Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography. Since the latest versions of Lightroom and Capture One have been released, there have been significant new features in each, which changes the math so to speak.
You can find it here. I first capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download this article last year, and since then it has become my most popular post on this blog. However, since last year, both applications have continued to develop, and both have had several new features added and both have changed the way they perform, so I felt that it was important to update this article. While the bulk of this will still be the same, there are a capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download things that have changed that are worth pointing out.
Despite being around for a long time, Capture One has really become more and more popular over the past few years. As capture One has gained more and more users, Adobe has also seemed to step up its development of Lightroom. With ardent fans on capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download sides, it can be hard for users to distinguish the facts from the fan service, and so, hopefully, this article will provide a balanced look at both.
I have been using both applications for many years now and I often switch back and forth between each as my primary editing application. This article is primarily written from the perspective of someone looking to switch to Capture One from Lightroom, as the chances are, if you're reading this article, that's probably why. If you are a Lightroom user looking to make the switch, I hope this article can provide some useful information.
One of the complaints about Capture One from Lightroom users is that they don't understand why it's called "pro" or why someone would consider it "high end". This may seem like an obvious or silly question, but the answer probably isn't what you think. While Capture One and Lightroom share many of the same functions, they aren't the same, as in my opinion Capture One is more of a high-end tool.
This may be a controversial opinion, but Capture One and Lightroom, aren't directly competing in some respects as they occupy different segments of the market. Capture One is a more focussed tool and a more high-end tool, primarily designed around RAW processing. While it has some photo workflow and organisational tools, its primary strength comes as a raw processor.
Lightroom, on the other hand, has a broader set of tools across a lot of areas. This covers things like organisation, working with online services, creating books, making panoramas and so on. On a purely feature for feature set, Lightroom would appear to have the upper edge.
But, if you're only comparing features on a spec sheet, then you're missing the things that make Capture One so good at what it does. The answer is that, while it might have a smaller overall set of features, those features that it does have are generally more focused and more powerful. Often, while Lightroom may work in a certain way to achieve a certain unction, Capture One might have several different tools for that purpose, and those tools generally have more granular control.
If I was to make a bad analogy which is always dangerous it's like comparing Premiere Pro to Davinci Resolve. Premiere Pro does most of what Resolve does, but if you're colour grading, Resolve has a much more powerful toolset. In contrast, Premiere is a much broader application and appeals to a wider audience. This analogy falls apart a bit because Blackmagic has been busy adding features to resolve and capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download now quite a comprehensive editor too.
Capture One has a compelling set of colour correction tools, that greatly exceed what is possible in Lightroom alone. You can create individual colour keys on single colours in an image and manipulate them. You can create your own colour profiles and use them as the base calibration. You can create masks based on a colour key, and you have very precise controls over that key. You also have a three-way colour corrector similar to what you have in cinematic and video colour grading solutions.
Combined with the powerful layer system in Capture One, you can have exact control over the colours in an image. And that's just one example. Update: Since I wrote this last year, Adobe has added a three way colour corrector to Lightroom too, and so this is one less advantage that Capture One has.
The thing is, this high level of control is probably unnecessary for a lot of users, and that's one of the things that some people can't understand when comparing the software. Capture One may have a smaller core feature set, but those core features are generally more powerful, and more high end. Because of the extra controls, and different ways of doing things, for some people they may find this additional control unnecessary.
Some first-time users find some of the extra options daunting, and that partly contributes to the view, justified or otherwise, that Capture One has a steep learning curve. Each application has its own advantages and disadvantages. If you need features that Lightroom has and don't need the more powerful controls and tools in Capture One, then Capture One is not for you.
One example is panoramas and HDR merging. Capture One has neither of these options. If these are important to you, then you probably should stick with Lightroom. There are of course third party options for both of these, but they aren't part of Capture One's feature set, and I don't expect that they will be added any time soon.
Lightroom has an excellent book module and allows you to create your own photo books, connecting to Blurb and allowing you to design and order high quality printed books directly to your door, from within Lightroom. There is nothing like that in Capture One. Lightroom's print module is much better. As well as bringing you a high degree of control, you can print directly to a JPEG allowing you to do simple layouts directly in Lightroom. You can't do this in Capture One, without jumping through some hoops.
