in this while there's a lot of good software makers one of the leaders in terms of RAW processing is capture one capture one is now at version 12 even as far back as maybe version 10 or 11 I was looking at it and saying wow it's it's processing the color the the nuances of the color gradients are sometimes notably better than the way Lightroom is processing now this video isn't so much about a side-by-side of processing RAW files from different cameras in Lightroom versus capture one if you guys are interested in that or if you're interested in more videos on how to use capture one let me know and I'll see what I can do this video is more my personal thoughts on using capture one over lightroom and I've been using capture one heavily now for I'm gonna say almost a year I've almost approached at times using capture one exclusively because I like particularly what it can do with color on the other hand it has some lacks and I'm gonna talk about that today too I've started using Fuji cameras I also use Sony and I also have lots of files from my can and I have film scan so I have a wide range Fuji users oftentimes are a bit nerdy and they tend to really like capture one and you'll see a lot of Fuji users using the capture one I have the X III I have the X t3 very nice cameras is capture one better for Fuji cameras probably it probably is that's not to say however that you can't process Fuji Rock files very nicely in Lightroom and I will sometimes process in both capture one now has native camera profiles meaning if you enjoy the color profiles like Velvia Pro via things like that on the Fuji but you want to shoot in RAW you can actually shoot in RAW and then when you load those in to capture one I believe this came with version 12 when you load those into capture one it will actually apply those as the color profile and of course it's a raw file so you can change it and do what you want with it but that's pretty cool because it allows you to the flexibility of the raw file but to have that kind of native color field as we talk I'm going to show you some things between capture 1 and Lightroom but mostly in regards to just general usage and here's what it comes down to for me because I don't want to keep this video long this video is for those of you that are thinking about trying capture one wanting to know if it's really worth it should you really switch those of you that are saying I want to delete Adobe cloud I want to delete Lightroom I want to stop paying by the month which again is something you can do I in the most recent version just went out in bot capture one because I liked what I saw it's doing good things let's talk about pros and cons though and let's just come right down to the brass tacks of it Lightroom is bloated and I'm running a very fast system I up till recently was using Apple computers but I built PC a Windows PC recently just because that the Pro Apple computers have been falling behind so much on their desktops so I have an MD 2700 in here I have 11 gigabytes of video memory 64 gigs of ram this is a very powerful computer so we don't have any power bottlenecks it's running m2 SSDs and I've even for sake of speed test he moved the catalogues while my images my archive of images of our years are on external drives the catalogs and the caches in the previews for Lightroom and capture one I recently moved to an internal m2 drive to have the fastest performance there and yet while that does help because things load faster it's still surprising how slow they can both be Lightroom has gotten worse over the years about reliability and speed in fact a lot of people are still using Lightroom 6 because number one they refuse to switch to the cloud or maybe they stopped at Lightroom 7.2 which was before there was a lot of significant changes that was a fairly a fairly large back-end update and honestly because of previews and and all these different things that they changed in 7.3 for a lot of people 7.3 ran slower 7.2 is is no speed demon even on a computer like this but Lightroom is fairly reliable it handles large catalogs fairly well well I do make separate catalogs if I'm doing individual client projects and I've talked about this for years that separate catalog method however for my personal projects which is a lot of what I do now I'm just using one big catalog with folders divided by year now maybe it's because I've been using Lightroom since the original beta and inversion one but honestly it didn't take me very long to get my head around Lightroom Lightroom I find is a bit more minimalistic in in the learning sense there's a lot in Lightroom but it's kind of a 1 2 3 you know there's your grid hit the G key press D to go to develop I found myself going into capture one and for example assigning the switch between the grid view the lightbox view if you will and full screen view with the strip at the bottom to the D key so that I can kind of have some similarities to my light environment but I struggled with that and so one of the first things I would recommend and capture one is go into your shortcuts play with the menus and figure out how to get the interface set up in a way that feels good to you however your editing style is but for a lot of us it's gonna be kind of gearing towards Lightroom to be honest they should have better profiles better workspace options that actually give us shortcuts and stuff that are similar to Lightroom capture one is not actually very good at this in my opinion they have a lot of training videos but I found capture one and I've told them as much the the contacts that I have in developers at phase one and I've said look this is not easy if I'm techy right I'm nerdy I make software I make presets and it's hard for me to switch over how much harder isn't going to be for somebody who's not really like a nerd of the digital world right maybe for somebody who who just wants it to work out of the box does all this mean in practice here's the Lightroom interface right the Lightroom interface and we can see we've got the develop module we can switch over here to the grid you can select a group of images and apply presets you can go to the develop module and on the right you have the sliders now we come over to capture one and as you can see as I've set it up here it's it's not so dissimilar I've assigned some shortcuts so I can switch between this grid mode here and