About Capture One. Capture One was originally designed as a software front end and processing tool for Phase One's medium format camera backs. As such, it has always been a relatively high-end tool, but over recent years, the company has seen the potential to go toe to toe with Lightroom. Something else Capture One offers is the creation of masks from selections through the color editor and the use of refine edge tools. Both applications offer gradual filters and with version 12, Capture one introduced radial filter just like the one in Lightroom. With Capture One Pro 12, Phase One introduced the Luma Range tool. Once you imported your images, Lightroom and Capture One automatically apply an ICC profile based on the camera model. Lightroom has just a drop-down menu called “ Profile” with the Adobe Color profile selected by default. You can choose other Adobe profiles from the list.
- Compare Capture One To Lightroom
- Capture One Lightroom Comparison
- Capture One To Lightroom Online
- Capture One To Lightroom Download
- Capture One Import Lightroom Catalog
- Capture One To Lightroom
- Capture One Vs Adobe Photoshop
Introduction
Two years ago, I decided to jump ship from Lightroom to Capture One Pro. At the time, it seemed like a brave move, but after an afternoon of testing I felt somewhat confident, so jump I did. Two years on, I can confirm that this has been the best thing I could have done for my photography.
Recent changes to the Lightroom product strategy have lots of people asking for help, so when my friends at Phase One asked me to write a post outlining points to consider when migrating from Lightroom to Capture One Pro, I jumped at the chance.
Preparing to Migrate
In case anyone recalls my original post on jumping ship, I’d like to mention that Capture One Pro now supports Photoshop PSD files, so it’s no longer necessary to convert any PSD files that you might have to a different format. You can keep them in your library as they are. I also talked about cleaning up Catalogs, to avoid extra work after the migration, but this is no longer necessary either, although a bit of spring cleaning doesn’t hurt.
Export Your Lightroom Catalogs
When I was using Lightroom, I had every image I’ve shot since 2000 in a single catalog, but Capture One Pro does not work well with this many images in a single catalog, so it’s best to split images into multiple smaller catalogs.
Note that in both Lightroom and Capture One Pro, I do not keep my images inside the Catalog. I think this makes backing up hard work, and is less transparent and therefore error-prone than referencing images in a separate folder structure.
My main archive of raw images lives in a folder called Photo Originals, and at the time that I migrated, had a one catalog for 2000 to 2005 images, and then a separate year catalog for all years from 2006 to 2015.
To prepare to import these years into separate Capture One catalogs I right clicked each year folder in Lightroom and selected Export This Folder as a Catalog. I was able to select multiple folders and export them as a single catalog for years 2000 to 2005.
I have one special folder that I call Finals, and this contains a copy of every image I’ve ever shot that is worth a hoot. It’s like my Keepers folder and has images just in year subfolders. I exported this as a separate catalog as well, in preparation to migrate.
If unlike me, you already have multiple Lightroom catalogs, you will need to decide how you want to organize these in Capture One Pro, and export your various catalogs accordingly.
In the Export dialog in Lightroom, uncheck the three checkboxes to Export negative files, Build/include Smart Previews and Include available previews in the new Catalog. The export process is quick, and once you have your bite-sized Catalogs exported from Lightroom, you are ready to import into Capture One.
Importing Lightroom Catalogs into Capture One
To import a Lightroom Catalog, open Capture One Pro, and if you don’t already have a catalog to import to, create one from the dialoag that is displayed. I personally prefer to work with Catalogs rather than Sessions.
If you are creating year catalogs like me, just give your catalog a name like 2018, or whatever year you need, then from the File menu select Import Catalog > Lightroom Catalog. The following dialog (below) will tell you what settings will be imported, which includes Collections, Crop, Rotation, and Orientation information as well as White Balance, Exposure, Saturation and Contrast settings, and Metadata, including IPTC, Rating, Color Label and Keywords.
Catalog Considerations
Capture One Pro stores more information and previews inside the Catalog than Lightroom does, which I imagine is the main reason that Catalogs can’t contain that many images. I have found my strategy of keeping my original raw files for each year in single year catalogs to work very well.
My 2016 original photos catalog, the year that I jumped-ship, ended up a little over 30 GB, and my 2017 catalog was 40 GB, each containing around 22,000 images. I can’t say if Capture One Pro has got better at handling large catalogs since then, but I have grown to like having each year’s original raw images in a catalog of its own, so I’ve had no reason to try larger catalogs at this point.
My Finals catalog for my final selects for all of my shots is just over 11 GB, and only grows gradually, so this strategy has worked out well too.
Metadata Settings
Note that in the Image tab of the Capture One Pro preferences, I have my Metadata settings set to Full Sync for the Auto Sync Sidecar XMP option. I turn off Prefer Embedded XMP over Embedded IPTC and turn on Prefer Sidecar XMP over Embedded Metadata.