Another thing that Lightroom has is a whole mobile ecosystem and built-in syncing service. Lightroom has mobile apps on iOS and Android and using the Adobe cloud, you can capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download your photos across devices. It's not perfect, but there's nothing like this at all with Capture One. Some people are incredibly irate about this, and they can't understand how anyone could use Capture One because they don't have these features, but different people have different needs.
Not everyone shoots panoramas or HDR files. You have to remember where Capture One came from. It was initially designed as a software front end for medium format cameras. Its original purpose was for high-end studio and commercial photographers, as a way to get the most from their images at the time of capture.
It is still considered one of the best tools for this, especially due to its tethering options. Lightroom is designed to appeal to a wide range of people, both amateur and professional, across a wide range of genres. As I said earlier, its toolset is much broader, and for many users, it is probably more suitable. If you only ever do modest editing to your images, then Lightroom is perhaps better. However, having said that, Capture One is constantly evolving too, and over the past few versions, they've been making efforts to reduce the complexity and simplify some aspects of the interface to appeal to a broader audience.
Here are some other areas where Lightroom has a clear advantage:. Better integration with Photoshop, including the ability to open your image as a non-destructive smart object in Photoshop, retaining all the RAW edits. Publishing plug-ins and publishing service make it much easier to work with online services. If you capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download need to do more powerful processing, or you want more precise control, then Capture One can be very powerful.
I already mentioned the Colour Correction features, but there are other capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download where it excels too. These are just a few of the things that make it different. There are others too like levels and advanced curves. You can completely customise the interface in Capture One, rearranging tools and creating your own layouts.
Again, a lot of these features are probably things the average enthusiast or consumer photographer may never need or use, and in that case, if you're ignoring all of the advanced features of Capture One then it probably doesn't make much sense to switch. But if you do need them, then it's clearly worth it, as there isn't really anything else like it. Some things are more subjective when it comes to comparing capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download two.
Image quality is one of them. I think this depends a lot on the camera you use and the type capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download images you shoot, and of course, your own personal opinions.
Capture One uses a completely different RAW decoding engine from Lightroom, and so the differences can be seen across things like detail, noise and colour rendition. Sometimes these are small, subtle differences, and other times they are significant. If you shoot with a Fujifilm X-Trans camera, for example, the detail rendering is much better with Capture One than it is with Lightroom unless you use additional processing such as Lightroom's "Enhance Details" or Iridient X-Transformer.
Even then some people still prefer Capture One. I have found that the colour rendition with some Sony cameras is capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download better with Capture One too, as some of the colour profiles with Lightroom have problems with incorrect colours. Some of Canon's latest cameras, such as the 90D or the Eos RP have no camera matching profiles in Lightroom, and the colours are much better in Capture One. Conversely, some cameras work better in Lightroom.
Some, more obscure lenses, and even some common ones may not be fully supported by Capture One, and in some cases, the calibration may be better in Lightroom. I recently bought a Sony ZV-1 and this is one of the cases where the raw files are actually much better in Lightroom than they are in Capture One. For a lot of cameras, Capture One doesn't have multiple picture profiles.
So, with a Canon camera, for example, it doesn't have separate portrait, vivid, and landscape modes and so on. Instead, they are generally calibrated to match the "Standard" profile. For some, this will be a deal-breaker. Update: There are a couple of things that have changed since I last wrote this.
Capture One now has a dedicated Nikon version, and the company has added Nikon picture mode profiles across all versions of the application. Some of this is entirely subjective, of course. Some people will still prefer the look of files in Lightroom, regardless of what others think, and that's fine. At the end of the day, it's important to use whatever tool you are comfortable with, and whatever works for you. One of the main reasons that people cite for considering switching to Capture One is because of the option for a perpetual licence, vs Lightroom's subscription model.
This has caused a big stir recently when Capture One 20 was released and Lightroom fans were keen to point out that the Capture One upgrade price was the same as a year of Lightroom. They also argued that Lightroom has added more features over the same time, but that's a whole other discussion. While it is true that a year of a Lightroom subscription is broadly similar to the upgrade price for Capture One, the big difference that the people pushing this argument seem to have missed is that you don't have to upgrade each version of Capture Capture one pro 12 vs lightroom 6 free download.
