Latest Posts

Capture One Launches a new update to Capture One 20

Bringing new features, new capabilities, a new product, and a new look, Capture One is providing better solutions for more people, and breaking new ground.

COPENHAGEN, May 18th, 2020: Capture One, the premiere name in photo editing software, delivers a suite of announcements that highlight new product offerings, expanded capabilities, and a new direction; revealing the company’s continuing evolution and support for creatives.

The development of Capture One 20 remains driven by an evolving roadmap rooted in user feedback from both the Capture One community and creative community overall.  The latest update brings brand new heal and clone tools that reduce the need for external retouching applications while increasing efficiency, and a new Before & After Tool that gives new ways to check your editing progress and to compare your edits.

With user experience in mind, Capture One has also developed a new activation flow with new dialogues, sample images, and interface guidance that make it faster and easier than ever to become a Capture One user. In addition, the company has advanced its Lightroom Catalog importer, and together it not only makes it easier to start using Capture One, but easier to migrate without missing a step.

Beyond that, when it comes to Capture One, users have choice. There are currently a number of Capture One variants such as Capture One Fujifilm and Capture One (for Sony), and now the company is proud to deliver Capture One for Nikon. Similar to the other branded versions, Capture One for Nikon brings the full feature-set of Capture One Pro at a reduced cost to Nikon users.

“We want to enable creatives to achieve their best images as effortlessly as possible, and that is why we drew heavily on feedback from our community to develop Capture One 20,” says Jan Hyldebrandt-Larsen, VP Software Business at Capture One. “It is our commitment to support them by providing a seamless photo editing experience defined by developing the features they ask for and need, as well as the ones they didn’t know they wanted. Capture One 20 is an exciting moment for us as we happily put even more focus and resources behind that goal.”

Learn what’s new in Capture One 20 at: www.captureone.com/20

Learn more about Capture One at: www.captureone.com

New features and tools in Capture One 20

New Heal & Clone Tools

  • New dedicated brushes for Heal and Clone will automatically create the correct layer when used
  • Fast workflow with automatic source-point generation
  • Limitless number of heal-zones per layer (previously only 1 p/layer)
  • Most flexible healing workflow of any RAW converter
  • Moveable source points, and transformable heal zones
  • Fast performance and high-quality rendering

New Before & After Tool

  • A new dedicated tool placed in the Toolbar with easy keyboard shortcuts
  • ‘Y’ will toggle before/after on and off
  • ‘Shift + Y’ will toggle between the two modes:
  • Full View and Split View Slider (draggable)
  • Fast performing and works on multiple photos in the viewer
  • Full View available in all products
  • The Split View Slider is not available in Capture One Express variations

New Lightroom Catalog Import

  • Improved Lightroom Importer with better descriptions
  • Allows import of ‘offline files’ (files located on disconnected storage devices).
  • Capture One automatically imports files once the correct hard drive has been plugged in
  • Provides a report after the import with information about unsupported files
  • Basic image adjustments and Catalog structure will be replicated in Capture One

Capture One for Nikon

Capture One continues to not only provide the best image editing software but to provide tailored options to suit as many users as possible. From free variants of Capture One Express to branded versions for Fujifilm and Sony, Capture One users have choice in product and to either own it outright or via subscription. The new Capture One for Nikon will bring all the power of Capture One to dedicated Nikon users at a reduced price point, including tailored profiles* for supported Nikon cameras.

Unlike other RAW processors, Capture One’s camera profiles are uniquely developed for each specific camera model, a process that requires the use of the camera in and out of a controlled lab in Copenhagen, where a team of specialists engage each new model in various scenarios. They then evaluate all the performance parameters such as color, sharpness, and noise across hundreds of images and uses that data to deliver a truly tailored profile, which ultimately provides the best post-processing experience. Capture One for Nikon, like the Pro version, brings this level of support for Nikon cameras, including their latest cameras like the Z6, Z7, and D6.

The company is also proud to begin this journey with Nikon users with one of the photography world’s most beloved people, Joe McNally.

“Working with Capture One means I have a complete solution, from tethering and file management on location, to creative control over how the drama, impact and color of the picture at hand matches up with my imagination,” says Joe McNally, Nikon ambassador. “It’s a complete tool and with the new features, it’s getting simpler and more seamless than ever to use.”

*Nikon profiles included for selected Nikon cameras (also in Pro, not unique to these products). Capture One 20 adds Nikon profiles to match what is available in-camera for selected Nikon camera models.

