Capture One Pro 11
Unimpressed by Lightroom? Capture One is out to grab you
$299, or subscription from $20 monthly From PhaseOne, phaseone.com Needs OS X 10.11.6 or later, compatible with files from over 400 cameras
It’s unlikely that Photoshop will soon be deposed as king of the photo-editors, but things are less clear-cut for Lightroom. It has been widely panned for its recent split into a stagnating Lightroom Classic on the desktop and bare-bones Lightroom CC in the cloud, leaving professional photographers feeling a little maligned. Capture One Pro has seized this opportunity, with this version incorporating various improvements to hook disgruntled Lightroom users.
There’s a compelling list of things it does that Lightroom can’t do. 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 added, enabling the kind of per-pixel adjustments Lightroom users can only dream of.
Other additions are as innovative as they are welcome. Annotations allow you to draw reminders or instructions on an image so the next person in the workflow can see what’s wanted, and these can be exported with an image as a layer on a PSD file. It’s a lovely addition, if limited — you can only draw in freehand in six colors. For those 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. The same goes for watermarks, which can also be exported as layers in a PSD file.
The learning curve remains steep, although a selection of online tutorials will help those migrating from Lightroom get started. In our tests, importing images into Lightroom Classic was faster overall, but both apps allow you to start editing while they finish importing in the background, so this isn’t necessarily a real-world benefit.
Import aside, performance is impressive. Plus, Capture One’s tethering mode is the best in town, and its ability to create a local server for wireless tethering to an iOS device is a client-wowing showstopper.
The sticking point is the price: a Capture One sub is fully twice the price of Adobe’s Photography Plan, including Lightroom and Photoshop CC. While Capture One could be worth the cost for pros, everyone else should take the 30-day free trial before deciding.
The bottom line. A fabulous, high-end app well worth investigating — but it comes at a daunting price.