Hasselblad is a well-loved medium format camera system – but one of the brand's biggest requests has finally been answered: more native RAW file support across third-party photo editing apps.

Today, Hasselblad announced native RAW file support inside the popular photo editor Capture One. The company says that tethered camera support will follow later this year.

RAW files from cameras like the Hasselblad X2D II 100C – the “finest stills camera ever made” according to my colleague James Artaius – are packed with 100MP resolution and dynamic range.

But while Adobe Lightroom and Camera RAW support the 3FR file format, Hasselblad’s RAW file format isn’t widely compatible with some of the most well-known Adobe competitors. That left photographers opening the files and working with the colors in Hasselblad’s Phocus software for the best color rendering before exporting as a TIFF and importing into other programs.

With Capture One support, the announcement removes an extra step for Hasselblad photographers working with one of the best Lightroom alternatives.

Hasseblad says those files open natively inside the photo editor, including support for the camera's dedicated color profiles. The collaboration also supports lens profiles for Hasselblad glass, enabling lens profile correction inside Capture One.

Capture One support includes file handling for the RAW files from the X2D II 100C, the X2D 100C, and the CFV 100C digital back and is available in version 16.8.3 of Capture One, as well as the mobile version 3.3.4.

“Photographers have asked us to bring Hasselblad’s image quality into Capture One’s platform for years,” said Rafael Orta, CEO, Capture One.

“This partnership delivers exactly that, empowering even more photographers with everything they need, from initial inspiration to final image. It’s a collaboration the photography community has wanted for a long time, and we’re glad it’s finally here.”

New users can also try a free seven-day trial for Capture One.

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Read more about the best photo editors, or dive into the best Hasselblad cameras.

Leica has announced a new strategic partnership with Capture One, strengthening the relationship between two brands long associated with high-end image creation. The collaboration focuses on delivering a faster, more reliable and deeply integrated tethered shooting experience for Leica photographers, whether they’re working in a controlled studio environment or shooting on location under pressure.

At the heart of the partnership is a tighter connection between Leica cameras and Capture One’s professional workflow system. The integration offers direct, stable, high-speed tethering, giving photographers instant image transfer, accurate Live View, and real-time adjustments as they shoot.

It’s designed to support the level of precision and consistency demanded by working professionals, while also bringing Capture One’s renowned colur handling and Leica-optimized profiles directly into the workflow. The result is a tethering and editing experience that mirrors Leica’s commitment to craftsmanship and image quality, from the moment of capture to the final grade.

To introduce the partnership, Leica and Capture One are launching a new Trial Program that offers Leica customers three months of complimentary access to Capture One’s All-in-One plan. The trial allows users to explore the full Leica-ready workflow, including tethered shooting, color refinement, and detailed post-production tools. Leica photographers can register at https://club.leicacamera.com to receive their three-month licence and setup guide.

“We are pleased to continue our collaboration with Capture One following our initial agreement. Capture One remains the best tethering solution on the market, and together we’re enabling Leica photographers to experience the most reliable and seamless tethered workflow available today,” says Nico Koehler, Head of Product Experience at Leica Camera AG.

Mathieu Bourlion, Director of Product Management at Capture One, adds:

“Leica has a long and distinguished legacy of shaping the art of photography for over a century. We’re proud to continue this collaboration by bringing our world-class tethering and workflow solutions to Leica image creators. Together, we’re supporting the next generation of photographers to carry that 100-year tradition forward, with greater speed, precision, and creative freedom.”

This renewed partnership marks a meaningful step forward for both companies, offering Leica users a streamlined, professional-grade workflow backed by tools designed to match the brand’s heritage of excellence.

The Nik Collection plug-ins are sold as a single unit. You can’t buy them separately, but you do use them separately. And although they are typically used as plug-ins for programs like Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, they also work as standalone programs and external editors for other programs, like Capture One. If you like to shoot raw, though, you will need a ‘host’ program to do your raw conversions before sending processed images to the Nik plug-ins for editing.

So even though Nik Collection is usually described as a plug-in suite, it actually offers a wide variety of workflows. This, and its huge creative range, make it one of the best photo-editing software applications for photographers.

Taking them alphabetically, Analog Efex is perhaps the most interesting for anyone trying to recreate the look of old cameras, primitive lenses, and lo-fi film stocks. It can create bokeh effects, light leaks, borders, dust and scratches, even ‘accidental’ multiple exposure effects, and multi-camera images where photos are chopped up into panels. It’s like a wild analog playground and a world apart from DxO’s rather more sober FilmPack film emulation software. It’s weird and sometimes over the top, but brilliant.

Color Efex is perhaps the central tool in the Nik lineup. It offers more than 50 filters, which can be used individually or in combination, each with powerful adjustments and masking tools. In Nik Collection 8, Color Efex gets preset effects for each filter, so there are even more ready-made starting points for your experiments. It’s aimed at more mainstream photographic effects than Analog Efex but has its own share of striking looks alongside regular tools like levels and curves.

Dfine is the Nik Collection’s noise-reduction plug-in, but it only works on JPEGs or images already converted from raw files, rather than directly on raw files, unlike more modern AI noise-reduction tools. It’s effective in an old-fashioned kind of way, with a good deal of control over noise reduction via ‘noise profiles’ and local enhancements, but these days it’s much more effective to tackle noise during the raw-processing phase. It would be great if DxO could find a way to bring its DeepPRIME AI noise reduction to Dfine, but it’s hard to see how it could fit into the editing workflow if your regular ‘host’ program is doing the raw conversion.

HDR Efex has had relatively little attention in recent Nik Collection updates but remains a very effective HDR tool that can be used to merge bracketed exposures or just to add HDR-style shadow and highlight adjustments to single files. Some of the preset effects are throwbacks to the worst excesses of the HDR craze, though it’s possible to produce strong-but-natural-looking results too.

Nik Sharpener comes in two forms: a ‘presharpener’ to crisp up soft-looking images and an ‘output’ sharpener to optimize sharpening for different output devices and print sizes. The screen sharpening is effective if you publish your images digitally, but for this and the print sharpening to be effective, you really need to resize your images for your output device before you send them to Sharpener. I suspect most photographers will just stick to the sharpening tools in their regular host software.

Silver Efex is one of the stars of the Nik Collection and is perhaps the best-known black-and-white software tool of all. It produces remarkable richness, depth, and tonal subtlety in monochrome images, with a powerful set of adjustment tools, preset effects, and local adjustments for ‘dodging and burning’. You can also produce striking black-and-white images in Analog Efex and Color Efex, but Silver Efex is probably the ultimate digital darkroom for monochrome work.

Viveza is harder to categorize. It’s designed for detailed color adjustments, via both global adjustments and local adjustments, but it does seem to be a bit of a one-trick pony, and three of its key adjustments are now incorporated into Color Efex. No doubt Viveza has its fans, but it does seem much more limited than the Nik Collection’s other creative plug-ins.

DxO Nik Collection 8 system requirements

DxO Nik Collection 8: price

DxO Nik Collection 8 sells for $169.99 / £144.99 (about AU$260) for new users, or for $99.99 / £79.99 (about AU$150) as an upgrade from Nik Collection 6 or 7. Note that DxO’s upgrade offer covers the last two versions, so although the Nik Collection is on an annual update cycle, you can afford to skip a version without losing your upgrade entitlement. If you already have Nik Collection 7, for example, and you don’t need the Photoshop workflow enhancements that feature so heavily in Nik Collection 8, you might want to hang on for next year’s Nik Collection 9 release.

Either way, while the Nik Collection is not exactly cheap, you do get an awful lot for your money. Analog Efex, Color Efex, Silver Efex, and perhaps even HDR Efex are easily good enough and different enough to be sold as standalone products, and here you’re getting all the plug-ins for a single price.

DxO Nik Collection 8: interface and usability

They have different jobs, but all the Nik creative plug-ins share the same basic design. The left sidebar displays preset effects and individual filters for building your own effects, while the right sidebar displays panels for each filter so that you can make further adjustments. This right sidebar can get a little busy once you start combining effects, but the panels can be collapsed to save space.

You can also apply a wide range of highly customizable local adjustment masks via DxO’s trademark Control Points, Control Lines, and – now – Polygon masks. These work in a unique way, targeting only specific tones and colors within the mask area, so they are highly selective. The Nik Collection does not offer AI object masking, but this system is equally effective in a different way.

If you want to, you can dive very deep indeed into the Nik Collection’s filters, masks, and controls to create some stunning effects. Or, if that’s just too much to take in initially, you can pick from a long list of excellent preset effects and work back from there.

Improved Photoshop integration is a key feature of this Nik Collection 8 update. It comes with a new-and-improved Nik Collection palette displayed directly within the Photoshop interface, including the ability to save interim edits in Nik plug-ins and return them to Photoshop as layers when you’re done.

Silver Efex gets some updates too, including a color reference image display, interface improvements and local adjustments for ClearView (a bit like Lightroom Dehaze) and Selective Tone adjustments. Also, each filter now comes with pre-defined presets.

Overall, the Nik Collection workflow has been refined to a point where it’s as quick and seamless to use as possible, and you can just click a preset if you don’t want to get bogged down in tools and settings. It also has special features and options for Photoshop users.

DxO Nik Collection 8: performance

The Nik Collection plug-ins offer such a huge variety of image-editing effects, tools, and inspiration that it’s hard to know where to start. If you like a lo-fi analog look, then Analog Efex does it spectacularly well. Color Efex is like a photo editor and effects generator rolled into one, and is like a giant box of filters with endless permutations. Silver Efex Pro is capable of wonderful black-and-white imagery with comparatively little effort – though you can dig as deep as you want with the adjustment and masking tools. HDR Efex does look a little dated in parts, but is still very good at creating classic HDR Effects.

Dfine is less impressive because it’s starting from images that have already been processed once. It can reduce noise very effectively, but you can easily lose detail at the same time, so it’s some way behind the latest AI noise-reduction tools. Sharpener is interesting but perhaps a little specialized for the average user – it’s handy if you want to optimize detail carefully for screen or print, perhaps. It’s also hard to warm to Viveza, as it doesn’t do much that programs like Lightroom or Photoshop can’t, though its masking tools are effective in a different way.

