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Top 10 reasons to switch to Capture One Pro 9 – Part I

There is no question that Lightroom is the most popular RAW-converter on the market: It’s quite comfortable, cheap and easy to learn. The problem is that many photographers are not aware of the number of opportunities that they are missing. A RAW-converter should be considered photography gear – just like a camera or a lens. It would be weird to hold on to the 18-200mm kit lens you got in the box and never look for anything better.

Meanwhile, this is what’s happening with some RAW-software users: They’re stuck on the first step of the great RAW-processing ladder.

In this article, I’ll show you my reasons for my choosing Capture One after almost a 10-years of using different RAW-converters. If you’re totally fine with your converter of choice – well, good for you. If though, you feel that there is something missing, that some guys should really find a better way to deal with RAW formats; If you’re looking for something more – this article will help you find it.

10. Color

Actually, that should be the reason number one since for many professionals realistic and clear color “rendering” in Capture One is the primary cause for switching. On the other hand, color is always quite a subjective matter, and that is why it’s meaningless to argue about that. But there are a few objective reasons, why Capture One deals with color better, than any other software.

First of all, it uses unique color profiles designed for each particular camera model.

These particular profiles provide that accurate, precise, realistic color in Capture One. If you wish, you can also edit them to taste and re-save them as your custom color profiles.

Second reason is not quite evident, but crucial. Phase One (the company that develops Capture One), is not just a software company.

Their main business is to produce hi-end digital backs and medium format cameras; they also have an industrial division developing professional solutions for aerial and cultural heritage photography.

The High-quality image processing algorithms in Capture One are a logical result of their many years of experience in that field.

Third reason is not about color itself, but about the primary rendering of the image in general.

In Capture One, at the very first stage of image rendering, you can choose the type of Base Curve, which will affect the image and it may give you a mass of editing possibilities.

For example, with Linear Base Curve you will get the “real” RAW image, almost without any initial corrections, which all the popular RAW converters do without your permission.

At the first glance, the image with Linear Curve may look quite flat, but behind that you’ll find some amazing RAW editing capabilities.

If you’re looking for something more than a simple contrast and exposure sliders – it’s a great place to start.

9. Customizable everything

One of the main advantages of Capture One workflow is that you can customize almost anything:

A) Reorganize and resize each workspace element.

B) Put any tool in any place on the screen or duplicate tools and create custom tool tabs – for example did you know you can duplicate the curves tool 3 times to see Red, Green and Blue channel Curves?

C) Set a custom default settings for all the main tools for one particular camera model

For example, if you have a few different cameras you can set default Sharpening and Noise Reduction settings for each camera.

8. Image organizing

What I truly like in Capture One’s image organizing approach is that it gives you a choice.

There are three alternative ways to work with your files:

A) Open files directly on your hard drive, without import or any additional action

Simply open a folder and you’re ready to work.

B) Create a new session for every new shoot

Best suited for commercial photographers with project-based workflow. That way, you will have all the images that are related to a particular shoot in one place.

C) Organize images in Catalogs

Capture One Catalogs have all the popular DAM (Digital Asset Management) features: ordered structure with folders and projects, albums & smart albums, searching filters and keywords. You may also decide where to store RAW files – inside the Catalog or on any attached storage to the computer.

If you have tried Capture One 7 and weren’t satisfied with its catalog features – it’s definitely worth to give Capture One 9 a second chance. Since the first release of Catalog in Capture One 7 a bunch of features have been changed and improved. Now we have great Keyword Libraries, Folder Synchronization, Dynamic Locations and much more.

It is still the Capture One approach to cataloging images and organizing and different from Lightroom. A good analogy would be that it is like Mac is different to Windows. Take your time to get used to it and let it work for you.

7. Different processing recipes

In Capture One, you can easily create custom processing recipes and convert images into different formats with one click.

Let’s take the most common case: processing images into Full-size JPG, Tiff, and small-size JPG for the web.

We’ve created three recipes with different formats, sizes, quality and embedded metadata settings. Now you can convert all the files to different formats and locations with just one click.

By the way, here is another example of how you can automate processing using tokens:

With that set of tokens, Capture One will create new folders with dates when images were taken. Inside each folder, it will create folders by image ratings and inside them – by format names.

In my case it looks like this:

Again – all that folder structure will be generated automatically for any new process with only one click. And you have dozens of tokens to choose from and to create unique processing paths.

