From Phase One, the maker of top-end professional photography hardware like the remarkable 100-megapixel IQ3 100MP Trichromatic, comes Capture One Pro 20 photo editing software, which offers digital photo import tools, raw camera file conversion, image adjustment, local and layer editing, and some organizational features.
Yes, that's a big version number bump from the previous version 12, but there are a decent number of improvements here.
The software supports tethered shooting with a live monitor view and focus tools for shooting directly from the app.
Capture One is a strong competitor to Editors' Choice winners Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, DXO Optics Pro, and others in the pro photo workflow space thanks to updates to its interface, export plug-in capability, masking tools, and especially its fine raw file conversion.
Getting the Software and Getting Started
You can either buy the software outright for $299 or subscribe for $20 per month.
There's also a $15 monthly plan if you prepay for a year.
These prices are a bit steep when you consider that you can get Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic and Photoshop for a $9.99-per-month subscription.
You get three Capture One licenses for your money, more than Adobe's two-computer maximum.
Upgrading from a previous version costs $159.
Capture One (for Sony) and Capture One Fujifilm each cost $129; these versions are full-featured but only support raw files from those cameras of those brands.
A free, fully functioning 30-day trial version lets you test the software before purchasing.
Capture One Pro is available for macOS (10.13 or later) and Windows 7 SP1 through Windows 10 (64-bit only), and both require a machine with least a Core 2 Duo processor, 8GB RAM, and 10GB of free disk space.
I tested the Windows version.
It takes up 620MB of hard drive space, but that's quite a bit smaller than Lightroom Classic's 2GB.
I had to upgrade my image catalog on first running the update, but doing so was quick.
You activate the software using a Capture One account as well as a serial number.
In all, installation is no harder than getting going with Lightroom.
What's New in Capture One Pro 20
For Capture One aficionados, here's a crib sheet on what's new for version 20:
- A new color editor, with eight color ranges and a cursor tool to see changes in-image
- Improved noise reduction,
- Interface improvements, including scrolling, button labels, changeable background color, updated white balance picker, and new keyboard shortcuts
- Improved HDR sliders, now with Black and White sliders for better contrast control
- Improved Crop tool with edge handles, aspect ratio locking, and (finally) Enter key finishing the crop
- Better DNG support and added camera model raw support, including for Canon 90D, Nikon Z50, Pentax K-1 II, Olympus E-M5 III, and Ricoh GR III
As a refresher, here's what we got in the previous version (Version 12):
- Interface updated with Resource Hub (see just below)
- Revamped menu system
- Keyboard shortcut manager
- Luminosity range, linear gradient, and radial gradient masking;
- Plug-ins for exporting and publishing
- Extended AppleScript support
- Fujifilm film simulations
Interface and Import
When you first run Capture One, the Resource Hub pops over the main program window.
This offers tabs for What's New, Tutorials, Webinars, Support, and Plug-In Shopping.
If you dismiss it, you can get it back up from the Help menu.
Just about everything in the hub opens a webpage in your browser, so I'm not sure why there isn't just a link on the program window to a web index page of all this.
Despite some interface tweaks, the app is still recognizable to longtime Capture One users, and it's a lot busier than the Lightroom Classic and Skylum Luminar's interfaces.
The dark (adjustable) gray window features two large buttons for importing and tethered capture.
Unlike Lightroom Classic's interface, Capture One's is not modal.
That is, it doesn't present different workspaces for different functions, such as organizing, editing, or output.
Instead, you do everything in the one interface.
You use buttons on top of the left-side control panel to switch between 10 (down from 12 in earlier versions) views based on what you're doing at the moment—Library, Capture, Lens, Color, Exposure, Details, Adjustments (including presets), Metadata, Output, and Batch.
You can remove any view you don't use frequently.
Along the top, 11 toolbar buttons switch you among Select, Pan, Loupe, Crop, Straighten, Keystone, Spot Removal, Draw Mask, White-Balance, and Apply Adjustments cursors.
