Phase One Capture One Pro 11
£289/$299, from £18/$23 month subscription
not cheap, but an easy Rival for Lightroom
Capture One was originally a tethered capture and editing tool for Phase One’s medium format cameras. However, it’s long since evolved into a much more powerful and broad-based standalone tool that does almost the same job as Lightroom.
Capture One Pro offers a database-powered image catalogue with powerful organizational and searching tools. You can browse your images by folder and group them together in Collections (or Smart Collections based on search criteria). Capture One Pro also offers a ‘Sessions’ workflow designed for tethered studio photography and is also well adapted for culling, rating, editing and exporting images.
There are differences in the editing tools. Capture One Pro works in a single window rather than in Lightroom-style ‘modules’ and has a highly customizable set of ‘tool tabs’. One of the key differences is its layers-based local adjustment system, which makes it much easier to see and edit the overall changes to your photographs.
Performance
Not all Raw converters are the same, and Capture One Pro is one of three that stand above the rest – the others are Lightroom/ Adobe Camera Raw and DXO Photolab. Capture One’s conversions are smooth very sharp, and its tone and colour controls make it easy to get the best from your Raw files. It does come with preset ‘Styles’ but Phaseone also sells Style packs as add-ons. You can make manual adjustments and save your own Styles too. Its camera support is not as wide as Adobe’s and it doesn’t have as many lens correction profiles, but its tools and results are quite superb.