These settings enable me to get the most basic metadata from sidecar files into Capture One, as well as synchronizing back to the xmp files to enable other editors to read the changes to metadata I make in Capture One. Since Capture One stores the image adjustments either inside the Catalog or in .cosetting files in Sessions, these are independent from the xmp files. If I need copies of my raw files outside of my Catalog, I right click the images in Capture One Pro and select Export > Originals, select a folder, and make sure to include the adjustments. These can easily be imported in another Catalog if needed – including the adjustments.
When using this method to copy images to my Finals Catalog for example, after making a copy I go to my Finals Catalog and right click the folder that I exported the images to, and choose Synchronize. Note though that to Synchronize adjustments you have to turn on the Show Importer checkbox, select all the images in the Import dialog, and make sure to tick ‘Include Adjustments’ within ‘Adjustments’ for this to work.
Working on Multiple Computers
I like to keep my images and catalog on an external drive so that I can move from computer to computer by just moving the drive. I was able to continue to do this with Capture One Pro, although my method is not entirely sanctioned by the Phase One Team, so try what I’m about to tell you at your own risk.
I achieve this by storing my Capture One Pro settings folder in Dropbox, with a symbolic link to the settings folder in the Library (on Mac OS). This way, all of my presets and settings automatically synchronize between my computers, so just moving my drive with my images and catalog on it from one computer to another works seamlessly. Rather than bloating this post, you can check out my post on how I do this, along with my backup strategy, etc. on my blog here.
Conclusion
From a Lightroom user’s perspective, you will notice some differences in how Capture One Pro does things, but in the two-plus years since I switched, not once have I been disappointed by my decision.
If you want an application that works the same as Lightroom, then stay with Lightroom. But, if you want the ultimate image quality, and you are willing to make a few changes to your workflow, I think it’s worth the effort to change.
If you don’t already own Capture One, you can download a 30-day trial and try it out!
Martin Bailey
Martin Bailey is a nature and wildlife photographer based in Tokyo. He’s a pioneering Podcaster and blogger, Craft & Vision author, Capture One Brand Ambassador and X-Rite Coloratti member. Fueled by his passion for nature and travel, and a tireless desire to share his knowledge and artistic vision, Martin is a popular international tour and workshop leader, helping photographers from around the world to experience and capture the wonders of this awesome planet we call home.
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Introduction
I use Capture One 20 to edit all my photos, both my old ones taken with Nikon D70, Nikon D90, Panasonic G7/GH5 and Sony A7II and glorious new photos taken with my Fuji cameras.
Capture One has a special Fuji version, which is cheaper and only works with Fuji cameras. They offer a similar version for Sony. I own a full license for the Capture One Pro 20, which handles all cameras, paid once, but they also offer a subscription-based version, similar to Lightroom.
After years with Lightroom – why change?
In mid-2019 my Lightroom catalog contained approx. 350.000 images, the first taken back in 2000. I never deleted anything and due to some failed attempts at re-organisation I’d imported lots of photos multiple times. It was a mess, a huge, overwhelming mess. Navigating this catalog was a nightmare as well so I started looking at the alternatives, but few solutions had good catalog performance and similar features, like rich metadata handling AND post-processing abilities. They were either good at metadata handling or mostly focused on photo processing (like Luminar), not both.
I’d just sold all my old photo gear and bought a Sony A7II, but trying my neighbors Fujifilm X-T2 made me switch completely to Fuji, which Lightroom didn’t handle very well, so another nail in the coffin for LR.
At the same time, Adobe did some strange changes to their subscription-based Lightroom plan, like suddenly doubling the cost for some users or telling owners of a license to old software that they might be sued if they tried to use their old software. They also seemed to focus mostly on their cloud-based solutions and lots of longtime Adobe users started looking elsewhere. All in all, they seemed to handle the whole thing rather poorly and this also strengthened my desire to find some non-Adobe alternative.
I looked at Luminar, and even bought a license for Luminar 3, but it didn’t have a catalog function at all. Later I tested Luminar 4, which had catalog features, but some of the editing features didn’t feel right, like switching out the sky in one click and adding artificial sun flares. Trying to catalog my huge amount of photos caused the software to crash after a few days of chewing through the files and when I tried to start Luminar again it never recovered.
I saw some youtube videos related to Capture One and after a few tests using the Fuji-only express version of Capture One I abandoned Adobe and went all-in on Capture One.
Ironically, the last time I started Lightroom Adobe had patched it and now it worked much faster in my enormous catalog, but it was too little, too late.