DxO Nik Collection 8: verdict

You probably won’t get equal value out of all the Nik Collection plug-ins, since Dfine is somewhat dated, Sharpener is quite specialized, and Viveza’s color adjustment capabilities are neither unique nor particularly valuable for Lightroom or Photoshop users.

So, does the Nik Collection still deserve a 5-star rating? I think so, because Analog Efex, Color Efex, Silver Efex, and HDR Efex offer such a rich and varied set of image effects that, in my opinion, they easily justify the cost of the Nik Collection on their own.

It’s not just a unique set of photo effects that you’re getting here, but a practically bottomless source of inspiration and ideas. If you’re getting stuck in a rut with your current photo editor – and we all do from time to time – the Nik Collection will bust you out of that rut in a big way. We all need fresh ideas now and again, and that’s exactly what the Nik Collection delivers.

Alternatives

Adobe Lightroom Classic alternative and the tethering stalwart’s favorite photo editing software suite, Capture One, is back with a plethora of exciting new features designed to revolutionize batch skin retouching and generally streamline the outlet’s already slick batch and tethering workflow.

The Capture One update, unveiled on May 08 and now available in beta, is designed to create a more end-to-end workflow so photographers don't have to use multiple programs. The long list of new portrait editing tools is designed to handle more types of edits while also allowing for quick adjustments for tethered users.

I got to sit in on a webinar with the editing software developer’s Global Head of Product Training, David Grover, who took me through the new edition’s headline features, and my first thought was, Phew! I’ll never have to do frequency separation on the fly again. And while you’ll have to wait for the inevitable Digital Camera World review to find out exactly how it fares on test, I was certainly impressed by the software’s retouching capabilities that I got to see in action. Especially for photographers who require a quick, on-the-fly fix to present images to models and clients mid-shoot.

As the global announcement of Capture One kicks off – complete with a sleek new logo – there’s plenty to be excited about. So, let's dive into the new features.

New portrait retouching tools means Capture One can handle more edits

Capture One’s intention with this update is to make it easier for photographers to remain inside Capture One, without having to work across multiple editing suites. As such, the software’s retouching features have received a big upgrade. As David puts it: “What we do with this feature is to keep you in Capture One and improve your efficiency.” There is now a powerful new retouching tool called Retouch Faces.

This tool features a variety of sliders: Impact, Blemishes, Dark Circles, and Contouring. You also have a dropdown option called Even Skin, with dedicated Amount and Texture sliders. Easily the most impressive tool is Blemishes. Push the slider to the right and blemishes magically disappear while retaining the skin's texture. Where I think this tool is particularly clever is that the software removes what it deems to be the largest blemishes first, with smaller blemishes disappearing thereafter.

I asked how this behaves with freckles, and although I’ll have to test it out myself, I was told that because freckles tend to be smaller, the Blemishes slider will initially avoid them while dealing with larger blemishes. However, David was very honest regarding the limitations of the tool. He told me, “We are doing some freckle detection, if you like. But it’s not always completely foolproof...and we are also looking at ways to be able to improve that as well.” And I have to say, from what I saw in the demo, Capture One is definitely on the right track.

As for whether this tool is AI-powered or not, Capture One says it’s a bit of both. Ultimately, I doubt Retouch Faces is designed to actually replace traditional retouching. But if you work in a fast-paced environment and require quick results, it looks like an excellent tool. And for portrait professionals who tether, it looks like a fantastic asset to do a quick retouch for showing models and/or clients previews in the studio. It’s also nice to hear that Capture One is dedicated to improving the technology, so it sounds like it’s only going to get better.

The Dark Circles tool removes shadows or dark circles from around the subject’s eyes. Even Skin’s amount slider works to even out the lighting across the subject’s face, while retaining skin texture. And indeed, the Texture slider provides an extremely subtle skin smoothing effect.

Capture One describes Contour as: “a bit of automated dodge and burn.” This is able to darken and lighten specific areas of the face, but in the example I saw, the tool was intelligent enough to leave the rim lighting added by the photographer.

The software can also detect up to 20 different faces, making Retouch Faces useful in group settings.

Batch editing makes it possible to quickly apply those adjustments to other photos. When batch editing is required, you can ‘Copy/Apply’ your retouching settings across multiple images. In addition, there’s an option in the Layers & Masks dropdown called People Masking, which allows you to check various boxes such as ‘Body Skin’, ‘Face Skin’, and ‘Hair’, so you can work on specific areas and copy those masks across to other images. ‘Copy/Apply’ works across Capture One, too, so it isn’t just limited to the Retouch Faces features. The Styles and Presets tab also allows you to save your workflow so you can instantly apply multiple retouches to an image.

A neat touch is the ‘Impact’ slider, which reduces the impact of all of the Retouch Faces tool’s effects. This looks like a useful asset should you come back to a photo and decide that you want to dial it back a little, without having to manually tweak each slider. And if you don’t like what you’ve done, you can reset at almost every stage, meaning you can reset a particular subject, reset the entire Retouch Faces tool, or reset your entire edit.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, copyright is a hot topic, and David made a point of stating, “You don’t have to be online. Nothing is uploaded to Capture One. We do not use any images for training of the models.”

Streamlined Sessions improve tethering with Capture One

A core component of Capture One’s filing system is Sessions. A Session is a self-contained project format with its own folder structure that’s ideal for tethered studio photography. Typically, a photographer would create a new Session every time they start on a new project or shoot. This latest Capture One release is designed to streamline creating a new Session by implementing an automated subfolder system. This is a Capture One Studio exclusive, with Capture One Pro sticking to the manual system only.

And the manual system still looks to be very useful. Capture One will create a Capture folder when you create a new session, but previously, you had to create a new folder and then drag it into the Capture folder to create a subfolder. Now, the Session window has a dialogue box called ‘Foldernames’, where you can simply type or paste in your preferred subfolder names and they will be automatically added to the Capture folder in Capture One, while also being replicated in your computer’s folder system.

You can also create a subfolder within a subfolder – a parent and child – by separating the two terms with a forward slash. For example, pasting in ‘Day_1/Look_1’ will create a ‘Day_1’ subfolder within the Capture folder and a ‘Look_1’ subfolder within the ‘Day_1’ folder. You can then add further subfolders within the ‘Day_1’ folder by typing in ‘Day_1/Look_2, Day_1/Look_3’ and so on. What I like about this is that you can write out your folder structure on a text document and paste it all in at once. Provided you’ve stuck to the correct formatting, Capture One will add and structure the folders accordingly.

The automated version, reserved for premium Capture One Studio users, provides an Automated dropdown option, which changes up the Session window slightly. This allows you to use what Capture One calls Tokens. When you type in your folder name, you can drag in various Tokens, each with its own automated function. This might be the current day, month, or year, for example, and can also include counters, which tell Capture One to add a number onto the end of the folder in question, with the option to tell the software how many folders you’d like and at what number the counter starts. This makes it easy to automate folders such as ‘Day_1’, ‘Day_2’, ‘Day_3’, etc.

You can even save custom presets, which is another time saver for photographers with repetitive workflows who tend to use similar folder structures in their Sessions. But don’t worry if you’re set in your old Capture One ways. David says: “The good news is that we haven’t broken anything, so if you want to continue exactly as you’ve been working before...then nothing is broken.”

The open beta for the latest version of Capture One is now live. You can purchase Capture One Pro as a one-off license for $317 / £317.00. Or, the software is available as a recurring monthly or annual subscription, which starts at $15.75 / £15.75 per month, moving up from there for All-In-One at $22.83 / £22.83 or Studio for $45.75 / £41.58 per month.

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Panasonic and Capture One have announced a new strategic partnership to bring tethering to Lumix cameras to Capture One's software – starting with the brand-new Panasonic Lumix SR1 II.

Capture One has long been the industry standard for photography studios tethering to cameras during shoots to review photos. The slick interface, quick edits and markups, and the ability to use a range of devices from desktops to iPads are often cited as the secret to Capture One's success.

With Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fujifilm cameras already supported – Lumix fans no longer have to miss out. While the most recent updates to Capture One (v16.5.7) will only add support for the Lumix S1R II, Capture One is promising day-one support for all future Lumix camera releases (although there is currently no word if recent cameras like the Lumix S5 II will be added to this list).

Capture One is not the only name in tethering, Adobe Lightroom Classic & CC have long been some of the most recognizable tethering solutions, but Capture One has been steadily winning over the photography community with its suite of Lightroom rivaling editing tools, and with Adobe's ever-changing pricing and pivot into being an AI-first company often a sore-spot for photographers.

Brands like Canon and Fujifilm also have their own tethering software, although these are a little lackluster in features compared to the extensive editing suites of Adobe Lightroom and Capture One.

Toshiyuki Tsumura, Executive Vice President, at Panasonic, says of the new partnership:“Studio photography represents an exciting frontier for Panasonic’s Lumix brand. By teaming up with Capture One, we reinforce our commitment to professional photographers, ensuring they have access to best-in-class tools for an optimized studio experience."

With Mathieu Bourlion, Director of Product Management at Capture One adding: "With this partnership, we are happy to bring professional tethering workflows to Lumix customers. We’ve worked closely with Panasonic to build support for the S1R II and to bring flawless tethering support for their flagship camera.”

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After you've transferred those photos, you might want to check out some of the best photo editing software for getting the best out of your images.

DxO PhotoLab 8 is the latest version of DxO’s flagship photo editing software. It’s an interesting alternative to Adobe Lightroom and Capture One, with perhaps a little less emphasis on photo organizing and cataloguing tools and a lot more on high-quality raw processing. In fact, if you shoot raw files in order to get the best possible quality from your camera, then DxO PhotoLab 8 definitely needs to be considered amongst the best photo editing software applications for the job.

PhotoLab 8’s key features include DxO’s proprietary DeepPRIME noise reduction and detail enhancement process, which can achieve amazing results with high ISO images, and its lab-derived lens correction profiles, which don’t just correct distortion, corner shading and chromatic aberration, but also the progressive loss of sharpness towards the edges of the frame shown by most lenses.