New camera and lens support

Capture One provides users with the most accurate and powerful image editing available, and the wide-ranging support of cameras and lenses is a hallmark of the software. For enthusiasts and professionals alike, Capture One continually evolves to handle the newest cameras and lenses.

Capture One carefully evaluates and interprets each camera’s RAW formats, allowing Capture One to present images with the utmost fidelity, often bringing out nuances that other programs can’t even perceive.

Currently offering RAW support for all major camera brands, and profiling and image correction support for multiple lenses. As with the RAW file interpretation, Capture One carefully measures the optical characteristics of each supported lens and builds correction algorithms that compensate for the various optical imperfections of various designs. As a result, Capture One can correct for numerous common optical issues such as vignette, and chromatic aberration as needed for each of the supported lenses, providing you the best version of your image possible. And they are always adding support for the newest camera bodies and lenses.

New camera support:

  • Canon 250D
  • Canon PowerShot G5X Mark II
  • Canon PowerShot G7X Mark III
  • Nikon P950
  • Leica M10 Monochrom
  • Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III
  • Zeiss ZX1
  • Phase One iXH 150

New lens support:

  • Phase One XT -Rodenstock HR Digaron-W 50mm f/4
  • Tamron 28-75mm F2.8 Di III RXD
  • Fujifilm Fujinon XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR
  • Ricoh GR III (GR Lens 18.3mm f2.8)
  • Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II
  • Sony FE 20mm F1.8 G

For a complete list of supported cameras, please go to: www.captureone.com/features/supported-cameras

Pricing and Availability

The new update for Capture One 20 is now available and is a free update for all Capture One 20 customers.

For new customers Capture One is committed to providing customers a choice when it comes to how they acquire their software, so Capture One Pro 20 is available for purchase, or via subscription. The perpetual license for Capture One Pro 20 is available for $299, with upgrade pricing from previous versions starting at $159. Capture One for Nikon, Capture One (for Sony) and Capture One Pro Fujifilm are available for $129.

For those who prefer subscription models, Capture One Pro 20 is available for plans as low as $20 per month, and Capture One for Nikon, Capture One (for Sony) and Capture One Fujifilm subscription plans start at $9.99 a month.

For a complete list of all products and licensing options, please visit: www.captureone.com/store to learn more.

A 30-day fully featured free trial of Capture One 20 is available. Download the trial here: www.captureone.com/download

About Capture One

Capture One creates award-winning photo editing software for every kind of photographer.

With an intuitive interface and powerful tools for editing and organizing, Capture One software delivers a seamless editing experience, fast workflows and total creative control. And with unmatched color handling for all major camera brands and industry-leading tethered support, it’s preferred by professionals and studios worldwide. Driven by innovation, users rely on Capture One to deliver cutting-edge features to keep their photography one step ahead.

Based in Copenhagen, Denmark with a team of global partners, Capture One empowers image creators globally with world-class knowledge, technical expertise and the ultimate creative tools.

Learn more here:

Capture One at: www.captureone.com
Facebook at: www.facebook.com/CaptureOnePro
Instagram at: www.instagram.com/CaptureOnePro
YouTube at: www.youtube.com/CaptureOneProDK
LinkedIn at: www.linkedin.com/company/capture-one

Sign up for the webinar

capture one raw photo editor webinar shoot tethered with the Fujifilm X-T4

Shooting and Editing with the Fujifilm X-T4 and Capture One

Join Fujifilm X Photographer, Wayne Johns and David Grover from Capture One to see a complete shoot to edit workflow with the Fujifilm X-T4 and Capture One.

✓ See how to connect your X-T4 to Capture One and shoot tethered
✓ Optimise settings in Capture One for the X-T4
✓ Use Fujifilm Film Simulations in Capture One
✓ Edit and export your photos to final formats

Length: 60:00 minutes

Download a 30-day trial of Capture One Pro.

Sign up for the webinar

Why is Capture One 20 amazing for wedding photography?

NOTE: This article discusses an older version of Capture One Pro. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

Customization is key

With Capture One, you don’t have to work around the interface or adapt to the default keyboard shortcuts. You can customize it all! Make the software yours instead of working around the way engineers designed it.

Better yet, you can create different workspaces for specific parts of your workflow. For example, you can have one workspace for culling wedding images, and then another one dedicated to editing the photos. This way, you’ll only have the tools you personally need on-screen at any given time.

