Capture One Pro 11
Unimpressed by Lightroom? Capture One is out to grab you
279+VAT (about £295), or € 20+VAT monthly (about £21) FROM PhaseOne, phaseone.com needs OS X 10.11.6 or later
If you’re a professional, there has never been a better time to check out Capture One
While it’s unlikely that Photoshop will ever stop being top of the photo-editing heap, things are a little less clear-cut for
Lightroom. The recent change to Lightroom Classic was widely panned, and updates to the software were of the ‘less is more’ variety.
Such is the window of opportunity that Capture One 11 finds itself in, with this latest version incorporating various improvements in the hope of luring Lightroom fans. The list of things that it does that Lightroom can’t is compelling. You can add up to 16 layer masks, with variable opacity to allow an incredible amount of flexibility. Masks can be feathered and refined once they’ve been added, giving you the kind of per-pixel adjustments that Lightroom users can only dream of.
Annotations, which allow you to draw reminders or instructions on an image so the next person in the workflow can see what’s wanted, can be added and then exported as a layer on a PSD file. It’s a lovely addition, if a limited one – you can only draw in freehand in six colours. For people without a graphics tablet, a text tool would be handy.
Further collaborative tools include the ability to use an overlay to aid composition, and to export a crop as a path in a PSD file, rather than simply chopping off bits of the image. The same goes for watermarks, which can also be exported as layers in a PSD file.
The showstopper
The learning curve is steep, although if you’re migrating from Lightroom then looking up a few online tutorials can be helpful. In our tests, importing in Lightroom was faster, although the amount of time between clicking Import and starting work was about the same; it was just the background import that dragged.
Other benefits continue to be appealing: the tethering mode is great, its ability to create a local server for wireless tethering to an iOS device being a client-wowing showstopper. Performance, import aside, is also impressive.
If you’re a professional with doubts about Lightroom’s future direction, there has never been a better time to check out Capture One – a raft of new features make it more powerful than ever. The sticking point, though, is the price: Adobe’s Photography Plan, including Lightroom and Photoshop CC, costs £9.98 per month; on the other hand, subscribing to Capture One will set you back more than twice that, while the standalone app costs about £295. For everyday pro users, Capture One’s advantages may be worth the extra outlay – for everyone else, it’s certainly worth a 30-day trial before taking the plunge.