6. Tethered shooting with Capture One

If you work a lot in a studio on portrait, commercial or product photography – tethered shooting software is one of your main tools.

In modern photography tethered shooting isn’t a new fancy feature anymore, it’s a professional work standard.

And in this area, there are no competitors to Capture One. The reason is that Capture One provides all the features, which you may need for tethered shooting and even more.

A) Full control over the camera settings and image adjustments

You can change almost all the camera settings directly in Capture One: Starting from aperture, shutter speed and ISO to focusing, synchronization, bracketing and dozens of other camera settings.

It allows you, literally, to not touch the camera during the shoot. Unfortunately, Capture One can’t move your camera and product in the frame, yet. Perhaps in the bright future, special photography robots will surely help us with that; today, however, we still have to use human assistants.

You can also decide which adjustments will be applied to the next captured image. They could be adjustments from any previous image or from saved presets.

Actually, this is one of my favorite features, because my clients will never see “raw” image during the shoot. Each new image shows up immediately with the right color, Curves and exposure corrections.

B) Great composition features

Picture: Phase One

Live view – allows you to see “live” pictures from your camera, to set composition and focus.

Composition mode – while this option is on, only the last captured image will be saved on your drive. Excellent feature for the pre-shoot tests.

Overlay – adds any picture over the main image. It’s really convenient when your image should fit a specific design layout or magazine cover (for example.)

C) Remote camera control

With Capture One Pilot app you can control your camera from any iOS device. For example, you can connect your iPad over Wi-Fi to your laptop with Capture One and fully control your camera. Take images*, change exposure and quality settings – right from you iOS device.

You can also select images, rate them and set color tags during the shoot. This feature works not only with iOS but with any internet browser on any device.

Here are some videos on how it works:

Using Capture Pilot for iOS and Web

Camera Control:

Introduction to Capture Pilot photography app

My favorite trick in a commercial session is to connect client’s laptop to my Capture One server and watch the reaction when images start to display on client’s machine.

It really impresses people! And it’s also quite convenient that client may rate the best images while you shoot.

Of course, you may find separate applications for each of those tasks, but you’ll never find all of them in one solid and easy-to-use solution on the market.

Best regards,

Alex Svet

To get to know Alexander’s top 5 reasons for choosing Capture One Pro, check out Top 10 reasons to switch to Capture One Pro 9 – Part II

A successful collaboration with separate viewpoints

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

Landscape photography can be a lonesome pursuit, and if I’m honest that’s generally the way I prefer it. The time alone really allows one to connect with the landscape, the mind freeing itself of the daily stresses of modern life. After a few hours alone in the wilderness, I begin to feel free, truly alive and everything else just slips away, I’m in the moment. This is when the creativity just flows, and it’s that feeling that I long for when I’m sitting at my desk writing blog posts or processing images.

Same location, separate viewpoints

However, we are social creatures, and even the most introverted people can benefit from some form of collaboration in their lives, particularly when it comes to photography. I met Darryll Jones at a camera launch event, where I was present in an ambassador role. I’d seen Darryll lying on the floor around the gardens of the country house where the event was being held, I initially thought he was just experimenting with low angles, he was in fact photographing toy storm troopers. To be precise, he was taking pictures of ‘Eric’ the storm trooper, and it turns out that Eric has upwards of a 100,000 followers on Instagram!

Let me cut a long story short by telling you that Darryll and I hit it off straight away, we were on the same wave length. We believed that we could tell the story of a location from two separate viewpoints, rather than say, two landscape photographers collaborating and coming away with more or less the same images. I would produce the finer art, classic landscape imagery, whilst Darryll tells the story from Eric’s point of view, somewhere within this chaos, Eric and I cross paths and share the adventure.

Getting started

Darryll and I had our first trip together to the Lake District, Cumbria in the UK, as a kind of test run. We found that we really feed off each other’s creativity, we get excited about the opportunities within landscape before us, yet we come away with a different story to tell. With the first trip being a success, we decided to go a little further afield. Within the UK it doesn’t get much more rugged and beautiful than on the Isle of Skye, the largest island in the Inner Hebrides archipelago, which is connected to Scotland’s northwest coast by bridge. During this trip, we would have the use of a very special camera indeed, the Alpa A-series, kindly supplied by Phase One. The A-series is a very beautiful camera indeed, a real work of art, and my first venture into medium format photography.