A customized workspace makes the transition from other photo editors much smoother and helps you build your own, personalized workflow. There’s no need to be bogged down by tools you don’t need for wedding editing. Simply create your own Tool tabs and add only the tools you use in the order that suits you.

Keyboard shortcuts are also a very powerful tool in Capture One, saving you a ton of time. You can also customize them yourself – search for the features you use most of the time and set unique shortcut commands that will make it easiest for you to access them.

With the most recent versions of Capture One, you can also work with external controllers such as the Tangent Wave 2 or Palette Gear (Monogram). Both solutions are also fully customizable with Capture One, and this will bring your workflow to the next level. I couldn’t edit weddings without my Tangent Wave 2 anymore!

Working on offline files

As someone who travels a lot, I don’t always have the luxury of keeping thousands of RAW files with me at all times on my laptop – but I still feel the pressure to edit images on-the-go to meet client deadlines.

This is where Catalogs come in handy. When I get back from a wedding, I create a new Catalog, import the files from my memory cards into my Catalog but store them onto my NAS rather my laptop. Capture One builds previews I can work from on my laptop, even if I don’t have access to my NAS.

Once I get back home and I’m done editing the previews, I can simply connect to my NAS. Capture One will see the files are back online and I can now process my RAW files using the settings I applied to the previews. It’s seamless, and you don’t have to do anything specific to take advantage of previews – just let Capture One create them when importing files.

Remove unsharp images quickly

Most photographers I know like to deliver crisp images to their clients and avoid giving away blurry images that may not print well in the wedding album. Thanks to the Focus Mask tool in Capture One, you can quickly separate blurry images from sharp photos and cull them fast.

Enable the tool which will show the sharp area of the image in green. If the default sharpness threshold is a bit high, be sure to adjust it in the preferences.

Matching Luminosity and Colors

When I edit weddings, the time-consuming task I dread the most is matching the colors and exposure across a set of images. Thankfully, Capture One 20 has an amazingly useful tool called Normalization to do the work for you.

The tool relies on two samples, one to pick the luminosity and color you want to match, and the other to apply and match the selection. Start by using the first sampler on the correct image; click on an area that is available on the second image as well – for example, the bride’s dress or forehead. Then use the second sampler and click on the same area in the photo that needs correcting.

Capture One does all heavy lifting for you in a matter of seconds. It’s easy-to-use and can save a lot of time when editing reception shots, especially at that point in the night when the DJ decides to go nuts with the lighting.

De-noise while retaining details and colors

I used to hate how de-noising features worked in other photo editors. They made my images very soft and dull, even with subtle adjustments. I never found the perfect way to get my reception images shot at high ISO to look the way I wanted – with the same color richness I saw with my own eyes at the wedding. My couples didn’t spend thousands on decorations only to get pictures which don’t accurately capture the look!

Thanks to the incredible noise reduction in Capture One Pro 20, I’m finally happy with the quality I get from images shot at high ISO. Not only does it retain details better, but more importantly, the color is far more accurate and vibrant. For those who don’t shoot much with strobes and rely on high ISO all evening long, this will forever transform the image quality you’ll deliver to your brides and grooms.

Color Balance for quick grading

The Color Balance tool is one of the fantastic tools you’ll see colorists use to grade movies and ads in the video industry. It’s very visual, making it quite user-friendly even for non tech-savvy photographers. It can be used for both color grading and color correction.

I love using it for color correction on wedding images, as I can tweak the shadows, midtones, and highlights independently. To correct a color cast, you’ll want to add the opposite color. For example, if the shadows are too warm, you’ll take the opposite color – between cyan and purple – and add some in the shadows. It may sound bizarre at first, but once you start using it, you’ll fall in love with the Color Balance tool.

The color grading process using the Color Balance tool is quite easy as well. You can add a different color in each luminosity zone while seeing if the colors you are adding works. No need to check a color wheel somewhere else to make sure you’re basing your grade on a harmony that works.

Relying on Layers for more control

Layers in Capture One are a game-changer for my wedding editing workflow. I can apply Styles (presets) as Layers so I can adjust their opacity and stack a few of them to get the look I want.

My wedding editing style relies a lot on local adjustment. I dodge and burn areas of my images to direct the eyes of the viewers. Capture One allows me to make this a speedy and easy process. I create a new dodge layer (blank layer with exposure at +1 and contrast at +12) on one image, then copy and paste that layer onto the rest of the pictures. I can now select a bunch of images (usually 9 or 12) to display in the view at the same time, and I brush away to dodge where it’s needed. Once I’m done with the first group of images, I press alt + right arrow to move on to the next group.