PhotoLab 8 also has powerful local adjustment tools and masking options. These don’t follow the current trend towards AI subject recognition but instead use DxO’s own U-point masking technology, which is a very different, but very powerful alternative.

PhotoLab 8 comes in two versions. We’re reviewing the Elite version, but there is a cheaper Essential version. This does not have all of the advanced tools in the Elite version, though. You can check the pricing and upgrade options below.

DxO also publishes the Nik Collection, DxO FilmPack and DxO ViewPoint. You can launch the Nik Collection plug-ins, if installed, direct from PhotoLab 8, while the FilmPack film simulation and ViewPoint perspective correction tools will integrate directly with the PhotoLab interface, as well as working as standalone applications and plug-ins.

DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite: What’s new?

DxO PhotoLab appears to be on an annual upgrade cycle, so the burning question is what’s new in PhotoLab 8 to make it worth upgrading to? That will depend on which version you are on a the moment, but here are the key changes:

PhotoLab 8 now comes with an improved DeepPRIME XD2s denoising process. At first glance it does appear to offer some slight gains in performance if you look closely, but it does feel like an evolution rather than a breakthrough. For the record, DeepPRIME XD was already so good at noise reduction and detail enhancement that it hardly left any room for improvement.

If you use a Fujifilm camera with an X-Trans sensor, though, like many of the best Fujifilm cameras, you’ll still be restricted to the original DeepPRIME XD process. That’s also very good, but apparently the X-Trans color filter array is trickier to work with than a regular bayer layout, so this is still a work in progress.

DxO is also claiming improved lens softness correction via an updated algorithm, to produce images with no color fringing or artifacts. My test so far do seem to show slightly better results at the edges of the frame – though again, this will depend on your cameras, lenses and how closely you look.

DxO’s DeepPRIME processing offers exceptional results. The one issue that it’s hardware-intensive and can’t be displayed in real time – you need to export a processed image to see the effect.

That hasn’t changed, but DxO has added a large preview ‘loupe’ which can show DeepPRIME effects with very little delay, and this is a huge improvement over the tiny preview display in the Denoising panel which was all you had to go on before.

The Tone Curve panel gets a major update in PhotoLab 8 too. It now offers both Luma and RGB curve adjustments – adjusting the Luma curve changes the contrast but not the saturation – and, even better, there’s now a Lightroom-style Tone Picker tool you can use to drag directly up and down on areas of the image to create and shift a tone curve point for that tone. The Tone Curve panel also now displays a histogram.

DxO continues to develop its already powerful U-point masking tools, and in PhotoLab 8 it adds a Hue Mask tool for selecting specific colors within the mask area. However, PhotoLab 8 does not include the elliptical and polygonal masking tools we’ve seen in Nik Collection 7.

On top of these new features, DxO is highlighting a new Compare mode, faster and better scrolling and display for LUTs, faster image loading and various bug fixes.

DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite : Price and availability

DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite is sold only as a perpetual license and is not available on subscription. This will please subscription haters, though it should be noted that PhotoLab is updated annually, so if you do want to keep up with the latest version you will need to keep paying upgrade fees, so there is still an ongoing cost of ownership – though you can of course skip versions.

PhotoLab 8 Elite costs $229 / £209 for new users and $109 / £99 as an upgrade for existing users. There is also a 30-day free trial if you haven’t used it before and want to try it out before committing.

PhotoLab 8 Essential costs $139 / £129 for new users and $75 / £65 as an upgrade for existing users. If you do decide to ‘uplevel’ to the Elite version later, that will cost $99 / £89.

DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite: Interface and usability

PhotoLab 8 does have a more technical appearance than many photo editors, especially Lightroom, but its interface is organized on a similar basis.

There are two main operating panels. The PhotoLibrary panel is where you can browse all your folders, view image thumbnails and create Projects (albums) for specific photo collections. The PhotoLibrary also has some effective search tools, where you start typing what you’re looking for and the search box automatically starts matching this to picture information such as EXIF shooting data and filenames. It’s not as sophisticated as programs like Lightroom or Capture One, but much more powerful than a simple file browsing tool like Adobe Bridge.

The main editing work is done in the Customize window, where you also get access to all of PhotoLab 8’s editing and local adjustment tools in the right sidebar. These are quite deep and technical-looking the first time around, but DxO has steadily improved the tool organization so that now related tools are organized into tabs for exposure adjustments, color adjustments, detail and more. There’s also a search box to help you quickly find the tools you need.

However, you can use PhotoLab 8 very effectively without getting drawn into any complex adjustments at all. One of its key features is that it will automatically detect your camera and lens combination and apply (or download) a correction profile to optimize it automatically. You can also choose from a selection of preset effects for an instant ‘look’.

All of PhotoLab 8’s adjustments are non-destructive, so you can go back at any time to make changes. You can also create Virtual Copies to try out different adjustments or looks on an image without having to duplicate the file.

You will need to export/process images to share them. You can create regular TIFF or JPEG images, or output a part-processed Linear DNG file with all of DxO’s lens corrections and denoising applied, ready for use in another program, where it will look and behave exactly like a regular raw file, with all the extended tonal and color information intact – though  if this is all you want to do, you might be better off with DxO’s raw batch processor, PureRAW 4.

DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite: Performance

PhotoLab 8’s DeepPRIME XD2s processing is simply spectacular. What it can do with the raw files from older cameras or raw images shot at high ISOs on any camera can leave you rubbing your eyes with disbelief. When you combine its exceptional denoising capabilities with its powerful and effective lens corrections, you have a tool that can dramatically elevate the performance of even quite mediocre camera gear. In fact, the more ‘average’ your gear, the bigger the improvement. Some of the best DSLRs, for example, are a few years old now, but PhotoLab 8's processing and lens corrections brings their image quality right up to date.

It’s not an instant process, though. While PhotoLab 8’s regular adjustments take place in real time, just as with any other photo editor, its DeepPRIME process takes a few seconds, even on a faster computer. This means that you can’t just zoom in and out of an image as you work to see the effect of the DeepPRIME process. However, in this version, the new, large preview window is an effective solution, meaning that you can examine large sections of your image in real time as you work to see how the DeepPRIME process will render your image. You no longer have to export it to find out.

DxO PhotoLab 8 does not have quite the same range of presets as programs like Lightroom, Capture One or ON1 Photo RAW, for example, but it definitely rewards a more considered, manual approach. Its local adjustment tools are particularly effective and, once you get your head around their particular way of working, the U-point control points in particular let you enhance areas and objects in a very fast and intuitive way. 

DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite: Verdict

DxO PhotoLab 8 will appeal most to photographers who shoot raw and are happy with a more painstaking approach towards image quality – and if that’s a key priority for you, then PhotoLab definitely delivers. The results that can be achieved from raw files are simply spectacular..

If, on the other hand, you process dozens or hundreds of images at a time following a shoot, and you’re more interested in a consistent style and a rapid, easy workflow, then you’re probably better off with Lightroom or Capture One.

Photographers’ needs do vary, and not everyone can be bothered with pixel peeping. But once you’ve seen what DxO PhotoLab can do with lens corrections, detail rendition and noise removal, it can be hard to go back to a regular photo editor.

DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite: Alternatives

If anyone reckons that photographing A-list film stars at Cannes is a glamorous gig, then think again. 

That was the theme of a panel discussion hosted by Capture One in London last month, where events and documentary photographer Alessandro Galatoli took to the stage to discuss a new short film the brand has made about him. 

Galatoli shoots fashion shows and film galas as a freelancer, and sells his work to many leading picture agencies in both fields. 

Based in Florence, Italy, he is also a lecturer in photography at Florence University of the Arts, The American University of Florence. 

Using flagship Nikon Z cameras and lenses, Galatoli spends 18 days straight working at the Cannes Film Festival [Festival de Cannes] – one of the most prestigious events of its kind in the world. 

Red carpet photos give us a fascinating glimpse of stars out of character… the leading cast members attend evening gala screenings of their films at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, ascending the famous red steps in tuxedos or ball gowns and pausing momentarily to pose for the cameras (with varying degrees of enthusiasm, it must be said). 

But glamor doesn’t extend to the photographers documenting the glitz… in the Capture One film we discover that Galatoli rents a small apartment a two-mile walk away from the red carpet shooting ‘pen’, and despite often finishing late around 1am he has to be back at work at 6am to start photographing other assignments. 

The allusion to cattle isn’t an accident; the pack of photographers is allocated set places within a confined space from where they have limited time to attract a star’s attention and fire off a burst of frames. 

A-listers seen in the film of Galatoli working the red carpet include Emma Stone, Eva Longoria, Jesse Plemons, Eva Green, Cate Blanchett – and many more. 

Made by production house Evoku, a collaboration between film-maker Tom Coe and Capture One ambassador Paul Reiffer, the film is part of a series in which Capture One users tell the stories of their working lives, and why the software is a perfect fit for them and their workflow. 

So if you want to discover how Galatoli manages to get his shots under extremely challenging conditions, then watch the film – which runs for three and a half minutes and is followed by a recording of the panel discussion at the screening. 

And as you will see in the discussion – a must-watch, we say – moderated by fashion and beauty photographer Tina Eisen, Galatoli also had some interesting things to say about how he works. 

Researching who he is photographing is a key part of his modus operandi, but this is not surprising; Galatoli is a self-confessed cinephile and loves watching chat shows featuring the actors he goes on to photograph. 

And his workflow is noteworthy, too. Shooting 3,000-4,000 photos a night, he has to use post-production tools that allow him to work super-fast and super-efficiently. 

Picture agencies need to receive red carpet photos very quickly, which are then circulated to leading media outlets around the world. 

Galatoli uses Capture One – widely regarded as one of the best photo editing software programs on the market – which he says is ideal for the way he works. 

He trusts the advanced technology in his camera to do the heavy lifting on exposure and keeping his captures sharp, leaving him to concentrate on his compositions. 

Post-production is kept to a few vital steps, including adjusting exposure, contrast, clarity, sharpness and saturation before converting the images to black and white. 