then go to the large view but you're not really switching module so much you can switch panels for example lens Corrections detail color tone and then you can customize those panels which I have done so the panels that I use the most I'll have maybe one or two windows all over on this left side here and I'll just have those panels and kind of switch through those so in essence rather than switching models like develop or library mode you simply have the view of the image on the right whether you're in a grid mode or you click that and open it up in a large mode or assign shortcuts to that I've assigned the D key to kind of make me at home right because I use develop and grid and Lightroom well I just assigned the D key to kind of turn on and off the grid mode and I can do it that way and I can sort and I can rate and I can do all of those things similar Lightroom and then I just come over to the left panel and choose whether I want to work on color or tone and I have all my sliders it's still a raw processor the essence of it works the same but it's different and I have to say it took me some time to get around the raw files that you've edited in Lightroom if you save the metadata out I found that the ratings will come over right so I actually can cross back and forth sometimes honestly I still find it's faster and easier to import and synchronize folders and things like that in Lightroom and so I'll do stuff there and maybe quickly delete rejects and still work in Lightroom and then save the metadata out and go over to capture one to edit and those ratings can come over when I when I then update that folder over in capture one but that's something I'm gonna come back to in a minute because the folders are well I'll come back to that in a minute a pro for capture one it handles color beautifully we have much more detailed control over color there's the skin tone module where you can target skin tones but it's more than that because you can go here to the advanced color module and rather than just the sliders right we have like the seven sliders of color hue/saturation luminosity those are very powerful in Lightroom but in capture one you can go so much farther because I can actually say no I want to target only this shade of red and I can actually drag the slider I can drag the wheel I can use an eyedropper and select a color and then I can adjust it I can click the check box to say only show the color that I have selected this is really cool because if I'm working with skin or maybe greens or trees or a river I can actually select that color and then refine it in the color wheel so that I can make a custom slider as it were that's only going to affect that specific colors as you can see right here it's really cool it looks a little confusing at first but in essence once you have that color selected it still works the same you have luminosity saturation etc so the fundamentals of the raw process are the same I think the hurdle for people is the interface in capture one is still not that intuitive capture one does not do a great job of making training videos in my opinion for people that are coming from Lightroom they do have a video library on their YouTube channel but it's almost like the people making the videos don't really use Lightroom right I've used Lightroom for over a decade now I've used capture one now for awhile and I'm very comfortable in capture one but I'm probably more comfortable in Lightroom and maybe that's partly why even for my own editing I still kind of have my feet in both worlds I like what capture one offers me particularly I like that I feel I have a small edge with the Fuji files and maybe we should do some more testing on that to see in the latest versions of Lightroom if that's even true because Lightroom has been improving on that front for a lot of people when they first download capture one they're kind of looking at it and they're like what do I do with this and it just seems a little messy and I think for that reason some people maybe walk away and just go back to Lightroom but know if you get in there you can still add a folder you can add the same folders you don't even have to move them maybe you have your folders on a single Drive like I do you can actually reference them from both Lightroom and capture one and when you synchronize the folder in Lightroom or capture one which is not automatic so if I edit a folder a photo in Photoshop right I edit a raw file out of Lightroom and go to Photoshop I save that and it's saving back as a tear for a PSD all right that works I have a fairly clean path there and it's right in there next to my original image if I then go to capture one that new TIFF is not gonna show up in the same folder unless I go down and synchronize the folder and vice versa if I edit a photo from capture 1 take a raw file into Photoshop which is also a fairly smooth transition it's not quite as elegant as Lightroom but I can click on a photo and I can edit that photo in the application of my choice and it will render it out and open it as a 16-bit or whatever file I want in Photoshop and then when I save it it goes right back in to the capture 1 catalog without a hassle now the cons of capture 1 aside from the fact that the learning curve can be a little confusing obviously the idea for most people would be to use one or the other because I work with all these software's all the time I kind of have to keep up to date with all of them why on my own work would I not use only capture one and here's the honest answer I don't feel that capture one has the basic organs of files down as well speed wise in some ways it's faster but often times I noticed this lag even when my cash and my previews and my catalog for capture one are stored on a fast drive I load capture one and I go to a folder and it's still even though the previews are all rendering it's I still have to wait I still have to wait for it to like count the files and load them on the screen and it's not that it's terribly slow but when you have a large catalog this can add up the filtering isn't as good right on Lightroom yeah it can be a little slow and honestly Lightroom the latest versions of Lightroom I find are kind of frizzy so sometimes I have to quit Lightroom and start all over but in general if you have those previews rendered you open Lightroom and you open a folder and it's there I would say