Untangling about 20 years of bad data management
I’m going to write a separate post about how I manage my photo collection, but in short, I use Capture One sessions, one for each photo event and all events sorted by year, but have planned a Master Catalog, which will contain only the selects from the separate sessions. When I consider a session to be done, I’ll import the selects into the Master Catalog and then move the session into an Archive-folder. Everything is stored on a Synology NAS, which is backed up to another local Synology NAS in addition to a cloud-based backup of everything.
I’ve imported old photos by year into sessions and are going to work through each year, sorting photos into groups/collections based on event, deleting bad ones, adding metadata, and rating as I go. Hopefully, I can export those collections into separate sessions somehow later, but as I’ll go into details below, Capture One has a few missing features and performance issues when it comes to session and catalog handling. Even if there are a few hiccups performance-wise, Capture One has nice organizing features and I feel I finally have a chance to get control over my enormous collection of photos.
What I like #1 – Small adjustments
In Lightroom I found small adjustments in a slider made huge changes to my photos. It’s probably a common problem with inexperienced user like myself coming into photo editing software to overuse tools like shadow- and highlight-recovery, clarity and sharpness. So the problem is certainly a user error, but I feel Capture One makes it easier to make small adjustments and keep my photos from looking over-processed than Lightroom.
Compare Capture One To Lightroom
In short, Capture One makes me feel like I’m still working with photography and not digital art.
What I like #2 – Layers
Capture One has great support for layers, making it easy to adjust only parts of the image and keep the adjustments separate. After lots of adjustments, you can still remove or reduce or increase the opacity of a given layer to fit the final goal.
Capture One Lightroom Comparison
What I like #3 – Color editor
The color editor in Capture One is more advanced than the one found in Lightroom. For a nice introduction to the color editor go here.
What I like #4 – Customizable user interface
You can customize the Capture One interface to better fit your own needs. I especially like defining my own panel with the tools I use the most, in the order of how I edit my photos so my post-processing workflow is manifested in the editing software.
What I like #5 – Support for Fuji film simulations
I’ve writtena separate post about Fuji film simulations and these are also found and applied by Capture One on import, which is a great starting point for additional processing.
What I like #6 – Tutorials on YouTube
Capture One To Lightroom Online
At least in the past months, there has been new official Capture One related live streams or youtube videos every week. There are already lots of tutorials available on PhaseOne’s (the publisher of Capture One) website, but the live streams with guests are on youtube are especially nice and is a great way of building a community around a piece of software.
Capture One To Lightroom Download
What I like #7 – Helps me focus on producing a few good photos
That might sound strange, but when you use Capture One sessions it will build a folder structure with one folder for all your imported photos, on for trash, one for output, and one for selects. The folder called selects are meant for the few, the best of the bunch and they’re kept separately. This mindset has made me more aware of sorting out the really good photos and setting those aside. If I take 1000 photos at an event I want only 10-15 in my selects folder (ok, sometimes a few more 😉 ) – that’s where to gold is.
I also like that my finished photos are processed and the produced JPEGs, or TIFs, are placed in the output folder. It keeps the folder structure simple.
What I don’t like
Capture One Import Lightroom Catalog
- Capture One 20 has crashed multiple times. It seems to hang some times, especially when closing one session to change to a different one. This is very annoying and will hopefully be fixed. Keeping the catalogs and sessions small in size seems to cause fewer problems.
- When importing large numbers of photos Capture One 20 becomes very sluggish after about 15.000-20.000 photos. We’re talking 2-3 photos per second on import. It also seems to be very harddrive dependant and a fast SSD is required for larger sessions.
My whishlist
Capture One To Lightroom
- Be able to export a collection in a session or catalog to a new or an already existing session, optionally removing the collection from the source. In my workflow, I cull all my images, then process the selects and when done I want to export the selects into an existing master catalog.
- Support for automation and scripting, preferably using processing recipes, perhaps using Python as scripting language instead of AppleScript. AppleScript is very limited and using a more popular language would make more people use it. Like in point 1, I have a specific workflow, and after the processing of the selects are done (and they have been exported to the master catalog), I’d like to archive the current session and move it into a specific archive location. I want to be able to do this in one operation (export to master catalog, archiving the original session). This is just one example, but good support for automation like this would be great.
- Merge & stacking features for HDR or panorama, similar to Lightroom.
- More plugins! I tried submitting a plugin request, but the provided email failed :-(. An open standard or at least a easy-to-use SDK for the development of plugins would be great.
- Plugins for direct upload to Instagram, 500px, Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, SquareSpace, WordPress sites etc from inside Capture One.
Capture One Vs Adobe Photoshop
In conclusion
I love Capture One for the editing features. I almost love the organizing features if the performance can be fixed and add a few features for organizing & automation. Capture One has been a perfect fit for my transition to a more mindful photography mindset, with a better focus on producing a few good photos. There seems to be a nice community among the Capture One users.
Further reading/watching
Capture One Facebook resources