A picture of a Hollywood star has to stand out from all the others taken at the same time in the same location, so Galatoli opts to send mono images to his agency customers. 

Explaining this creative choice, he notes that the human brain can fill in color information using its imagination; a black and white image therefore allows the subject of the photograph to stand out, and there’s no ambiguity. 

Of many excellent photography tips Galatoli shared during the panel discussion at the screening, one stood out: if you include something in the frame, you have to explain why it’s there… so make your photos more effective by leaving out extraneous items. 

Make sure you give ‘Capture One presents Alessandro Galatoli and Paul Reiffer at Cannes’ and the panel discussion recording a watch – the film is a fascinating insight into photographing fast-paced events under pressure, and there are so many insights for photographers to glean from it, no matter which genres they like to shoot. 

The DxO Nik Collection now consists of seven different plug-ins, five of which are designed to offer creative inspiration and effects, while two are more ‘corrective’ image enhancement tools. We call them plug-ins, and they can indeed be used from within Lightroom Classic, Adobe Photoshop, Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, and Affinity Photo, but they can also be used on their own as standalone applications.

We've long considered the Nik Collection to be one of the best photo editing software suites on the market, so what exactly do you get?

The creative plug-ins include Nik Color Efex, Silver Efex, Analog Efex, Viveza, and HDR Efex, and while there is a degree of crossover for black and white photography and color adjustments, each one is aimed at a particular style or genre of photography.

With Nik Collection 7, Color Efex becomes the principal photo editing tool, with its ability to apply over 50 different filter effects, combine them as presets, and mask each one with DxO’s fast and effective control point adjustments.

Color Efex 7 gets the lion’s share of updates in this version, with new preset management options, ‘dynamic’ filters which now include (improved) HSL controls, grain effects, and DxO’s own contrast-enhancing ClearView effect. It also has three new filters taken from the Viveza plug-in to extend its potential for image enhancement and effects.

The other plug-ins benefit from new control point options too, including the ability to reshape circular control points as ellipses and a new polygonal control point tool. It’s now possible to switch images to a different Nik plug-in while you work and to export a version of an image straight from the plug-in without having to return to the host program first.

Nik Silver Efex 7 specializes in black and white photography, with powerful tools and controls that reproduce the depth and richness of analog black and white photography, while Analog Efex 7 replicates the flawed, faded, and distressed look of old analog photos and adds in camera effects like double exposures, lens blur and bokeh.

HDR Efex 7 is little changed from previous versions but is a very effective tool for merging bracketed images into high dynamic range composites with a range of preset effects and manual adjustments. Viveza is a simpler tool aimed at color control and enhancement using both global adjustments and DxO control points for local adjustments.

Nik Dfine 7 and Nik Sharpener 7 are different and perhaps a little dated in their appeal. Dfine is a noise reduction plug-in that’s effective enough in a modest way but outclassed by today’s AI-drive raw denoising tools. Sharpener 7 is very good at ‘output’ sharpening for specific devices, but you can almost certainly do this in your host software too.

The plug-in missing from this release is Perspective Efex. This makes sense because there was always a rather confusing crossover (duplication, even) with DxO’s standalone ViewPoint software. Besides, most host programs like Lightroom Classic and Capture One have perfectly effective perspective correction tools of their own, which you can apply before or after sending images to the Nik plug-ins.

DxO Nik Collection 7: Price

DxO Nik Collection 7 is available to download now. The full version costs $159 / £145 (about AU$243), but existing users can upgrade for $89 / £79 (about AU$136). Alternatively, if you just want to see what it can do, there’s a 30-day free trial.

You do get a lot for your money. A new license will cost a little more than an annual Adobe Photography Plan subscription, but it’s cheaper than a Capture One license and in the same ballpark as other software tools. It’s also a perpetual license, so if you don’t need any of the new features in subsequent editions, you can use this one indefinitely. It doesn’t work directly with raw files, so it won’t be made obsolete by new cameras and lenses.

DxO Nik Collection 7: Interface and usability

Typically, the Nik plug-ins follow a standard modern layout, with presets in the left sidebar and manual controls, including local adjustments, on the right. There are differences in the details, though. Nik Color Efex 7 offers both individual filters and presets (combinations of filters) in its left sidebar, and the ability to change the stacking order of filters in the right sidebar – changing the order the filters are applied will change the appearance of the image.

Silver Efex 7 is slightly different in that the left sidebar has presets, but there are no filters as such, just adjustments you can apply in the right sidebar, and you can’t change the order – though that really doesn’t matter very much.

Analog Efex 7 has presets too, but not filters as such. Instead, it has different tools and effects under a ‘Camera Kit’ heading which you can select manually, and they then appear in the right sidebar where you can make detailed adjustments.

HDR Efex 7 is different again. In Lightroom, this has to be launched via the ‘Export’ menu rather than the ‘Edit in’ menu, and the interface layout is similar to Silver Efex, with presets on the left sidebar and manual tools on the right.

So while all the Nik plug-ins share the same family resemblance, they do operate slightly differently. It’s not a problem and you very quickly get used to it and think no more about it, but it’s worth pointing out that they are not identical.

If you’re launching them from Photoshop, you have another potential workflow. The Nik Collection installer adds a Nik Collection 7 palette which you can use to launch the plug-ins directly. There’s also a section for ‘Meta presets’, which are automated combinations of plug-ins and settings you can apply with a single click – though it’s a relatively small selection and you can’t create your own.

The Photoshop workflow is interesting because you can apply the Nik filters to Smart Objects, which means you can go back and change the filter settings later – it’s a non-destructive workflow.

But you can also achieve a non-destructive workflow from Lightroom and other host applications, or even when launching the Nik tools as standalone apps. There’s a non-destructive TIFF file option that does double the file size, but stores both the original image, the edited version, and the processing instructions needed to achieve it.

This non-destructive route is not new, but the plug-in switcher and quick export options are. These are genuinely useful additions to Nik Collection 7. They don’t change any of the creative options available, but they do make it possible to swap to another of the plug-ins if you realize you didn’t launch the best one for the job or to export one or more versions of your image while you’re still in the plug-in.

DxO Nik Collection 7: Quality of results

Nik Silver Efex enjoys a near-legendary reputation amongst black and white photographers for its ability to produce rich, dense, and dramatic black-and-white images. It also offers a set of tools that properly reflect the way photographers see and manipulate black-and-white images.

For me, though, Color Efex has always been the star of the show. Its filters are powerful, inventive, and genuinely useful day to day, and the range of permutations and presets you can create are practically infinite. The improvements in Nik Collection 7 make it better still.

I also love Analog Efex, though its presets can be a little heavy-handed and its sometimes odd photography jargon firmly rooted in the Google era – this is the one plug-in added by Google during its tenure before DxO took over. But what other tool gives you multiple-exposure effects, lens distortion, motion blur, and multi-lens effects like these?

I also like HDR Efex 7, though its HDR presets can look a little over the top by today’s standards. If you want naturalistic high dynamic range imaging, you are better off in a program like Lightroom, Capture One or Affinity Photo, where the HDR tone mapping is designed to be invisible, not exaggerated.

Viveza seems, to me, less valuable. It offers global and local color adjustments you can apply just as easily in Color Efex. Indeed, Color Efex 7 now includes three core components of Viveza as new dynamic filters.

Dfine seems a rather old-fashioned approach to removing noise in images that have already been processed. It can do a useful job on noisy old JPEGs, but if you shoot raw you would be better off with one of today’s raw denoising tools. Nik Sharpener 7, meanwhile, can apply subtle sharpening enhancements for printed output, but again seems a bit of a throwback to older ways of working.

DxO Nik Collection 7: Verdict

This review points out some inconsistencies in the Nik Collection 7 plug-ins and perhaps some areas for improvement. This might make it sound like a rather average sort of product. It isn’t.

The fact is, Color Efex 7, Silver Efex 7, Analog Efex 7 and even HDR Efex 7 are just so spectacularly good you could forgive the Nik Collection 7 anything. Viveza seems less useful and Dfine and Sharpener are distinctly old fashioned and limited. But who cares? Those first four plug-ins are so good they easily carry the rest.

These Nik Collection plug-ins are classic photo editing tools that have stood the test of time and then some. DxO has constantly updated them without ruining them, enhancing and developing them with a care and sometimes an ingenuity that’s kept them right at the cutting edge of photographic creativity. AI? Who needs it, when you have software that so perfectly releases the photographer’s own human intelligence?

Nik Collection 7 is not perfect and perhaps never will be, but it’s so good that it hardly matters.

DxO Nik Collection 7: Alternatives

If you use Lightroom, Capture One or some other software to view and process your raw files, you’ll have formed a good idea of the quality you can get from your images. If you try DxO PureRAW 4, you might just have to change your mind.

Almost all image editing tools can now process raw files. They do this using the software’s own proprietary ‘demosaicing’ process to turn the red, green and blue sensor data into full colour images. Some do this raw processing better than others, however, and if you use Adobe Lightroom, for example, you might end up with a completely different idea of your camera’s image quality than if you use Capture One. Even the best photo editing software can have weaknesses, and sometimes it's the raw processing quality and noise handling.

Now normally this is somewhat academic because you’re at the mercy of your photo editor’s own raw processing, but PureRAW 4 changes all that. It generates part-processed ‘Linear DNG’ files, with all of DxO’s demosaicing, DeepPRIME noise reduction and lens corrections baked in, but still with all the extended color depth, dynamic range and editability as regular raw files. 

PureRAW 4 can be used as a standalone batch processing tool for converting folders full of raw files into processed Linear DNGS. It can also generate regular JPEG or TIFF images for photos that don’t require any further editing.

But it can also be used as an export plug-in with Lightroom Classic, so that if you decide a raw file you’re working on in Lightroom needs the DxO treatment, you can export it to PureRAW 4 for processing, after which it’s automatically re-imported back into your Lightroom catalog. And if you’ve already done some editing on the original in Lightroom, these edits are automatically applied to the imported Linear DNG.

Effectively, then, PureRAW 4 can either be used as a standalone batch processing tool at the start of your workflow, or from within Lightroom on an image by image basis.