Just as in Photoshop, right-clicking (or click-and-holding) these buttons opens a drop-down of more cursor choices, including Zoom and Pan.
The Apply Adjustments cursor lets you copy and paste adjustments between images.
The paste functionality is smart enough to not include spot removal and cropping, and new for Version 20 are improvements to layer copy-and-paste.
The program offers good right-click menu options, and keyboard shortcuts (for example, C for crop, Ctrl-T to hide or show the Tools menu, and number keys for ratings).
You can even create your own shortcuts for any of the program's menu options.
You can search for shortcuts, by either the key combination or the command performed.
Undo and Reset buttons are always at the ready to reverse editing goofs, something I like to see in an interface.
Question mark icons in every tool take you to the appropriate help entry—very helpful indeed.
A simple roll of the mouse wheel quickly zooms your photo.
Like Lightroom Classic, Capture One can't zoom to a specific percentage.
Instead, it stops at set amounts, such as 25 percent, 50 percent, and so on.
There's no indication whether the photo you're viewing has been fully rendered.
In my testing, photos rendered faster than in Lightroom Classic, which does, however, indicate when the photo is completely rendered.
There's a full-screen view in Capture One that shows both the side panel and your image, but this is far less useful than Lightroom Classic's true full-screen view.
I also found that the basic action of switching between gallery and image view was less intuitive than it should be.
Sometimes I would hit the multi-image button and the program would keep me in single-image view.
In Lightroom, it's a simple matter of double-clicking an image.
As an alternative to the large Import button, you can set Capture One as your default AutoPlay option when plugging in camera media.
The import dialog is powerful.
It lets you choose the source, destination, file renaming, and copyright metadata.
You can also perform a simultaneous backup during import, and even apply adjustment styles and presets such as Landscape B&W, midtone boost curve, and sharpening.
Autocorrect is also a useful import option.
You can zoom the preview thumbnails, view single images, and choose which images to import.
You can't rate or tag them before importing, unfortunately.
The program's duplicate detection (like that in Lightroom) saves you from having unnecessary copies on your drive.
Like Lightroom Classic, Capture One stores information (including any edits) for your imported photos in databases called catalogs.
The actual image files can be stored in a different folder location from the catalog, or right inside it.
Keeping them separate means you can have the large image files on a NAS drive, for example.
Unlike Adobe's app, Capture One lets you have multiple catalogs open simultaneously.
The default is to open the catalog you're importing to as soon as the import starts.
A double progress bar shows both the overall import and current file-operation progress.
(See the Performance section below for a comparison of import speeds; long story short: Capture One imports faster than Lightroom, PhotoDirector, and ACDSee Pro.) You can start working on photos before the whole import finishes, which is handy.
Many raw camera files I tested in the program look noticeably better than the unadjusted Lightroom and ACDSee equivalents, and even better than in the excellent DxO Optics Pro .
Capture One supports DNG images created by Adobe programs, treating them as original raw files.
Even with these, I see more detail in Capture One than in the Lightroom's initial conversion in some photos for some camera models.
Lightroom sometimes tends towards oversaturation, though increasing Sharpening brought the detail up to Capture One's initial level in my test image.
Capture One's documentation states that its raw conversion process "uses an extremely sophisticated and patented algorithm."
Capture One raw conversion on the left, Lightroom on the right (using the Adobe Color profile).
The colors look more accurate with Capture One; both are with no adjustments applied.
You can switch the Curve presets in the Color section for rendering among Auto, Film Extra Shadow, Film High Contrast, Film Standard, and Linear Response.
The first few modes are more saturated, and the last two give the most detail.
As its name suggests, tethered capture is a strong point for Capture One—it offers more than just about any competitor, with its live-view Sessions feature.
There's also an iPad app, Capture Pilot, that lets you show, rate, and capture photos using Apple's tablet as a remote.
Organizing Photos
Capture One lets you add star ratings via thumbnails across the bottom of thumbnails and at the lower-right corner of the main photo view.
It also lets you apply color tags for organization, but there's no simple Pick or Reject option for people with less-granular processes.