Shooting with the Alpa A-series

The A-series IQ3 Camera System comes with all the accessories needed straight out of the box, comprising of a beautiful wooden handled mid-section, which the lenses and IQ3 back attach to, assembly is a breeze and the whole system oozes quality. For our trip, we had three lenses available to us, the ultra-wide Alpagon f/5.6 23mm, the wide ALPAR f/4.0 35mm and the Alpagon f/5.6 70mm. Without wanting to sound too pretentious, I consider myself an artist, not a technician.

As long as I can get the camera system to do what I want and deliver great results, then I’m happy, I don’t study the finer details of lens construction or count pixels. I do like my kit to be a joy to use, however, I find that most modern DSLR and mirrorless camera systems come with many features that I never find myself utilising. With the A-series, it’s back to basics, a fully manual camera, which dictates a different kind of workflow. A slowed down, methodical approach is required, this totally suits my style of working, and the system is an absolute pleasure to use. It’s not a camera for beginners, but then a beginner certainly wouldn’t be investing in this level of kit.

Individual preferences – individual stories

As we travelled around the Isle of Skye, it’s difficult not to want to stop and take an image around every bend in the road; additionally, the typically changeable light of the Hebrides presenting us with picturesque view in all directions. Personally, I prefer the moodier, overcast days for my style of photography, always striving to evoke the mood of the landscape before me, whilst attempting to simplify the elements within the frame.

As I hike out in to the landscape, Darryll can be found clambering around rocky shores, and wading through rivers with Eric and friends, Billie the Scout Trooper for example! With us both immersing ourselves in the environment, time slips away, minutes turn to hours. I often find this time outdoors Zen like, sometimes no thoughts entering my mind other than searching for a good viewpoint from which to make an image. I enjoy looking for detail in the landscape, perhaps concentrating on the geological features, creating abstract imagery which can give us clues as to the history of a location.

High level image quality

After our first day out with the A-series, we were keen to get back to base and see what we’d captured that day. Immediately upon opening one of the files we were absolutely astounded at the image quality, it is something that I’d never experienced previously. My own personal camera is a full frame Sony A7R, which is pretty amazing image quality it has to be said, but the A-series is another level altogether. That large sensor (2.5 times larger than a full frame DSLR) creating almost 3D like images, with such impressive dynamic range. Additionally, the Rodenstock lenses supplied gave us beautiful bright, distortion free images.

Cool IQ3 back features

As mentioned previously, working with the A-series is a stripped back approach, getting back to basics with camera techniques. However, the IQ3 back does have a few very useful features. I found the Live view function perfect for focusing, a simple double-tap on the touchscreen and you are zoomed in to 100%, whilst zoomed in, I’d adjust the focus ring, using this technique I found the images to be pin sharp every time, almost alarmingly so!

The Alpa A addiction

Eventually we had to give back the A-series, we were not happy about this. Adjusting to life after the Alpa has been difficult for me especially, but life goes on and we managed to capture the images that you see here, which we hope you enjoy! Using the Alpa A-series was just a phenomenal experience, for me this is the pinnacle of cutting edge photography. Phase One’s IQ3 digital backs paired with the precision engineered Alpa lenses and body are perfect for landscape photographers wishing to create the best quality fine art imagery.

If you’d like to follow our adventures more closely, and for the full story of our trip, please do head over to our various social media platforms.

Did you get curious to explore more pictures and adventures? Visit Karl’s and Darryll’s websites on the following links:

www.karlholtby.com

www.haveyouseeneric.com

Capture One Power tips: Browse multiple images with “Select Set”

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

Capture One 9.2 introduced a number of powerful workflow related features, which can make your daily routines easier and more efficient.

My favorite of these new power tools is “Select Set”, which gives you the ability to browse through a collection of images in sets – choosing a range of images then advancing through the thumbnail list by the same number.

Selecting which images to work with

Before Capture One 9.2 was released, I would browse through all the images one by one and assign color tags – red for “reject”, green for “keep”. The problem arose though, that I would rate everything – even images virtually identical. Advancing one by one gives you no frame of reference to the last image.

In version 9.2 I can now load a set – maybe 6 or 8 images at a time, which is great for contextually comparing a range in the main viewer with big preview. Once I have the images loaded into the viewer I can target the rating to the key images in the set. There is though a trick to the new workflow, and that is the Edit primary switch. If I rate a selection like this, all images would be rated the same. As I would like to give different ratings to the different images in the viewer I have to make sure that I only edit the primary selected image.