DxO PureRAW 4: price

PureRAW 4 is available now from the DxO website. It costs $119 / £109 (about AU$182) for new users and $79 / $69 (about AU$121) as an upgrade for existing owners. That's not far short of the cost of a full year's Adobe Photography Plan or a full-blown photo-editing suite like ON1 Photo RAW, so is it worth it? Bear in mind too that Lightroom users already have access to Adobe's own noise reducing Enhance tool, which does some of the same work.

It depends on whether you shoot raw files, how highly you value outright image quality and, ultimately, how much of a pixel-peeper you are. There is a fully featured 30-day trial, so you have plenty of time to decide for yourself if the improvements to your raw files are worth it.

DxO PureRAW 4: design and usability

For an application that does so much, PureRAW 4 is exceptionally simple to use. In both standalone and Lightroom plug-in modes, it will automatically identify the camera and lens profile pairing that it needs and download it if it’s not already installed. From there you simply need to choose your processing parameters and start processing.

These parameters aren’t complicated. You simply need to choose the processing settings and the output options. It’s in the processing settings that you find some of the new features in PureRAW 4. For a start, it has a new DeepPRIME XD2 process which DxO says gives even better edge correction with fewer artefacts – this does not yet support Fujifilm X-Trans sensors, however. With these cameras it will fall back on its older (but still highly effective) DeepPRIME XD process.

DeepRIME XD2 now has additional controls. These include a Luminance slider for further noise control and a Force Details slider for controlling the amount of detail recovery. PureRAW 4 is so effective at its default settings, however, that you might not bother with these at all.

Below this are switches for enabling Lens Softness correction, Vignetting, Chromatic Aberration and Lens Distortion correction – you would only disable any of these if you had issues with any specific camera and lens combinations.

The drop-down menu under the Lens Distortion switch deserves a closer look. If you’ve ever applied lens corrections in other software, you may have noticed that some programs can reveal extra image area outside the default crop. If you set this menu to ‘Maximum Rectangle’, PureRAW 4 will crop the images to include this extra image area – it’s most often found with wide-angle lens corrections.

The output options are pretty straightforward. You can choose the file format to export in – you choose DNG if you want Linear DNG files – and where you want the processed images to be stored. New in PureRAW 4 is a powerful token-based renaming system where you can choose how your processed files are named.

The regular batch processing workflow doesn’t give you any idea about what your processed images will look like, but PureRAW 4 has a new Process with Preview mode which shows a split-screen preview of your image – though you do have to keep updating the preview manually with a button at the base as you move around the image. It’s also hard to see much difference when changing the processing settings.

The Lightroom Classic plug-in is just as straightforward. It takes no longer to export an image to PureRAW 4 than it does to use Lightroom’s own noise-reducing Enhance option, and both produce a processed Linear DNG file that’s automatically imported into the catalog when processing is complete.

The results, however, are somewhat different.

DxO PureRAW 4: performance

It’s hard to describe PureRAW 4’s performance without lapsing into superlatives. Its ability to produce clean, sharp results at high ISOs is quite uncanny – you’re left checking the EXIF data to make sure you’re definitely looking at the same image. 

Improvements in image quality will vary from one camera to another, and with low-ISO shots on the best full frame cameras, you may not see much difference. But as the ISOs go up, and especially with crop sensor cameras, the difference between what PureRAW can do and what Lightroom’s default raw processing can do is just embarrassing – for Adobe, at least.

Lightroom’s issue is that it’s not very good at fine detail and noise. Even at base ISO settings, you can often see a faint patina of noise over even-toned areas, and if you use any kind of sharpening, that quickly becomes prominent. At higher ISO settings, Lightroom seems to struggle even more. Very often, the camera’s own JPEGs are sharper and smoother.

But what about Lightroom’s Enhance feature? It’s true that this can do a remarkable job of reducing noise, but it really can’t match PureRAW 4’s detail enhancement at high ISOs or its improvement in edge sharpness at pretty much any ISO setting. The better the lens, the less you will notice – but we don’t all have the best lenses.

So while Lightroom Enhance is built into Lightroom and PureRAW 4 is a paid-for extra, it does deliver a clear step up in quality.

PureRAW 4 is not quite faultless. Its ‘Standard’ detail enhancement can be just a bit too ‘crunchy’ for camera and lenses which are quite good already, and the ‘Soft’ option looks more natural. It can’t fully correct poor quality lenses which are just blurry at the edges – its real strength is in enhancing the edge detail of those countless ‘average’ lenses on the market which are not bad, but not great either. It doesn’t simply apply a global sharpening effect but uses tailored edge correction calibrated for each lens, each focal length and each aperture, using profiles developed in DxO’s own labs.

There is a processing overhead. The DeepPRIME XD2 process can’t be displayed in real-time and can only be seen in exported files. DxO says, though, that the latest version is faster than ever, helped by GPU acceleration. I found it typically took 8-12 seconds to process a 24MP raw file on my Mac Studio, while the older DeepPRIME XD process took around 50% longer. That’s a lot faster than the old days, when images could take a couple of minutes each – though back then I was using less powerful hardware.

In my tests I found it just a little faster than Lightroom Enhance. Both tools, however, produce large DNG files which does, alas, go with the territory. It’s because the original raw data is demosaiced during this process so that the new files have full color data for each pixel rather than the red, green or blue raw data. It’s no worse than saving your images as 16-bit TIFFs, though, and rather more flexible for further editing work.

One thing you might need to check in Lightroom and other programs is that sharpening and lens corrections are disabled for the new PureRAW DNG file. These have already been applied, so don’t let your software do it twice! If PureRAW’s DNG files are accidentally double-sharpened in this way, they will look horribly over-processed.

DxO PureRAW 4: verdict

PureRAW 4 has an improved workflow and improved DeepPRIME XD2 processing which are both welcome but perhaps only a small gain for existing users. In fact, if you have PureRAW 3 and a Fujifilm X-Trans sensor, you might just as well stay with the old software until PureRAW 4 adds X-Trans support to its DeepPRIME XD2 process. The best Fujifilm cameras in the X-mount range use a unique color filter array on the sensor which has to be handled differently to regular 'bayer' sensor data.

If you already have an older version of PureRAW you won’t need any convincing about its spectacular transformative properties. New users might need some convincing, but for this there is a 30-day trial which will be more than long enough to see what this software can do with your raw files. 

You might not see too much difference with good quality cameras and lenses at low ISOs, but the higher the ISO, the smaller the sensor and the more ‘average’ the lens, the more spectacular the transformation becomes.

If you’ve been thinking the performance of your old cameras and lenses just isn’t up to scratch any more, don’t do anything until you’ve tried PureRAW 4. DxO’s raw processing software could and probably will change your mind about what you think your camera is capable of.

Photo editing just got a whole lot easier with the launch of the DxO Nik Collection 6, bringing with it a whole host of new features and updates. 

While most other software updates are making use of AI, DxO's Nik Collection keeps things simple and brings updates to the slick new user interfaces for several of its plug-ins. 

• See our picks of the best photo editing software

Never heard of the Nik Collection? It's been around for years – and is essentially a series of plugins that you can install on your computer (Mac or Windows) that offer advanced editing tools to be used either standalone or integrated with your own primary editing software of choice. It is compatible with Lightroom, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Capture One, or DxO's own PhotoLab 6 RAW editing software and works with the non-destructive workflow of those applications.

The popular suite includes eight separate plug-ins that each have a different purpose, these are: Nik Color Efex, Nik Silver Efex, Nik Analog Efex, Nik Viveza, Nik Dfine, Nik Sharpener, Nik HDR Efex, and Nik Perspective. 

Nik Collection 6 offers some pretty impressive new features, including the ability to apply any of your last 15 edits to a new image with a single click. New Control Selectivity sliders have been added to elevate specific areas of your image, and the new Control Lines tool incorporates linear gradient filters into your workflow. 

With the new collection, you can now also search for presets within all plugins (excluding Nik Dfine), and rename local adjustments while saving them as part of presets, making it easy to apply quick changes to your gallery. The Nik Perspective plug-in has a new ReShape tool, and the Nik Color Efex has been equipped with a newly added Hue/Saturation/Luminance slider.

The Nik Dfine preset has been rebuilt from the ground up, in what the company describes as a "Complete visual overhaul" for a refined editing experience. It's also been given an upgraded user interface (along with Nik Sharpener and Nik HDR Efex) and the ability to save denoising profiles and return to them later. 

In terms of integration improvements, the Nik Collection 6 will auto-detect the presence of Affinity Photo during software installation. Users of newer Macs will appreciate that it now supports Apple Silicon natively. 

Want to try it out? You can take the Nik Collection 6 for a spin with the  30-day free trial of the full unlimited version, with no payment options required to test it out, and it can also be installed and reverted back to an existing version of Nik Collection after testing – now that's confidence! There are also helpful onboarding tutorials included with the trial to show you how to navigate the plugins and user interfaces. Head to the DxO website for details. 

• You might also be interested in the best photo editing tools and accessories, and require one of the best computers for photo editing . If Nik has piqued your interest, check our review of the DxO Nik Collection 4 plug-in.

Adobe Lightroom is the go-to image organizing and editing application for many enthusiast and professional photographers, and it comes as standard with Adobe’s good-value Photography Plan. 

But Lightroom has has a rival. Capture One Pro does almost exactly the same job and, while it is more expensive, it is also more powerful in many respects and more precisely tailored to the needs of professional photographers. It also offers very high quality raw processing which Lightroom cannot quite match, at least for noise control and fine detail rendering. Both are among the best photo editing software applications to use today.

So in this Lightroom vs Capture One comparison, which one comes out on top? We’ll also factor in the fact that there is not one single version of Lightroom but two, and while these share largely the same editing tools, they are designed for very different workflows. It sounds complicated, so we’ll try to make it simple!

