Capture One Pro

[Kirk Gittings]

Rhetoric aside, what are peoples opinions about Capture One Pro for raw conversion and shooting tethered? For almost $500 bucks over the free software that comes with DSLRs it should do some pretty fancy tricks.

[David Luttmann]

Kirk,

The Pro version is pretty slick for tethered shooting. If you just want Raw conversion, stick to the LE version for $99. Canon ships with DPP which is great for color, but mediocre for detail. Photoshops ACR is OK for color and awful for detail. Capture will give you the best in detail with above average color control.

[Sheldon N]

I use Capture One LE with my Canon DSLR. I find the workflow very good, can easily sort through and correct 500 photos in an hour or two.

I don't shoot tethered, but for my purposes there aren't any features with the Pro version that I need, and the $99 vs. $500 price difference is substantial.

[Kirk Gittings]

In side by side comparisons, does the C1P really give better detail and what is the basis for this? I am particularly interested in holding more highlight detail.
Thanks.

[Greg Miller]

Adobe Lightroom has a lot of power in controlling exposure during RAW conversion. You can independantly adjust Shadow and Highlight clipping separate from the primary exposure. The bad news is that Lightroom is very slow when importing a lot of images. I wanted to use Lightroom for this capability for a recent commercial shoot. But I was forced to abandon that plan and switched to ACR/Bridge because of Lightoroom's poor performance. Maybe by the time Lightroom gets out of Beta the performance issue will be corrected.

[Henry Ambrose]

I'm currently running comparisons of Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop CS2 RAW, Canon DPP and Capture One. I've used them all a little but I'm not complete on all of them head to head, not by a long shot. My first thoughts follow:

So far I tend to favor CS2 RAW for conversion with Photomechanic as a viewer/light table. Photomechanic is screaming fast and having the conversion opened right there in PS works for me. I hate Bridge, PM beats the pants off it, IMO.

Lightroom gives unsatisfactory results so far. It is beta so I'm assuming they'll fix it. Its nice to use but not ready. Same powerline against a sky and a roof will be blue in the sky and brown at the roof. Tree limbs do this too. Bad, bad, bad.

Aperture is very very nice and I liked the quality of the conversions. It does require a full bore machine to make it fun to use. On a MacPro it is fine. On my new intel iMac its very acceptable. More so if I'd never run it on a faster box. Put it on a slow computer and you will hate it. From what I see this could be a wonderful way to work given a very fast machine. Lots of folks could do most all their work with Aperture and never hardly ever use PS.

DPP just works and it runs fine on lesser machines. Comes with the Canon camera so the price is right. I can think of worse things to have to use.

Capture One seems to be the favorite with guys who shoot a large quantity of shots per set-up and process them in batches. Also for tethered work. I don't have any experience with it tethered so can't help much with that part of your question.

I'm planning on shooting untethered by overwhelming force, experience of viewing the LCD and later compositing or multiple processed captures. I'll start looking at tethered shooting and its higher level of control after that first level is gained.

I used to shoot all tethered in the studio and it has a very strong pull based on that long experience and knowing EXACTLY what you're getting.

[ageorge]

I used to use Capture One (CO) for my 1DsII, but switched to Camera Raw (CR) for couple of reasons. BTW, I don't shoot tethered so I can't help there.

1. I found the hightlight recovery better in CR.
2. With CR, I can "fix" Chormatic Aberration durring RAW conversion, thus fixing once and "applying" to other images.
3. I selected CO originally by comparison of a couple of conversions. The CO seemed more apealling colorwise, but now I am almost 100% BW so this is not an advantage anymore. Plus I view RAW convertion as more of a RAW material generator versus an editing tool, so the color is not as important for RAW conversion. I figured that CO is primarily a hardware company and probably had a better understanding of how to convert a file where Adobe is a software company with a wider gamut of expertise.
4. With CO, I would convert to Tiff and then edit in PS resulting in a PSD. More data files lying around. Where with CR, I go striaght to PSD.

[Dominique Labrosse]

Kirk,

I have shot tethered with Lightroom before. It involved using Nikon's tethered software (Camera Control Pro) to automatically save to a watched folder in Lightroom. It would take a couple of seconds for each frame to appear in Lightroom. But I was using an old G4 iBook on location.

I have used Lightroom, PM/Bridge/CS2, Aperture & Capture One LE. I prefer Lightroom. Each package aseems to do one or two things better than the other though.

Here are my impressions of each:

Capture One LE provides the best RAW conversions as long as one is exporting to a 16 bit tiff. However, I find the UI to be clunky and one cannot make correction to things like chromatic abberation. I also don't like the fact that one cannot preview the whole image before conversion (this is probably whay it is quite fast).

Lightroom has more adjustments and provides conversions that in my opinion are very close to those in Capture One LE. One can also correct more parameters. The UI is great and it provides fairly good project management. However, it is slow if you dump a whole lot of iamges on it at once.

Aperture is the king of project management. However, the UI is a little complex and the RAW conversions can some times be suspect (see here and here).

Bridge and Photoshop are slow and destructive respectively.

Photomechanic is great on a single machine but I have been having serious performance problems in a network environment at work and have stopped using it entirely. It's only a project management tool anyways and one has to use another tool for raw conversion anyways.

Regards.
DL