By working this way, I can work on smaller images, making sure my mask falloff isn’t too strong and also allowing me to go through the process very quickly and efficiently. If you do burning at the same time, just make sure to define a shortcut to change layer easily so you can do both at the same time without fumbling around with your mouse to find layers.

Keeping everything neat and organized

That’s why I love Capture One so much – it keeps everything organized for me.

When editing weddings and engagement sessions, I put files from each moment of the day or location in a different folder. Each folder is then imported into a different Collection in my Capture One Catalog, so I can find all the images from the getting ready stage in one place, and then the formals in another.

While Collections have to be created manually, you can rely on Catalog Templates to save time. Simply create an empty Catalog, add Albums to the User Collections for each moment (getting ready bride, getting ready groom, ceremony, etc.). You can also add Smart Albums if you use them. Once you’re done creating the structure for all your future weddings, go to File and then select Save as Template. Next time you create a new Catalog, you’ll have the choice to base your Catalog on the template you just created and thus have all the Albums and Smart Albums ready for you to use.

Even where your files are organized into different folders, you can still do a single export to JPEG for final delivery to your clients. Select all the images that you have edited by going to the All Images Album in the Catalog, then create a new Process Recipe and ensure with the setting you want, and then have a look at the File tab in the Process Recipe.

In the Sub Folder text field, you then create a file structure using plain text or Elements. If you want your final JPEGs to be organized in the same way as your RAW, make sure to use the Image Folder Element. Capture One will then place each exported image in a folder that mirrors the folders organizing your RAW files – i.e. Getting Ready or Ceremony.

You can also go further and use Color Tags or Ratings to organize even more your processed files.

Try it for yourself.

For me, Capture One Pro is undoubtedly the superior choice for wedding photography editing.

It has helped me develop my business by allowing me to edit photos faster while improving the quality of my final images.

Try it for yourself – take advantage of the 30-day free trial and experiment with every feature I’ve mentioned above. During the trial period, you’ll have plenty of time to play and see how Capture One Pro can help improve your wedding workflow.

Sign up for the webinar

Why nature photographers need photo editing

NOTE: This article discusses an older version of Capture One Pro. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

As a nature photographer, I spend a great deal of time trying to get to the most remote places possible. Like all photographers in the nature space, my goal is to create unique images – helped along by my sailing background and the fact that I seem to be frequently working on a boat.

That being the case, there are some inherent challenges in nature photography, whether it be limitations on gear, split second opportunities to take a photo, or terrible lighting.  Because of that, photo editing software and a good understanding of how to use it are quite possibly the most important tools in my photography toolkit.

It also requires an immense amount of patience and luck.  Having a good camera is important in nature photography, but not as critical as luck, timing, and editing.

I spent several years working in Lightroom.  I don’t have anything bad to say about it, because it’s a great tool.  But, as I have been working for over a decade as a photographer and moving more into the world of selling prints, I felt like I wasn’t getting enough out of my images in Lightroom.  Was I nervous about switching out of my comfort zone to learn a new editing software?  Yes.  Did it take a long time to get comfortable with Capture One?  Not one bit.  It is an incredibly intuitive photo editor.

After switching my Lightroom Presets over to color-adjusted Styles in Capture One, I had a solid editing foundation in place.  My editing workflow is pretty simple after that: I typically just make minor adjustments in the dynamic range and bump up the clarity ever so slightly.

But the difference in the way those adjustments in Capture One compare to Lightroom are noticeably visible.  It’s much more controlled.  It’s fine-tuning instead of broad strokes.  And the finer details make a huge difference to nature photography for me.

What was my biggest hold up for making the switch from Lightroom to Capture One?  It sounds silly, but it was the dehaze option.  Shooting in the water, or in conditions with hazy atmospheres, it was a wonderful tool to have in Lightroom.  It’s also readily available in Capture One due to the ease of creating a filled layer, increasing the contrast, and decreasing the brightness.  Now I have even more control over that adjustment and ultimately better results.

For the amount of time and energy I put into capturing one image (often times months), it’s comforting to know that I can get the most out of it through my photo editing software.  Combine that with how much faster Capture One is, I can now spend more of my time waiting for “the moment” and out shooting photos instead of waiting for editing adjustments to catch up.

It’s well worth the switch.

Sign up for the webinar