Lightroom vs Capture One in 2026

1. Cloud storage and sync

• Lightroom: Full cloud storage and sync
• Lightroom Classic: Selective cloud sharing (Smart Previews)
• Capture One Live: Short-term client collaboration

Both versions of Lightroom are part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud ecosystem, so both offer online synchronization and editing, a mobile app, and sharing tools. Or Lightroom does – with Lightroom Classic, these online tools are much reduced. Lightroom makes all your images available at their full resolution, anywhere, and on any device. But this does mean paying for an extra 1TB cloud storage, which costs as much as the Adobe Photography Plan itself. Lightroom also has some limitations that Lightroom Classic doesn’t.

See also Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic

Lightroom Classic does offer online synchronization, but only for manually selected Collections and not your whole image library. It also synchronizes lower-resolution Smart Previews, which are fully editable but your changes are synced back to your desktop library where your full-res images are stored. Lightroom Classic has the convenience of cheaper local storage but is limited in its online synchronization.

Capture One is like Lightroom Classic. Your images are stored on your own computer. There is no direct equivalent to Adobe’s Creative Cloud/mobile synchronization, and while it does have a Capture One Live setup for image sharing, this is for shorter term client and colleague collaborations, not an online catalog.

2. Cataloging options

• Lightroom: Fully managed catalog, basic organizing tools
• Lightroom Classic: Referenced images, full organizing tools
• Capture One: Referenced or managed images, Sessions

All three programs import images into a catalog database, but there are two ways of doing this. One is to create ‘managed’ catalog where your images are drawn into a big, monolithic catalog file – where they are viewed and managed exclusively by that program. This is how Lightroom works – your images are all stored remotely on Adobe’s servers. Lightroom’s cataloging tools are more basic than Lightroom Classic’s, with albums but no folders and no smart collections, though it does have Adobe’s Sensei AI subject-based search tool.

Managed catalogs are simple in concept and prevent ‘broken’ image links, but many photographers prefer ‘referenced’ catalogs instead, where your images stay in their original folders and are simply ‘referenced’ by the catalog database. This is how Lightroom Classic works.

Capture One can do both. If you prefer a ring-fenced ‘managed’ catalog it can do that, or it can create a regular ‘referenced’ catalog or even mix the two. It also offers a ‘Sessions’ mode primarily designed for studio workflows but which can also works as an Adobe Bridge-style folder browser, with some useful cataloging tools on the side.

3. Editing tools

• Lightroom: Seamless non-destructive editing of raw + RGB images
• Lightroom Classic: Same tools as Lightroom, modular interface
• Capture One: Seamless non-destructive editing of raw + RGB images

Both versions of Lightroom and Capture One all offer seamless raw image editing alongside regular JPEG or TIFF files. This makes for a much simpler and more direct editing workflow than Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo, for example, where you have to ‘develop’ raw files before you can edit them.

Lightroom has a streamlined single-window workspace, where Lightroom Classic has a more structured set of ‘modules’, many of which look a lot less useful today or even irrelevant to many photographers, such as ’Slideshow’, ‘Web’ and maybe even ‘Maps’ and ‘Print’.

Capture One, like Lightroom, has a single-window interface with Browser and Viewer panels that can be displayed individually or both at the same time. While Lightroom and Lightroom Classic share the same effective set of editing tools, Capture One goes a little further with advanced colour adjustments, individual tool presets and a completely customizable interface.

Both versions of Lightroom come with an extensive set of profiles and presets, and there is a huge third-party preset industry behind them. Capture One comes with a smaller set of ‘Styles’ and commercial styles packs can be more expensive. However, it’s as easy to create your own in Capture One as it is in Lightroom.

4. Local adjustments and masking

• Lightroom: Mask-based, with AI masking, limited adjustments
• Lightroom: Mask-based, with AI masking, limited adjustments
• Capture One: Adjustment layers and masks, full editing tools available

All three programs offer powerful local adjustment and masking tools. Lightroom and Lightroom Classic apply local adjustments using masks – you can create as many as you like – and includes powerful and effective AI masking tools that can select skies, subjects and individual objects. These can save a lot of time and effort.

Capture One works differently, using Photoshop-style adjustment layers and masks for local adjustments. It doesn’t have Lightroom’s AI subject recognition and masking, but it does have an array of masking tools, such as its ‘Magic Brush’,  that can get you to a similar outcome via a different route. What’s more, almost all of its editing tools are available on all layers, where Lightroom offers a smaller subset of editing tools for local adjustments. Lightroom’s masking is probably going too prove quicker and more effective, though can sometimes lack finesse.

5. Camera and lens support

• Lightroom: Regular updates, widest support
• Lightroom Classic: Regular updates, widest support
• Capture One: Updates only with subscription, less support for low-end lenses

Adobe is not always the first to support new camera raw formats and new lens correction profiles, but it still has the most extensive camera and lens support of all, especially for lower-end consumer gear.

Capture One also offers very wide support for camera raw formats and lens correction profiles, but there are gaps amongst consumer lenses. There’s no correction profile for the Canon RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS STM kit lens for example, or Sigma’s old 8-16mm f/4-5.6 ultra-wide zoom in Nikon F mount. On the other hand, these days Capture One is sometimes quicker to support new camera formats than Adobe.

6. Raw processing and results

• Lightroom: Extensive profiles and presets but default settings can be noisy
• Lightroom Classic: Extensive profiles and presets but default settings can be noisy
• Capture One: Excellent raw processing, fewer presets included

Lightroom and Lightroom Classic share the same Adobe Camera Raw processing engine. The default sharpening and noise reduction settings are effective at reproducing finely textured detail but can introduce noticeable noise that’s not present in Capture One conversions. It is possible to juggle the Adobe sharpening and noise settings to get closer to Capture One’s results, but out of the box, Capture One’s processing is cleaner and crisper. There’s no significant difference in shadow and highlight recovery.

7. External editors and plug-ins

• Lightroom: Not supported (except Photoshop)
• Lightroom Classic: Plug-ins and two external editors
• Capture One: Plug-ins not supported, any number of external editors

Programs like these can typically do most but not all of the editing jobs you like to carry out, so often you will need a plug-in or an external editor for specific tasks.

This is where Lightroom really falls down. It does not support plug-ins at all, and while it does support one external editor, it’s only Photoshop. So while you can send images to Photoshop and then to plug-ins, it means using three programs not two and also means you need both Lightroom’s extra 1TB storage and the Photography Plan (to get Photoshop).

Lightroom Classic is far more plug-in friendly. Pretty well all plug-ins released these days include a Lightroom plug-in, and you can also configure two external editors, such as Photoshop and, let’s say, Affinity Photo.

• See 25 premium Lightroom presets and plugins

Capture One does not support plug-ins, at least in the same way. Instead, it works with external editors, but you can add as many of these as you like, ‘round trip’ images just as easily and, potentially, use a wider range of tools, that don’t come as plug-ins.

8. Subscriptions and pricing

• Lightroom: Subscription only via Lightroom Plan or Adobe Photography Plan – needs 1TB storage
• Lightroom Classic: Subscription only via Adobe Photography Plan, 1TB storage not essential
• Capture One: Subscription, or perpetual license without updates

Both versions of Lightroom are subscription only. You can get a Lightroom-only plan for $9.99 / £9.98 per month which includes Lightroom only (not Photoshop) and the 1TB storage you’ll need. Otherwise, you need the Photography Plan, also $9.99 / £9.98 per month, which includes both versions of Lightroom and Photoshop but not 1TB of storage – if you want that too, it will double the monthly cost.

Capture One is available both on subscription and as a one-off perpetual license. The subscription cost is higher than that of the Adobe Photography Plan but includes regular updates. The perpetual license version no longer gets these incremental updates. Instead, you will have to wait for major version updates and decide if they are worth the upgrade cost.

Lightroom vs Capture One: conclusions

Capture One is more expensive than Adobe Lightroom, and you get just that one application, not the set of programs included in the Photography Plan. However, out of the box, its raw processing is visibly superior, its editing and local adjustment tools are both powerful and precise and it offers a range of different workflows including sessions and both managed or referenced catalogs.

Capture One does not have Adobe’s cloud-based storage, synchronization and mobile app setup, which could be a deal-breaker for many. However, if you work primarily on a desktop or laptop device and share your images by other routes, this probably won’t matter.

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Capture One is a direct competitor to Lightroom Classic and similar to the Adobe product in many ways. Like Lightroom, it lets you work from a central image catalog and offers non-destructive editing tools that work seamlessly with raw, TIFF or JPEG images. Like Lightroom, it offers presets (‘Styles’, in Capture One) and both global and local adjustments. There’s very little you can do in one program that you can’t do in the other.

But there are some key differences. Capture One does not offer the creative ecosystem that Adobe does. There is a mobile app, but it’s designed for on-location shooting, editing and client collaboration, not as an entire cloud-based image library – and you’ll need a more expensive All in One subscription to use it. It also doesn’t come with Photoshop or any equivalent photo editor. If you need to do anything with layers, type or design, you’ll still need Photoshop, or Affinity Photo.

So a Capture One subscription doesn’t offer the same scope as the Adobe Photography Plan, but it does offer workflows tailored specifically to professional shooting needs. Tethered shooting, either in the studio or on location, is one of Capture One’s key strengths, together with its ‘Sessions’ workflow that works with images live in session folders on your computer for rapid editing, image selection and approval.

You don’t have to work this way. Capture One also offers ‘Catalogs’ for larger, permanent image collections. The image organizing, searching, and filtering tools are a direct match for Lightroom Classic’s, and Capture One has another trick – it can also offer a ‘managed’ approach where images are imported into the catalog itself and ring-fenced against accidental moving or deletion. Does anyone remember Apple Aperture on the Mac (sigh)? Capture One’s managed catalogs are the closest thing for Mac users.

All of this makes Capture One one of the best photo editing software applications, not to mention one of the best Lightroom alternatives, for professional/commercial photographers at least.

Capture One is clearly designed for professional efficiency, finesse, and image quality, and that’s really what you’re paying for. Amateurs can still get a lot from Capture One, but it doesn’t make any concessions to Insta-friendly effects or headline-grabbing AI tools outside of those that will actually make a difference to pros. Which is kind of refreshing.