overall once the images are loaded capture one is faster than Lightroom at loading it zooming in one-to-one things like that I feel like it feels a little snappier but the fact that it's 20:19 and I have a catalog and when I open capture one I still have to wait for those images to queue up as it is for example I select this folder and then I want to rate the five stars I go down here to the filter and I click five stars and you can see it's just counting up it's like even though they're already in the catalog it has to go through and tally them all again because I opened a folder that I didn't have open today I don't really know what's going on there I'm gonna look into that a little bit more and I already have tried to resolve it but even though I'm on this fast drive that alone didn't fix the problem it may have sped it up but capture one the filtering kind of lacks the loading of the catalog in terms of getting images onto the screen initially seems to be a little slow well in Lightroom you can say well show me four stars and higher well in capture one you click four stars and it only shows you four stars and if you want to show four and five stars you control and you click five and so it's just an extra step that you're going through I think the main reason I do not switch to exclusively the capture one is its inability it's inexcusable inability to deal with folder drill-down in Lightroom if I go to let's say this 20 18 folder right you can see if you look at the number of images that what is there like 8,000 images in here okay in my 20 18 folder what it's doing if I click on the top folder it's showing me the 20 18 folder and the contents of all folders inside it now this is something I've taken for granted because as far as I recall Lightroom has always done this and this is how it should work as a general rule or maybe there should at least be an option to drill down into those folders or not then I can go into that 20-18 folder and I can select any of the folders within it if I want to filter down to only what is in and let's say you know this shoot right here capture 1 does not work that way despite outcry from users of capture 1 for years you can synchronize a folder and capture one at any time that works fine you can right-click you synchronize the folder and it's gonna update it with the files inside if I go to that same the very same 20-18 folder and capture one and you can see this in Lightroom we had around 8000 images if you look in capture one there's what 4,000 the reason for that is because it will not show the folders inside if I want to see the images inside the folders that are within my 20-18 folder I have to go into those folders and click on them individually I cannot click on the parent folder if some people don't want it it should simply be an option right there are programs that you can click on a folder and say turn on drill down and drill down means it's gonna show synchronize etc everything below it in that folder structure and then if you want to go down you can on an individual level and a lot of people I don't even think realize that they're lacking this until they really go to organize and I think that's probably the only thing holding me back at this point from using capture 1 is my primary editor for everything yes I think it takes a little bit longer to learn capture 1 it might be a little more complicated unless 1 2 3 ish but it's it's still if you if you try not to think like I need it to be like Lightroom it helps I don't need it to be like Lightroom but I'm gonna set it up similar to Lightroom which I'm comfortable with and then I'm just going to learn it and then you find out that particularly with color capture one is notably more powerful than Lightroom with tone with dynamic range is it better that's debatable and maybe we should do some specific tests on different files but with color and the controls and nuances we have over color there's really no doubt now that I do dare I say gotten good at capture one I mean I've been making presets and developing tools for my customers and fellow photographers for my viewers I know capture one pretty well now and I like it I like it well for my part I still need some of the Adobe software because I develop on all these things I think for a lot of people the competition has come a long ways phase one and other products and on the raw side are very powerful on the pixel editing side for people looking to replace Photoshop I think you know software like affinity photo and others have come a long way and are giving us professional level editing therefore a lot of people if you don't absolutely have to have the Adobe file formats and synchronizations and systems that yes these are very viable alternatives and I can say that for most people despite a few lacks and frustrations that you may experience if you want to get away from Lightroom in that subscription model yes phase one is a viable alternative don't just give up in the first hour because the interface is a little confusing watch some videos set up some shortcuts get the interface the way you want it and it can absolutely replace Lightroom and arguably in the processing department least be better than the files that you're gonna get out of Lightroom I hope this helped you this was kind of a long rambling discussion I've been using capture one in Lightroom side-by-side these are my thoughts let me know what you think about both of these or about whatever solutions you're finding to get away from the cloud or are you staying with the cloud are you joining the exodus and leading Adobe behind or are you gonna just keep it up keep with it and hope that Adobe starts to respect their customers more and take care of business we'll see those are both options let me know what you guys think all right take care [Music]

Channel: Seim

Views: 30,357

Keywords: gavin seim photography tips photographic school zones system, luminosity masking, photo tips, photos hands on, getting it in camera, lightroom presets, capture one, capture 1, phase one, lightroom classic vs capture one, Is C1 better than Lightroom, fuji raw file editing, fuji X camera in lightroom, I'm leaving adobe cloud, adobe creative cloud price increase, leaving photoshop, leaving lightroom, professional photography software, best raw software

Id: kAXjSaeN2yY

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019