- In the world of photo editing,
there are a ton of options as far as software goes
that you can use to get great results for your photos.
That being said, we can probably all agree
that there's one company that's thought of as
the company who has the software in that world.
And that's Adobe
with both their Photoshop and Lightroom software.
But if you're anything like me,
you don't like to just settle with one kind of thing
for too long,
you wanna kinda explore what else is out there.
And that's what got me
on this little experiment trying Capture One.
Well, it's been almost a year using Capture One now.
I opened Lightroom for the first time
in probably six months the other day
and I definitely wanted to stay in Capture One.
In this video we're gonna talk about five reasons
why I'm switching to Capture One more permanently
and I'm gonna talk about five things
that I miss about Lightroom.
(upbeat music)
The first and maybe most important reason
why I'm switching to Capture One is because it's faster.
Now, I haven't done any kind of like benchmark test on this
or anything like that,
but in my personal experience, both editing and exporting,
I've noticed a speed bump with Capture One.
My workflow feels faster,
things just kind of happen snappier for me,
and just for a little bit of context there,
I'm using a 2020 27-inch iMac 5K display
with the 3.8 GHz 8-Core i7 processor
with the upgraded graphics card and 128 GB of RAM.
So I've got a decent machine,
but I've definitely noticed that Lightroom
is a little bit more laggy and slow to respond
to the moves that I'm trying to make when I'm editing
or when I'm just calling through photos.
Reason number two that I'm switching to Capture One,
and one of the most interesting things about Capture One,
is the layers functionality.
Kind of similarly to what you might do
in something like Photoshop,
you can actually add different layers inside your edit.
So every time you go to start a new edit,
you've got a bottom layer called a background,
and that's kind of your base layer corrections.
Certain things are stuck to that background layer,
they don't actually apply two layers
that you might put on top of that,
but for the most part when you create a new layer,
you've got almost all your functionality
so you can do different layers with masks,
you can do different layers
that are only for certain things,
so if you wanna turn them on and off
just to see before and after of those specific edits.
There are so many different things
that you can do with these layers,
whether it just be organizational
or whether it be a workflow thing.
In light room, you're limited.
If I make a radial filter,
I only have a certain kind of controls.
They only give you certain ones of the main controls
that you get on your main base layer.
Whereas in Capture One,
if I make that same radial filter on a new layer,
I get all of my controls again.
And in my opinion, that is a huge advantage
to the layers versus the functionality
that we have in Lightroom.
Reason number three that I'm sticking with Capture One
instead of going back to Lightroom
is because of the skin tone and advanced color tool.
These tools are just so cool and so handy.
So beyond just having your regular HSL sliders,
which both Lightroom and Capture One have,
you've also got something called the Advanced Color tool.
And what that allows you to do
is select a color within your photo,
refine which color you're talking about
so you're making sure you're only editing
the parts that you want,
and then you can adjust the hue, saturation and luminance
of just that color in the photo.
So you're not stuck with the predefined colors
that you get in your HSL panel.
And you could do a whole bunch of different colors
if you want.
So this can be so much more powerful
if you're trying to,
let's say, change the color of a jacket, or a hat,
or somebody's hair, or something along those lines.
Also you can create a mask from a selection in this panel,
which is very cool.
Once you apply that mask to a new layer,
you can do more than just hue, saturation, and luminance
with that specific selection.
Then the Skin Tone Tool takes that even one step further.
With the Skin Tone Tool, you select a color in your photo,
and then you select a range around it
that you want to affect.
You can make hue, saturation, and luminance adjustments
to that color and all of the selected colors
and then you can decide
how much you want the hue, saturation and luminance
to be similar within those colors.
So for example, if you select,
let's say, a piece of kind of that orangy skin tone,
it'll select from yellow to red,
and you can make the hue more similar,
so it will move all the red towards orange,
all the yellow towards orange,
so that you've got a more uniform color.
This is great for people who,
let's say, have kind of a red nose
or something along those lines.
You can kind of tone back
the different colors in a skin tone
so it looks a little bit more uniform.
The name suggests it should just be used for skin,
but it can really be used for anything.
If you've got a sky
with a bunch of different kinds of blue in it,
you could make it so that it's a lot more uniform.
Or let's say you've got a bit of a forest
that's looking kind of green and kind of yellow,
you could make that a little bit more uniform.
There are so many different things
that you can do with this
and you can get really creative with it.
All right, reason number four
that I'm sticking with Capture One
is because of the catalogs and sessions workflow.
So with light room, we're used to seeing just a catalog.
You have a catalog,
or you could have multiple catalogs
and they have a whole bunch of different projects
within them.
So generally you might date your projects
or name them depending on what the project was,
that kind of thing,
but you can kind of see them all at the same time
and navigate through them.
With Capture One you could set it up exactly the same
if you want.
You can still do the catalogs,
but they've got this other option called Sessions.
And sessions kind of allow you to do a specific project
as almost its own confined catalog,
but they've done some specific workflow adjustments
if you're going to be working that way.
Now, I did try the sessions for a while and I was liking it,
but for my specific workflow,
I actually did end up going back to the catalog.
But I love that I have the option to do sessions.