Capture One Pro system requirements

Capture One Pro: price

Capture One Pro is available both on subscription and as a perpetual license. The perpetual version is pretty expensive at $317 / £317 (about AU$479) and will be subject to upgrade fees if you want to swap to a newer version at some point. The subscription plans are much cheaper in the short term and probably represent the best option for users who like to get all the updates and new camera support as they arrive. Here are the plans:

Pro: $17 / £15.75 (about AU$26) per month, bought annually

All in One, which adds the mobile app and other benefits: $22.93 / £22.83 (about AU$35) per month, bought annually

Studio, designed for heavy commercial studio/client use: $45.75 / 41.58 (about AU$69) per month, bought annually

Capture One Pro: interface and usability

Everything in Capture One happens in a single window. There are no separate modules, like Lightroom Classic has, and no distinct ‘browse’ and ‘editing panels. Instead, it has a set of tool tabs in the left sidebar that cover everything from folder browsing to image filtering, from adjustments to lens corrections. The main screen area can be used either as a Viewer for editing or a Browser for displaying the current folder or album thumbnails – and very likely you’ll want to keep both visible at once.

There’s a lot going on in Capture One’s left sidebar, so it could be a little daunting for new users. The payback comes later when you start to appreciate its efficiency and its endless customizability. Capture One doesn’t really make any concessions for beginners, but that’s not who it’s for.

You can create custom tabs, add whatever tools you like to any of the tabs, and even drag panels off the sidebar to float on the screen as palettes to stay visible as you work. It’s a great system.

Capture One’s masking tools and adjustment layers also deserve a special mention. They work like Photoshop’s adjustment layers and might prove easier to grasp than Lightroom’s list of masks and sub-masks. Each adjustment layer offers practically the entire set of adjustments in Capture One, not like the limited subset in Lightroom, and each layer can store a mask created with as a linear mask, radial mask, ‘Magic Mask’, freehand brush tool (with or without auto-masking) and AI subject-detection masks.

You can also subtract areas from masks. For example, you could use a linear mask to darken a bright sky and then use the AI ‘subtract’ tool to hover over trees or buildings to instantly remove them from the mask.

Capture One Pro: performance

Capture One’s raw processing is excellent. With full-frame cameras and moderate ISO settings, you might not notice much difference, but it’s much ‘kinder’ to smaller-sensor APS-C or Micro Four Thirds cameras than Adobe Camera Raw, which tends to produce a coarser noise pattern and rather less fine detail. I shoot with MFT cameras a lot, and if you open a raw file from one of these cameras in Lightroom you could quickly decide the MFT format just isn’t quite good enough. Do the same in Capture One and you’ll decide the results are very good indeed. The right software can make more of a difference than you think, and Capture One’s ability to render fine detail and low noise at the same time could be a decisive factor.

Capture One also carries out color adjustments with both strength and subtlety. I’ve never quite been able to recreate its smooth tonal transitions after color editing in Lightroom, with or without its new Point Color tool. The same goes for black-and-white conversions.

Capture One does not, however, have an equivalent of Adobe’s AI Enhance noise reduction process, now integrated into Lightroom with no need for a separate DNG file anymore. Fair play to Adobe for that one.

Capture One has also seen rapid development of its AI masking tools. It can identify subjects and backgrounds, or objects and areas, just by hovering the mouse over them. The masks it creates are accurate and well-blended, and if you do see any edge effects, the ‘Refine’ tool does a remarkable job of smoothing them over.

It’s also worth mentioning Capture One’s ’Style Brushes’ and keyboard shortcut adjustments – for example, you can just hold down the Q key and scroll with the mouse to change the exposure ‘live’. You think it’s a small thing when you first try it, but before long, you’re using it all the time.

Capture One Pro: verdict

Capture One is all about workflow, quality, and efficiency. You wouldn’t buy it to save money or just on the basis of its features. It doesn’t store all your photos in the cloud, it doesn’t come with a big collection of funky presets or AI resizing, AI denoising, AI sky replacement, or generative AI object removal. If that’s what you want, then the Adobe Photography Plan is far better.

Capture One is going to seem expensive to a lot of photographers who aren’t comfortable paying this much for software, but this is a fast, powerful, and very capable professional tool, which is a business investment like any other. If it saves you just a few hours a week or wows a top client on a shoot, it’s paid for itself. It’s also a beautiful space for organizing, browsing, and working on your photos.

Alternatives

Capture One 23 is the latest version of Capture One’s professional image capture, cataloguing and editing tool, and now offers even faster image culling as well as its editing improvements.

Already one of the best photo editing software applications you can get, Capture One 23 extends the range of tools available to pro photographers for organizing, editing and managing images.

The first of Capture One 23’s new features is Smart Adjustments, and these are designed specifically for portrait, wedding and event photographers, where consistency in face and skin tones is crucial. To use the new feature, you first edit a single image to your taste using Exposure and White Balance adjustments, then set this image as a ‘Reference’ to be applied to multiple images. Capture One will attempt to intelligently match that look across all of them. Not only that, you will be able to save your reference image as a ‘Smart Style’ for future use.

Professionals may spend as much time on image organization as editing, and Capture One 23’s new, faster culling system is designed to help you eliminate duds and duplicates more quickly. There’s a brand new ‘Cull’ view designed specifically to make this easier.

The next new feature in Capture One 23 is the ability to save layers with Styles. Capture One uses adjustment layers and masks for local adjustments, and now it will be possible to include these in preset Styles saved for future use. For example, you could include a graduated mask for skies in landscape shots. Even if you don’t use masks, splitting adjustments into different layers will make it easier to identify and modify them individually later on.

Capture One’s fourth new feature might sound dull, but when you need it, you really need it! It will now be possible to change the capture time for images, which is really useful if your camera’s date and time have been set incorrectly or not at all. Incorrect capture times can badly affect sort orders and filters when cataloguing photos.

Capture One 23 also fixes a long-standing frustration – the inability to store different versions (virtual copies) of an image in different folders. Previously. they’ve been inseparable, but now you will be able to put different versions in different albums, separating versions by looks or treatments, for example.

Lastly, Capture One has introduced a free version of its Capture One Live collaboration tool, previously sold as a separate service. There are some restrictions on how long a live session can last and how many you can have running, but this will be a major attraction to photographers previously put off by the cost of the service.

Capture One 23 pricing

Capture One continues to be offered as either a perpetual license or as a subscription. Capture One 23 costs $299/£299 (about AU$462) as a single payment, $24/£24/month (about AU$37) on a month-by-month basis or $178/£179 (about AU$277) as an annual subscription. You can also download a fully-functional 30-day trial.

For the first time ever, the image editing software Capture One is now available as a standalone app for the iPad. The company had originally planned for this iPad version to be released in early 2022 so we've had a bit of a wait, but was it worth it?

There's no doubt that Capture One is in with the best photo editing software on a desktop, but what can this new mobile platform version offer photographers at just $4.99 a month?

Capture One for iPad brings Capture One’s RAW converter to a fully mobile device for the first time, and the program's designed has been completely streamlined to take advantage of the iPad workflow. This means that touch interactions and intuitive gestures should play a part in the user interface when editing. For example, a long press on the screen brings up the before and after of your edited photo.

Features on the new iPad app include batch editing, film grain and the opportunity to import Styles. Disappointingly it looks like key desktop features such as tethering, masking and layers aren't available yet, but Capture One does state that these are coming in the future. "To not delay the release of Capture One for iPad, we have chosen to launch it with a reduced set of features. The first version is not the final version, but it is a version that we think will bring a lot of value to our community of photographers."

The Cloud File Transfer means that photographers can edit their work from anywhere, and easily switch between the iPad and desktop versions of the software. This isn't quite the same as full image synchronization, as users have to upload the RAW images with their adjustments from their iPad to the cloud and then import those images from the cloud into Capture One Pro for desktop when they get home.

Capture One for iPad is a completely standalone application, meaning that it is sold separately from Capture One Pro. Rather than just creating a pared-down version of its desktop program, Capture One says that the iPad app is a completely new experience – one that will appeal to new users as well as existing fans. 

“It was important for the team to make it immediately familiar to Capture One users and general iPad users, so it’s both capable and tactile" explains Rafael Orta, CEO at Capture One. "The distinct feature layout brings order to capability and sets an intuitive flow for new users, making this not only the most affordable way to enjoy Capture One, but the simplest.”

Capture One vs Lightroom

Capture One is developed by Phase One, and although it's similar to Lightroom in the sense that it can be used to import and store files and process raw images, the way that it processes images is very different. You'd think that every program would handle RAW files in the same way, but many photographers note that the same RAW files in Capture One appear punchier and more vivid than in Lightroom.

Capture One also looks quite expensive when compared to Lightroom, but its strength lies in the quality of its raw processing and editing tools. The software might not be not for everyone, but for those photographers who already enjoy the Capture One workflow and algorithms, the addition of a fully-featured iPad app to enable editing on the go will come as great news.

Pricing and availability

Capture One for iPad is available now on a subscription of $4.99/£4.49 a month, which includes Cloud File Transfer storage of up to 1000 photos at a time.

Capture One Pro 22 – arguably the professional Lightroom rival – is also available with a one-off license ($299) or subscription ($20 per month).

The app is available for the iPad Pro (third generation and newer), iPad (eighth generation and newer), iPad Mini (sixth generation and newer) and iPad Air (fourth generation and newer), and you'll need to make sure your iPad is running on iOS15 or a more recent version to use the app. 

You'll find a complete list of all the Capture One products and licensing options on the official Capture One website. 

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Capture One 22 gets a significant update, with no headline features as such but a host of worthwhile enhancements and improvements which are sure to please existing users and strengthen Capture One’s appeal as a high-end Lightroom rival.

One of the big changes is behind the scenes, as Capture One 22 adds support for Capture One’s Cloud Transfer system, which will come into its own when the long-awaited Capture One iPad edition is released – it’s currently due ‘later’ in June.

Capture One 22 15.3.0 new features

Apart from the Cloud Transfer support for the iPad edition, this latest Capture One update brings improved tethering tools, a new Magic Eraser for refining Magic Brush masks, an interface refresh and numerous workflow/tool enhancements.

