Capture One Pro 11 vs Lightroom... wow what a difference.

Richdog

Richdog

Richdog

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Yesterday I bought Capture One Pro 11 after being a Lightroom user for years (the Sony edition is a crazy low 80EUR, complete no-brainer) and while of course I do not yet have the exhaustive experience to make definitive conclusions, my initial impressions are extremely positive.

  • C1 is about 10x faster when împorting and editing photos from my NAS... Lightroom was appalling in that regard, slow and stuttery.
  • The menu system is super clean and logical and tabs stop me constantly scrolling and fiddling around.
  • It appears to work magic with NR and sharpening, never have I been able to reduce noise while retaining detail to this extent. You can literally max NR and max sharpening and the image looks surprisingly good.
  • The clarity slider has multiple "methods" which greatly improve the end result. The "Natural" method avoids looking too artificial.
  • The "Auto adjust" button produces extremely decent result all things considered, mch better than my experience with Lightroom.
I just need to spend a couple of months learning it and I get the feeling that it is really going to be less of a pain in the rear than LR was. I still have LR subscribed until Q2 next year so it's accessible if I need it.

Anyone else tried C1 and noticed similar? :)
 
Marzipanogram said:
I started trailing Capture One over Lightroom early this week.
I agree it makes your photos look better, just by viewing them and not touching any settings.
Using the Auto button, it works wonders compared to Lightroom.

You're right about Sharpening and Noise Reduction, but I've found if you export them to Photoshop for further PP. The default settings are too strong and your photos look plasticy.

I didn't like the UI at first, but once you're used to it or you've created your own menus, it's OK.

I prefer Lightroom's spot removal feature, which can be set to high contrast B&W for easy detection.
I can't find a way of auto importing a finished photo back into Capture One, once it's been saved in Photoshop. Lightroom does it, if you leave the program open at the same time as Photoshop.
I wish it had the Pano feature that Lightroom has.

Overall Capture One is a superior product.
If anyone from Phase One is reading this, I will gladly accept a lifetime licence and the use of your Medium Format cameras :D
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Hi Marzi, interesting points you raise there, I still have to try these features so I will give it a go and see what I think. Spot too in LR was indeed easy as pie, so it will be interesting to compare. Good point about panorama stitching, I did use that in LR, so I need to research what options are available. How do you do it now with your panos'?

As for Photoshop, I rarely if ever use it so shouldn't be a problem for me. The reduction in frustration though from having a program that is loading and editing files like lightning can simply not be overstated, it is a world of difference and is going to work wonders for my workflow, in fact I can now finally process 1500 photos from the USA that I was putting off for that very reason, lol. :)
 
I have managed to improve LR performance by tweaking the performance settings but it's still annoyingly laggy to the point where I am grinding my teeth waiting for it to switch between images etc... fair enough it is getting the images from a NAS, but CO does the same thing extremely smoothly and rapidly.

I really have no idea how the LR can still be so badly optimised with all of the development that goes into it.
 
Has anyone noticed that with C1 the exported JPEG files are ******* huge when the slider is set to 100% quality? I'm talking 2x or more larger than equivalent Lightroom JPEG's... sometimes close to the size of a compressed Sony RAW file (40MB)!
 
Schizo said:
My light room is laggy on my laptop and its no where as good as your PC,I'm sure light room is just laggy no matter what you got,I'll be trying c1 as well in the next few weeks.
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Lightroom just runs like a dog. Period. I almost threw my laptop out of the window earlier when I tried to edit a set of images with it.

This thread is a good read and sums things up... https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2396874
 
DeathStorm said:
I would assume they're not equivalent, all things being equal those smaller files from Lightroom can only be achieved by having a higher level of compression (unless they've got some amazing compression technique but that seems unlikely) regardless of how comparable the slider is between each program.

As you've got both do a direct comparison and see what the difference is in output at 100%.
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Actually I was being a ninny, the files are roughly the same size from C1 and LR, I just didn't take into account the double resolution of my Sony a7rIII when I first started working with it (I was using 24MP for so many years). Still, to have a JPEG produced which is the same file as the compressed RAW is quite surprising as my Fuji files were significantly smaller than the RAW's. Different formats and methods are seemingly sometimes very noticeably different. :)
 
rodders said:
Dont like it, too used to lightrooms.
As slow as lightrooms is, think I'll stick with it as it's a nicer layout.
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Lightroom, no s on the end.

Lightroom is better in terms of interface and ease of use, but the slowness is simply too much to bear and I will be buggered if I am going to spend extra hours editing large numbers of files just because Adobe can't optimise an application. I will possibly go back to it if or when they do fix it.
 
rodders said:
Whats the version number, mines still dog slow, but my PC is 6 odd years old
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If you have no SSD and a slow CPU/HDD then yeah it will likely be dog slow no matter what. The latest update to the cloud versions was meant to bring serious performance improvements, and on my system it certainly looks like it has.
 
Tysonator said:
I Will look into Sony's soft ware, if it as good as people mention it is worth look .
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The 'problem' is that the last major update of Lightroom has turned everything back around again. Performance is now good and it's a pleasure to use again, which has put me off learning Captur One in depth...

Sigh.
 
Minstadave said:
Yeah they’ve really got some nice improvements out of LR CC Classic, not tried the cloud version yet.

Not sure about the subscription model still, but i picked up a year sub for £70 ish off Amazon when it was on sale which is better than the full price sub.
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I don't see the point in the cloud version but the CC classic is now like a completely different application, I would say the performance increase is at least 1000% (yes, a thousand)... before the recent patches it was truly abysmal to the point where I considered it nigh-unusable. Just shows how badly optimised it was for the last year or so.
 
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