I can keep my main, let's say, Dunna 2021 catalog,
and then I could just do a specific session,
let's say, I had a project for a client
or something like that
and I kinda wanted to keep it separate and self-contained
so that I could move it around and share the files
and that kind of stuff,
I could keep that little session self-contained
without having to add it into my main catalog.
So I love the options that I have here
as far as the different workflows.
And if you get going with a session workflow
on a specific project
and you decide, you know what, that actually makes sense
to put into my main catalog
or once you're done with the session,
and then you wanna import it into your main catalog,
no problem, you can do that easy.
And the number five reason
why I'm sticking with capture one
instead of going back to Lightroom
is kind of a multiple reason, but a bunch of little ones.
Certain tools in Capture One I find to work
a little bit better or smoother or more accurately
than I find them in Lightroom.
So a couple of examples of this,
the Healing tool in Capture One
I find to work a little bit better
than the one in light room,
both the Brush and the Magic brush for making selections
I find work really well in Capture One.
Those are just a couple of them,
but there are a lot of like little features
that I just find I like a little bit better
in Capture One than I do in Lightroom.
Now with all that said,
it's not necessarily an easy decision between the two.
There are some things that I miss
or that I prefer about Lightroom.
So let's talk about a couple of those.
One of the main things that's a draw for Lightroom,
is that everybody uses it.
So it's got this kind of universal thing,
and that's definitely an advantage
for that piece of software.
First of all, there are a ton of tutorials on line,
there's lots of support
with all kinds of other third-party software.
It's just got a bit more of an overall
kind of universal thing to it.
And that kinda leads me into the second thing,
which is presets.
First of all, because it's more widely used,
there are a ton of presets out there.
So you can go buy presets,
you can buy my presets for Lightroom if you want.
And if you're someone who likes to use presets,
that can be a huge advantage,
but the other part of that
is I prefer the preset workflow in Lightroom.
I find it just a lot easier than the styles
that we use in Capture One.
I have made a couple of styles
for Capture One here and there,
and I probably will do a pack eventually,
but I just don't find the workflow of,
first of all, making them
and second of all, using them as kind of fluid
as the Lightroom version.
Okay, the third one.
This is gonna be a big one for a lot of people.
In the end, Capture One is pretty significantly
more expensive than Lightroom is.
And I know that a lot of people don't like
the fact that Lightroom is on a subscription,
all of the Adobe products are all on the subscription plans,
and some people just wanna be able to buy the software.
You can do that with Capture One, but it's pricey.
But you can also get a subscription on Capture One.
And personally, I kind of prefer the subscription plan.
I get automatic updates whenever they come out,
I don't have to worry about running out of updates
or anything like that.
And on a month to month basis,
it's actually a little bit cheaper that way.
So here are the kind of current pricing details,
and this was all in Canadian
when I went to look it up on their website,
so I'll try and put the US dollars on the screen as well.
For me, what I got was the Capture One for Sony.
So I can only use Sony camera files on my Capture One.
For the annual subscription, it's $195,
or if you wanna go monthly, it's $25 per month.
If you wanna upgrade to Capture One pro,
which comes with all of the different types of cameras
so you can use any camera with it,
it's $235 annually
or $32 monthly.
Now, if you compare that to the Adobe photo bundle,
which has no limits on which cameras you can use with it,
and it comes with both Photoshop and Lightroom,
it's $155 a year
or $13 a month.
So that's quite a bit cheaper
even than just the Sony version of Capture One.
Almost half the price.
So Capture One, definitely isn't a budget option
by any means.
But for those of you who don't like the subscription plans,
you can go buy Capture One as a perpetual license.
I think actually right now you get Capture One 22
when it comes out,
but generally you'll just get one version of it
and you can keep that forever.
If you never need to update
or never need any of the new features, then that's cool.
You can just have that.
You bought it, it's yours, you keep it.
Now, speaking of updates,
both companies do regularly put out updates.
I love how many updates
I've been getting with the Capture One,
but one update that Lightroom recently got
that I wish I had is the super resolution feature.
Especially because I've been shooting a lot
on both my FX3 and my A7S III,
I wish that I could bump those 12 mega pixels
up a little bit.
I did try it out a couple of times
and it works pretty darn good.
So that would be a cool feature to have in Capture One
if they could come up
with some kind of Capture One version of that.
And one of the things that I've really been missing lately
because I've been shooting a bunch of these
is HDR merging and panorama stitching
that you can do directly in Lightroom.
But they just announced that in Capture One 22
we're gonna have those features,
so I only have to wait a couple of months.
Hopefully, they work as well as the light room counterpart,
but that's definitely something that I've been missing.
So after nearly a year long experiment with Capture One,
I am gonna be sticking with it.
It wasn't an easy decision,
but the pros for me outweigh the cons
and the things that I miss from Lightroom.
But as always, I wanna hear what you think.
So leave a comment down below, let me know,
and on your way down there,
hit that like and subscribe button.
Hit the bell notification
so you don't miss out on future reviews and tutorials.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
(coughs)
This is it.
This is the end.
I'm dying the way that I lived,
drinking coffee.
My hat is slowly sliding back.
Oh, I'm sweating.
It is hot in here. Jeez.
(upbeat music)