Worth the Upgrade? My Thoughts on Capture One 22

welcome back everybody it is so good to see you all again my name is john magnoski i'm an architectural and fine art photographer and like so many capture one users i was waiting with baited breath for the new release of capture 122 so that i could play with the hdr and panoramic stitching tools so super excited about these new tools and i wanted to show them to you and i've been working on this video and i just have to be bluntly honest with everybody i cannot even pretend like i'm excited about this anymore um but before i get into that let me tell you quick story back in the spring i believe i was contacted by capture one to set up a time and do a zoom call with one of their ux designers specifically focused on the hdr merging tool mainly because i do manual blends and if you look at any of my other tutorials you'll see that i use capture one and affinity photo to blend all of my interior photos and my exterior photos manually i do that because i get the greatest level of control some of my feedback to them was that you know it's good to have some you know control over the image and that the the image has to be outputted in a very realistic sense and so some of the samples that they showed me had me super excited i was thinking this this tool is going to give me my proof images to my clients so much faster when the program was finally released just the other day i couldn't wait i mean i downloaded it right away i put other work aside and i started playing with the hdr merge tool and i have to say i was shocked at how simple the tool became compared to what i was shown instead of any sort of interface it's literally like a merged hdr and then merge um you can choose auto settings or other things in fact i'll show you real quick now this is the default workspace within capture 121 i am not a fan of having all of my tools on the left and my thumbnails on the right i am a right tool person so i've created my own workspace i call it jmp22 and if you're interested i do have a link to my workspace in the description below feel free download it plug it right in that way your workspace will be set up just like mine now the tool is incredibly simple as i was saying you simply grab all of your images that you'd like to merge you can either right click and choose merge to hdr you can go up into image merge to hdr and this is your tool palette no longer do you see a preview no longer do you have any sort of parameters it is basically just you choose auto adjust or auto align or not and so here we click on merge and when you do that depending on the size files that you're working with the number of files i haven't tested on anything more than five um so for me on my m1 max fully loaded macbook pro this took literally like 15 maybe 20 seconds when it's done though it it spits out a dng file that you can edit just like a raw file and overall it did a very good job of pulling in the highlights and the window here you know the reflections on the floor and keeping the foreground uh nice and bright and then i can go in and you know just lighten everything up you can see that it already did some adjustments it pulled the highlights down and so on so i can boost the shadows pull everything in and overall it's not bad i mean i was pretty excited when i saw that until i got into the details let me show you i'm going to zoom in here and do you see this i don't know why it's artifacting like this and i thought oh this must be a fluke and so i tried it on multiple images from the same shoot now i'm shooting with the gfx 100s and uh every time there was this harsh light coming in through a window it would do this and i thought well that's no good i i need i need hdr for this very reason in my workflow um and so i thought okay well maybe it's the camera maybe it's having a hard time with this particular sensor so i tried it on some of my older files with the 50s same issue under the same circumstances i thought okay that's incredibly disappointing because i know that lightroom can do it and i don't get this artifacting and then i discovered that and this is really weird i can't apply any fujifilm film simulation profiles to the file before the merge or after the merge they'll show up inside the drop down but they don't do anything that's that's a huge disappointment i use the film profiles all the time is like a base recipe if you will um it's my starting point for how i want the image to look and when i do an hdr merge in capture one i can't use those anymore so that kind of throws my workflow off um however i know in lightroom i can i can apply those after i've created an hdr merge and then i thought well maybe i can get more control over the image if i do some preliminary work to the file before merging none of that matters either you know if i change white balance or anything like that none of that carries over when i do the merge so i'm missing that granular control that i thought we were going to see knowing that it's capture one they give you all sorts of control over all of your file data and yeah not so much in the hdr merge so what's disappointing for me is this is not going to save me any time and my workflow still stands uh there is a link in the description below and up in the card above on how i do my blending manually using capture one and affinity photo and i'm still going to have to do it that way this hdr merge does not cut the mustard for me you think with what i can do with my phone my phone in one shot i would be able to get with something like this and a powerful program the m1 max processor like all that you think you would get something even better using computational photography than what they're giving us and you're still left with having to manually blend things in and so you know artifacting aside which is what i'm seeing in my images even if those artifacts weren't there it's giving me an image which is no different than what i could see in adobe lightroom and okay great guys you've matched adobe lightroom they've had this feature for years it was time for you to pass them and you didn't and i know that they're a small company i get it they have limited resources compared to the juggernaut that is adobe and i know i'm coming down really hard um but yeah the hdr merge i'm not i'm not loving it and i think i don't think it's ready i actually don't think it's ready yet i think they're going to end up updating this um you're going to see a lot more people probably complaining about it um i i doubt i'll be the only one should you upgrade if you're on version 20 or version 21 unless you absolutely necessarily need simple hdr or you know a good panoramic stitching i don't think so i think there's other options out there that are far far better and it really breaks my heart to say that as somebody who supports capture one really is rooting for them um you know i'm a user i use their program i used to be an affiliate and i always tell people capture one it's still it does it's true it gives you the best image quality from a raw file their raw processing engine is the best that's out there in my experience there's so many pieces that are missing and if you're looking for a nice easy cohesive workflow this really isn't it um as i said in my other video where you know i'm doing the the manual blending and everything if you're a real estate photographer or you're looking for more of an automated type of process to create your hdrs this isn't it and it still isn't it sadly so with that said again capture one is still a very capable program um but their new hdr tool is not what i had hoped or expected and i really really do hope that they work hard to improve the um the quality of these files i will be sending my images off to capture one so they can see the artifacting that i'm getting but yeah let me know what you think i kind of rambled on and i kind of came down hard but what do you think of the new tools are you are you happy with them did i miss something did i make a mistake um i would like to know because yeah i am not i'm not a happy camper right now and kind of feel like at this moment maybe the grass is greener i've looked at lightroom i've been playing with it all year their their improvements are impressive um they've kind of reached a level where they're matching capture one with some of the features but then if you're looking at stuff like hdr merge and panoramic stitching and then pano hdr merge stitching combination they have it in spades and it works well with every camera that i've ever tested so anyway i hope you like this video i hope it didn't make you too depressed or anything like that appreciate you spending your time with me i will have more videos coming out and until next time god bless please click on the links and check out my other stuff have a great day

Channel: John Magnoski

Views: 2,533

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Id: pJrsU7DTtCA

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021