Capture One 21 v Lightroom Classic personal quick trial

[Adrian]

Capture One 21 was recommended by another member here when I posted my search for a processing and library solution that meets my current and expected needs. Having tried everything else I decided to give this a go despite the high price.

Pricing

I dislike subscription models, but that does seem the best option here as the stand alone version is £299 versus £19 a month. Stand alone pays for itself in 16 months as long as there are no major upgrades at cost within that time. There is a price penalty of about 25% for being a Canon user as it is cheaper for Nikon, Sony and Fuji. Students get a 35% discount. You get two "seats" which is fine for me as laptop and desktop.

No storage. Unlike adobe which has 1TB built in or 20Gb if you choose the same price Photography package.

I am already familiar with Lightroom having used it for years until June 2020. I had tried to use a legacy version I already have on a different computer but it crashed constantly on OSX Big Sur. To overcome this I downloaded the free 7 day trial from Adobe. Unlike every other free trial I have tried in the past week, Adobe make you pay up front with credit card details or PayPal and will then charge you if you have not take positive action to cancel within 7 days. Sharp practice in my view. Lightroom charge £10 a month for the base subscription, but if you want extra cloud storage it is £10 per Tb. That's crazy expensive given that I can buy 10TB from iDrive for £6.25 a month.

[Adrian]

Capture One 21 first thoughts

Early days yet but first impression is this is very slick indeed. I’ve only played with it for about 5 hours, but the user interface is very easy to follow and everything seems simple to find, with excellent links to tutorials.

Lens correction is not super tailored like DXO, but I can hack through image processing to get very good results faster in this than anything I have trialled over the last week. (Lightroom, OSX Photos, Luminar AI, Affinity, DXO4).

I really like:

• Easy and fast to get natural looking images
• Well thought out tutorials
• Lots of opportunity to use custom label images
• Very easy to set up my own presets for batch processing
• Plug ins are easy to select and integrate
• Use of layers is a lot easier than Affinity or Photoshop
• Catalogue is straightforward and easy to shift around – in fact this is by far the best and easiest of everything I have tried, including Adobe
• Can quickly and easily import images, folders and subfolders and sort them out
• Gets rid of duplicates
• Easy to use different backup location
• The photo processing is easily explained at a basic level to a “non-enthusiast” user (my wife)
• Tethering is dead easy. This is handy for me as I have a long lens set up on an owls nest.

Less good:
Removal of duplicates is slow and the endless re-rendering of thumbnails is annoying
No cloud storage. This is handy when travelling. However I used portable 1 and 2 TB SSD drives a lot and these cover most things.
It is very expensive as a processor compared with Affinity. But Affinity has no sensible library and a confusing user interface (but is only £25 currently).
Watermark application not as easy and flexible as DXO
Lens corrections much better on DXO
Not convinced by the automated processing presets - I rarely preferred these and ended up going back to the original and processing manually. However I felt like this about all etc software I tried, with the possible exception of some DXO presets.

[Adrian]

I won't comment on Lightroom here much as everyone knows it. I find the Adobe plans confusing. The Photography Plan with minimal storage has Lightroom and Lightroom Classic along with PS whereas the cloud based plan just has Lightroom. When you fork out for the trial you can pick what you download but it is very difficult to backtrack from that in my experience if you make the wrong choice. (I chose the cloud option, which was a mistake).

Lightroom is easy to use for me as I am totally familiar with it as is my son, but my wife finds it confusing to deal with the sliders for highlights etc and she thinks the library system is over complicated. However, she only uses a laptop and that does make things harder as you rapidly use up screen real estate. The Capture One 21 system is a lot clearer and more flexible (at twice the price).

I was quite happy with the Lightroom processing, but not as happy as I was with Capture One 21.

Lightroom does not seem to sit happy alongside the OSX Photos cloud system. We ended up accidentally importing duplicated images into the Cloud when devices were synced. I haven't investigated this but it is a pain as third party duplicates software can be destructive to libraries.

Adobe watermarking is not as good as DXO. Nothing is as far as I can see.

LR is a lot easier to use than super cheap and powerful Affinity.

Photographer package is respectable value if you don't need cloud storage. It only allows 2 users (same as Capture One) whereas DXO allows three. That's a benefit to me as when we are travelling my wife and I can both use it. In normal times she is abroad a lot more than me so this would be handy. I could put Affinity on her laptop but I know she will abandon it as too much bother to learn.

[billtils]

[*]Use of layers is a lot easier than Affinity or Photoshop

There's more to it than that. Yes, you can do a lot quickly and easily in C1's layers (including a rather good implementation of luminosity masking) but giving it a "Plus" becasue it is easier than AP or PS is a bit of an oversimplification as it is restricted to adjusment layers and you cannot process composites. Its implementation of cloning and healing is OK but not nearly as good as AP or PS.

Whether these matter or not depends on what you do and could be of no consequence or (almost) critical. "Almost" becase round- tripping from C1 to AP is a low cost and effective way to get to the higher level layer applications.

[Manfred M]

They tend to run annual dates to a new version. Still pricey, but not as much as the original purchase.

[Adrian]

Thanks Manfred. I had a look at some online reviews where there was a bit of moaning about this from Capture One users. A Canadian guy saying he paid Can$400 for the standalone version (20?) and the it was $200 for the latest version, without much clarity about what people were getting for that. The subscription model may work better but is £20 a month.

It has been a hugely interesting exercise for me. They all have pros and cons and I wish I could pick bits from each. Decision time approaches. My wife has pointed out that we have two big trips that I have not got round to doing anything with, plus a lot of shots she took of an air she I participated in.

I jave also persuaded her that her practice only using JPEG is unhelpful as I can't apply sensible batch processing routines. It has become frustrating overall.