I make sure that I only work on the primary selected image by deselecting the “Toggle between Edit Primary slected and Edit all selected images”. The red circle in the above screen grab indicates where to deselect it. Rating now only affects the Primary selected images – the image in the viewer with the thick white frame.

By being able to view a number of images at the same time it becomes much easier to compare and rate the best images in a collection of images.

Setting op for browsing multiple images at a time

When I want to browse through a collection of images – e.g. 6 at a time I start selecting the first 6 images in the browser.
To load the next 6 images I hold down the Alt key + “->” arrow key
To cycle the primary selected image among the images displayed in the viewer, I simply use the “->” key. On a Mac I will need to use Cmd key + “->” if I’ve hidden the browser.

After my initial rating I will start working with the best images and during this process often end up making a number of variants of some of the better images. To select the best variants in the end I will again go through my collection now filtered for the green images (the keepers) then assign star ratings to rank them by best shots.

Adding or removing images from the set of images in the viewer

In the case where you might want to increase/decrease the selected set size, then there are additional shortcuts to do this quickly:

“Shift “ + “->” arrow : Loads one more image into the set of images in the viewer.

“Shift “ + “<-” arrow: Removes one image from the set of images in the viewer.

All the best,

Niels

Easy file selection with Capture One 9.2

I have had the pleasure to try out Phase One’s Capture One 9.2, which enhances the usability surrounding image management.

This recent update has untangled and solved the industry’s long issue of selecting and utilizing selects from my clients, based on simple lists. I’ve no longer had to spend vital hours finding and selecting my images individually based around my clients selects, as the handy new feature allows me to simply copy and paste a list from emails and documents, applying said information to Capture One Pro 9.2 for quick and easy selection.

Capture One 9.2 allows me to organise efficiently

As always, Capture One Pro 9 has benefited my work flow, even more so with the new features available to me throughout the new update, it is essential that my work flow remains at ease and organised. With the vast amount of shots taken from each of my outdoor shoots, I rack up a large number of files for myself and my studio staff to work through.

In the past, when receiving ‘Selects’ from my clients, I have had to sift through each file individually, typing in file names to rate each file. I have tried numerous methods to aid this such as writing my own scripts, however, Phase One has realised that this is a problem that their software can solve and have introduced the efficient new ‘Select from filename list’ function. Providing a fast and easy way of copying and pasting lists of files directly into Capture One 9.2, which is able to automatically select all corresponding files.

How Capture One 9.2 benefits my work

The first and most essential feature I’ve been using is that of selecting primary variants and sets of images within the browser. This is excellent, allowing me to easily compare images against each other for key characteristics such as exposure or colour grading, however, the tool is easily utilized both pre and post processing. This feature found through the ‘edit’ menu allows me select primary images that can be coupled alongside corresponding compositions, furthermore by creating sets of images I’m able to use easy key shortcuts to navigate through each set conveniently.

My use of these easy to use sets doesn’t end there, to organise my workload further I use handy shortcuts to rate my images based on quality and importance, ensuring only the best for the client. Doing this within sets is efficient and free flowing. Once a client has provided their chosen selects I use the brilliant new album creation tool to generate an album from the client selects list, this automates the whole process of dragging and dropping selected files for me, boost my work flow creativity. The way in which Capture One Pro 9.2 has eliminated the tedious tasks of commercial photography is gratifying.

Improved user interface

I’m very pleased to find that there is improved customisability towards key bindings and user functionality within Capture One 9.2, being someone who prefers to utilise software to my own needs, this is an essential new feature. When working with large numbers of files and automation functions, it is key to ensure that I can maximise time by binding my mouse and keyboard shortcuts to suit me. We all have our own work styles and flows, meaning that this update is a huge advantage towards feeling even more comfortable towards the use of trusted commercial software. Not only this, but one can also design key binding presets, allowing different key binding profiles for a variation of tasks, I can easily change these using the drop down menu.

Raw image quality

Through my promise to deliver the highest standard to my clients, I have taken vast proven trust in Capture One to provide accurate quality and colour to my raw files from my various shoots. Leading into a favourite new feature, which is that of ‘Raw Vs TIFF’ files retaining accurate quality, allowing the same seamless colour grades across the file types. This gives me reassurance towards the software I’m using in the commercial industry.

All in all, Phase One has really brought a user defined update to their excellent Capture One software, allowing photographers in the commercial medium to optimise and extend the quality of their work. I would suggest the use of Capture One 9.2 to any photographer with high confidence.

Images by MUSTO

Check out more of Pete’s work