The Keyword tool accessible from the Metadata tab lets you add keywords to build a Library.
The next time you start typing in the text box, any matching entry in the library is suggested.
You can even import or export keyword libraries and add hierarchical keywords.
The program doesn't, however, offer you a prepopulated keyword library.
A new issue is that, after adding a keyword to an image, the focus switches to the next image, which isn't helpful when you're trying to add multiple keywords (though you can turn off this behavior).
I prefer the treatment of keywords in Lightroom Classic, however, which offers exhaustive help and presets for organizing your photos in this most useful way.
You can create your own albums (including smart albums based on ratings, color codes, or search criteria), projects, or groups (which can include any combination of the above).
But forget about integrated geo-tagged maps or people tags, such as you get in Lightroom.
Capture One does offer good search options by date, filename, rating, and keyword.
One helpful organizational tool in Capture One is called Variants.
Similar to Lightroom Classic's Snapshots feature, Variants let you create multiple copies of a photo with different adjustments and edits.
Variants are the only way to get a before-and-after view of your adjustments, and even that method doesn't work as well as Lightroom Classic and DxO's side-by-side views.
Adjusting Photos
Organization may not be Capture One's forte, but in its selection of standard adjustment tools—exposure, contrast, shadows, highlights, white balance, and so on—Capture One is up there with the best.
The program offers an adjustable histogram, white balance, exposure, HDR, and clarity.
The last offers a few modes of its own, with Punch, Natural, and Neutral being more effective than Classic mode, which just seems to sharpen images.
A couple of Lightroom Classic tools I miss in Capture One are Vibrance and Dehaze.
The latter has made its way into several competing applications, so its absence in Capture One is now egregious.
For the record, the haze-removal tools in DxO PhotoLab and Skylum Luminar worked better than the one in Lightroom, which added a color cast.
I can usually get an end result that is as good or better looking using Lightroom Classic's tools, even though Capture One gets more detail and more-natural colors at initial raw conversion.
Where there used to be an A button, Capture One now uses a magic-wand icon for autocorrect adjustments, in both the top toolbar and in each adjustment section (White Balance, Exposure, and so on).
You can undo the autocorrect changes of any given setting (exposure, white balance, and so on) individually, without undoing the others.
The program's High Dynamic Range section now adds two more sliders to the previous version's Highlights and Shadows: You now get a Black and White slider, too.
The new sliders really do help in creating an image with better contrast; adjusting highlights and shadows alone often results in a washed-out looking image.
The tool's purpose is not to deliver special effects, but rather to perfect an image, and for that they're useful.
By comparison, CyberLink's PhotoDirector can create HDR images with extreme and artsy impact.
As for true HDR using multiple images of the same scene shot at different exposures, Capture One is completely lacking, with no such tool.
The same holds for multi-shot panorama merging.
Both of these are strengths of Lightroom.
The Levels and Curves tools in Capture One's Exposure panel are far more useful for making vivid images.
Capture One is all about image fidelity—though there are Styles that apply color and Black and White effects, as well as a Film Grain tool.
Capture One includes profile-based tools for correcting lens-geometry distortion, though the EF 70-300mm Canon lens for my Canon DSLR still isn't included.
Chromatic aberration correction comes under this lens-correction subset.
A generic option did quite a good job in my testing.
The Purple Fringing option is also effective.
DxO Optics Pro remains my top pick for really doing away with chromatic aberration, though Lightroom has also gotten very good at it, too.
Capture One improved its noise-reduction tools in the latest release and I found that some images had less noise in initial raw conversation, to the point that I had to apply 50 percent noise reduction in Lightroom to get the noise level down to Capture One's initial rendering.
Turns out that's because Capture One applies that much noise reduction by default.
Even so, the Capture One result with the same settings was more detailed than the Lightroom result, with the same amount of smoothness.
DxO Optic Pro offers the ultimate in noise reduction, however, with its time-consuming Prime tool.
Left, Capture One; right, Lightroom; both with noise reduction and detail set to 50.
Cropping in Capture One is improved...
