• Pros Best detail in initial raw file conversion. Pleasing interface. Good photo-adjustment toolset. Keyword tagging tool. • Cons Some usability quirks. No online-sharing features. No face recognition.
• Bottom Line Phase One Capture One offers pro and prosumer digital photographers the best detail from raw camera files, but it trails some competitors in organization, output, and enhancement tools. From Phase One, the maker of top-end professional photography hardware like the remarkable 100-megapixel, comes Capture One Pro 9, that offers digital photo import tools, raw camera file conversion, image adjustment, and some organizational features. Also featured are tethered shooting, a live monitor view, and focus tools. Version 9 adds new keyword capabilities, DNG support, and a few more local editing tools.
Oct 25, 2016. Phase One Capture One offers pro and prosumer digital photographers the best detail from raw camera files, but it trails some competitors in organization, output. Biomechanics And Motor Control Of Human Movement 4th Edition Pdf. But 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 is all about the photography and just the photography: There's no face recognition, maps, Web sharing, or book printing here. It competes with the Editors' Choice winner Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, DXO Optics Pro, and others in the prosumer photo workflow space. Getting the Software and Getting Started You can either buy the software outright for $299 or subscribe for $15 per month. That's a bit steep, when you consider that you can get and Photoshop for a $9.99-per-month subscription.
You get three Capture One licenses for your money, up from two in past editions and more than Adobe's two-computer maximum. Upgrading from a previous version costs $99. A free, reduced-feature Express edition of Capture One is available to owners of certain Sony camera models, who can upgrade to Pro for $50. A free, fully functioning 30-day trial version lets you test the software.
Capture One Pro is available for OS X (10.10.5 or later) and Windows 7 SP1 through Windows 10, and both require a machine with least a Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM, and 10GB of free disk space. The software installer is a not-unreasonable 167MB, which is quite a bit smaller than Lightroom's roughly 1GB. It's a 64-bit application—handy for when you have many large image files open at once.
One complaint I have with the installation process is that it forces you to install its own version of the.NET Framework, and another is that it requires a reboot. I had to upgrade my image catalog on first run, but doing so was quick. Interface and Import Capture One's interface hasn't changed much from version 8, and it remains easy on the eyes. The very dark (adjustable) gray window features two large buttons for importing and tethered capture. Unlike Lightroom'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. The left panel can be switched among 12 views based on what you're doing at the moment—Library, Capture, Color, Exposure, Lens, Composition (cropping), Details, Local Adjustments, Adjustments (including presets), Metadata, Output, and Batch. You can remove any view you don't use frequently. Along the top, buttons switch you among Select, Pan, Loupe, Crop, Straighten, Keystone, Spot Removal, Draw Mask, White-Balance, and Apply Adjustments cursors. Just as in Photoshop, rick-clicking 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 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. Undo and Reset buttons are helpfully always at the ready to correct editing goofs. And 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, 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, 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's true full screen view. 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 and destination, simultaneous backup, file renaming, and copyright metadata. It can even apply adjustment styles and presets such as Landscape B&W, midtone boost curve adjustment, or sharpening.
Autocorrect is also a useful import option. You can zoom the preview thumbnails, view single images, and choose which images to import, but you can't rate or tag them before import, unfortunately. Like Lightroom, 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 separate 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 overall import and current file-operation progress. Importing takes longer than with most of the competition, since the program builds previews for all the images.
You can, however, start working on photos without the whole import finishing, which is handy. Most 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. Capture One now supports DNG images created by Adobe programs, treating them as original raw files. Even with these, I saw more detail in Capture One than in the Lightroom conversion. You can switch the Curve 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.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, the program doesn't yet support the import of photo files from the new, which Lightroom digested without a hiccup. Below is an example showing Capture One at top left, Lightroom top right, DxO lower right, and ACDSee lower left. Click on it for a full-size view, and you'll see that the stitch work in the hat is most detailed in the Capture One image: 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 the interface screen and at the lower-right corner of the main photo view. There aren't simple Pick or Reject buttons for people with less-granular processes. There are, however, color labels, for those who organize that way. A new 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. I still prefer the treatment of keywords in Lightroom, 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.
The program offers good search options by date, filename, rating, and keyword. One helpful organizational tool in Capture One is called Variants.
Similar to Lightroom'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 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 now 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 tools I miss in Capture One are Vibrance and Dehaze. With these tools, I can usually get a better-looking end result using Lightroom, even though Capture One gets more detail at initial raw conversion.
A big A button above the side-panel buttons makes the appropriate autocorrect adjustments for the currrent window. 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 offers just two sliders, for highlights and shadows. Their purpose is not to deliver special effects, but rather to perfect an image, and for that they're useful. By comparison, can create HDR images with much more impact. The Levels and Curves tools in the Exposure panel are far more useful for making vivid images.
But 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. You do get a noise-reduction option in Capture One, but Lightroom's similar feature is more effective in reducing noise, and it maintains more of the original photo's detail in a low-light shot. DxO Optic Pro offers the ultimate in noise reduction, however, with its time-consuming Prime tool. I still find cropping in Capture One a little strange: You can't just hit Enter after selecting the rectangle you want; the crop only takes effect after you switch to another cursor. It's not a horrible process, just a bit unusual. The crop tool does helpfully show you each side's dimensions in inches or pixels, however.
The straighten tool has you draw a line that will become the horizon, or you can manually tilt your photo while using the Composition panel's Rotation tool. Color management is a special strength in Capture One.
You can adjust color ranges or individual colors, and you can also fine-tune skin tones in particular using a color picker. Other skin helpers are the Clone and Heal tools, which do a very good job of blemish removal. They work just about the way Photoshop's similar tools have for years, but Adobe's content-aware tools are more effective. A new Mask From Color option in Capture One lets you create adjustment layers based on color-selected areas for local adjustments. Output of Photos in Capture One Formerly, Capture One had no printing engine at all, but the present version includes a capable printing feature. It lets you select a color profile and offers standard layouts such as contact sheets and A3/A4 formats.
You can customize layouts with your choice of column and row counts and spacing, and text and image watermarking are options. Missing is the ability to save your own custom layout templates, however.
The View menu offers a good number of Proof Profiles to show how your image will look on a selection of displays and print output types, but it doesn't highlight nonprinting colors the way Lightroom's Soft Proofing feature does. One weakness in Capture One's usefulness as a workflow solution is its lack of online sharing capabilities. There's a Make Web Contact Sheet choice that creates HTML for a Web server, but aside from that the software basically leaves you to your own devices, with no Web- or email-sharing features. There's no built-in export to popular services like Flickr, 500px, or SmugMug, nor is there any integrated book layout and export tool such as you get in Lightroom. Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine?s lead analyst for software and Web applications.
A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine?s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine?s Solutions section, which covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered services and software for ExtremeTech.com.