Capture One 22 will now support wireless tethering for current Sony cameras (though not older models, as far as we can see). These include the Sony A7R IV/IVa, Sony A1, Sony A7 IV, Sony A7s III, Sony A7C, Sony FX3, Sony ZV-E10 and Sony A9 II.

You will be able to tether several Sony cameras over a wireless network, and with the same functionality as a regular wired USB connection.

If you’re a Canon shooter, you can now choose where to save images in a tethered shooting session – to a memory, card, computer or both.

The Magic Eraser follows on from Capture One’s Magic Brush, bringing the same fast, auto-masking process to the eraser. This looks like a great way to modify Magic Brush masks, which was previously a tad fiddly, and you can even link the brush settings for both.

The Capture One interface has been redesigned to align better with the upcoming iPad edition, and will feature larger icons with text labels (these can be turned off) and rearranged, simplified tool tabs.

Other improvements include the ability to save the crop aspect ratio image-by-image instead of globally, smoother image rotation on the Mac, semi-automatic keystone correction as Capture One looks for lines to align with first and a guided tour for new users.

Finally, Capture One 22 15.3.0 adds RAW support for the Canon EOS M50 Mark II and Canon EOS R5C, plus lens correction profiles for the Canon RF 24-240mm F4-6.3 IS USM, Canon RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1 L IS USM, Canon RF 800mm F5.6L IS USM and Canon RF 1200mm F8L IS USM.

Capture One 22 costs $299 for a perpetual license and $159 as an upgrade from a previous version. It’s also available on subscription, starting at $20 per month.

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Capture One and Lightroom are rival image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tools. Where Capture One has the edge in image quality and perhaps editing tools, Lightroom is cheaper and has the advantage of optional cloud storage and synchronization.

But that will soon change when Capture One rolls out its long-promised Capture One iPad edition. It’s clear from Capture One’s introductory video below, however, that Capture One sees the role of the mobile device a little differently.

In the Lightroom Creative Cloud ecosphere, the desktop and mobile applications are more or less equivalent. They can all access all your images in the cloud and carry out a range of editing tasks that are synchronized across your devices.

Capture One for iPad will have a different role, at least in the beginning. It’s designed as a mobile tool for the early stages of the Capture One workflow. 

Watch Capture One for iPad in action below:

How Capture One for iPad will work

For example, at a wedding you could use it to browse, rate and organize your shots, apply Styles (preset looks) and manual edits, and perhaps show clients their pictures right there and then. Later on, you will then be able to sync the iPad app with your desktop catalog to finish your workflow and integrate them with the rest of your photo library.

Where Lightroom’s cloud-based ecosystem is designed to offer all your tools and all your images everywhere, this first version of Capture One for iPad is targeted at quick edits and the first stages of your workflow – it’s a convenient alternative to lugging around a laptop.

Capture One for iPad does look very interesting. It’s designed to rely on simple ‘two-thumb’ controls to reflect the way people hold a tablet and is built for touchscreen control – it’s not intended to be mobile replica of the desktop software.

The scheduled release date for Capture One for iPad is June 28. It won’t be a free add-on for existing Capture One users, however – it will come with its own $4.99/month (about £3.99/AU$6.94) subscription fee.

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This Capture One 22 15.2.0 update is free to existing users and brings a new set of controls for perspective adjustments with new auto settings which bring it in line with Lightroom’s tools.

Lightroom has long had an edge over Capture one for automated keystone corrections – ideal for correcting converging verticals and other perspective issues – but the Capture One 22 15.2.0 update closes that gap and goes even further.

Capture One’s Keystone Tool redesign now offers two tabs – Guides and Sliders for easier automatic and manual adjustments. Capture One can now detect and correct perspective automatically, which has always been one of Lightroom’s strong points.

Capture One can now automatically correct vertical keystoning, horizontal keystoning or both. What’s more, it now lets you ‘nudge’ control points in fine increments using the arrow keys.

On top of that, the 15.2.0 update brings a new ‘Skew’ adjustment for correction particularly tricky perspective issues with front-on facades of buildings, for example. Previously, keystone adjustments would sometimes leave a small but unfixable ‘skew’ – which can now be fixed!

Also new in the Capture One 22 15.2.0 update

Capture One has improved the performance on M1 Macs, boosting preview generation speed by up to 100%, Luma Mask rendering by up to 300% and Fujifilm X-Trans raw loading by up to 100%.

The duration of Capture One LIVE sessions can now be set to 1, 3, 5, 7 or 14 days, the software’s Auto Rotate feature has been improved and the Crop tool will now snap to a new aspect ratio straight away. These are a few of a number of usability and feature improvements in this update.

This release also offers support for a new camera, the high-end Phase One iXM-GS120, and adds support (correction profiles) for the following lenses:

• Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 20mm F1.4 PRO
• Sony FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS II + 2X Teleconverter
• Sony FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS II + 1.4X Teleconverter
• Sony FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS II
• Canon RF 14-35mm F4L IS USM
• Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS | C
• Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM | C

Capture One Pro 22 is available as a perpetual license for $299/£299 (about AU$515) and as an upgrade from previous versions for $159/£159 (about AU$274). 

It’s also available as a subscription, with prices starting at $20/£20 per month (about AU$34), and if you currently have a subscription to the branded Nikon, Sony or Fujifilm editions (now discontinued) you will be upgraded to the full Pro version.

There's a 30-day Capture One free trial if you want to try it out.

• Get Capture One Pro

We asked pro photographer and Capture One user Paul Reiffer to share his top 10 editing tips. He explains some of this software's most useful and least known features, and at the same time offers advice on subtle and effective photo editing. Click on the links below to read the full article.

Capture One is a professional photo organising and editing application that's a direct rival to Lightroom and pitched at pro users who need tethered shooting tools, a choice of workflows and best-in-class raw processing and image enhancement. Capture One is available either for a single one-off fee, or as a subscription. Capture One also sells Style packs (presets) and has recently introduced Capture One Live, a subscription services offering remote live client and co-worker collaboration via a regular web browser.

01. Clarity: give your images extra punch

The Clarity tool is one of Capture One’s most powerful features for cityscape edits – adding a much-needed boost to mid-contrast elements in your shot. In a sense, it can be seen as a “mid-tone enhancer” for areas that need some extra definition, but there are four different modes of Clarity enhancement that are included in Capture One – with each offering something quite different to your edit. Read more: The Clarity tool in Capture One

02. Skin Tone tool: it's for more than just skin tones!

Landscape photographers will know that many factors can cause an uneven sky in your images – using a polariser on an ultra-wide lens, a filter placed in the wrong position, or even just the natural variation of color and brightness from the sun across the width of a scene. Read more: The Skin Tone tool in Capture One

03. Hot pixels: clean up your night time shots

Sensors heat up when they are in continual use. And when sensors heat up, there is a chance that several pixels will become stuck, or “hot”, leading to a bright red, green or blue pixel that stands out from all others. It’s perfectly normal, and not considered a fault by the camera makers, it’s just a side-effect of long exposures, especially when capturing dark images. Read more: Fixing hot pixels in Capture One

04. Keystone correction: fix perspective issues

Whenever we shoot off-plane from an object, with standard lenses, we introduce perspective distortion. This is the effect where the part of the subject that is further away from us becomes smaller in the scene. Read more: Keystone correction in Capture One

05. Luma Range: selective masking based on tone

Capture One has an amazing array of helpful tools designed to select and adjust specific sections of your images – from Gradient Masks to the latest “Magic Brush”, Auto-Mask and, of course, the standard brush. But it’s sometimes easy to forget one of the most powerful tools available to us in terms of isolating areas of a challenging shot, that can be applied to each and every type of mask – The Luma Range. Read more: Luma Range masking in Capture One

06. Presets, Styles and Style Brushes

Capture One’s styles, presets and style brushes have become a key creative ingredient in many peoples’ workflows – but many of us forget that we don’t need to stick with the stock versions that have been purchased or installed – we can create our own to reuse in future edits too. Read more: Presets, Styles and Style Brushes in Capture One

07. Lens corrections: why they matter

Each of our cameras, lenses, sensors and filters work together to deliver a different characteristic with each click of the shutter button. Sometimes those characteristics are wanted, other times they can be a distraction – and Capture One offers up a series of corrections to fix any undesirable aspects of a lens’ performance with just a few clicks. Read more: Lens corrections in Capture One

08. Base curves: what they do and why

Out of the box, Capture One is designed to deliver images from your raw data that hold the right blend of contrast, colour fidelity and tonal range with very little effort. But what happens when the default characteristics don’t quite hit the mark, especially in a challenging high-contrast image? Well, that’s where adjusting the “Curve” value in the Base Characteristics panel can help. Read more: Base curves in Capture One

09. HDR merge: blending exposures seamlessly

HDR techniques can be used to capture the detail in a landscape’s shadows and highlights for which there’s no “ideal filter” that can be used in front of the lens. Or we could find ourselves shooting an interior where the contrast between the view through a window and the dark room inside is too great. Whatever the reason, every now and then we’re faced with the challenge of needing to “blend” exposures to create a final image. Read more: HDR merge in Capture One

10. Panorama stitching: how it works

A frequent request over the years has been for the ability to “stitch” multiple images into one file, within Capture One. This is a particularly popular technique with landscape photographers. Why within the raw processor? While only having to use one tool instead of external plugins has its benefits, the bigger reason was that people wanted to be able to edit the output as a fully functioning raw file, not as a flat TIFF or JPEG. And with Capture One 22, that feature has now been added. Read more: Panorama stitching in Capture One

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. As well as the regular 'all cameras' edition, there are cheaper Nikon, Sony and Fujifilm-specific editions. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Panorama stitching is a favorite technique that's been made massively easier by photo-editing software. In the early days you needed dedicated stitching applications alongside your regular photo editor, but programs like Capture One are now including panorama stitching as standard.

A frequent request over the years has been for the ability to “stitch” multiple images into one file, within Capture One. This is a particularly popular technique with landscape photographers

Why within the raw processor? While only having to use one tool instead of external plugins has its benefits, the bigger reason was that people wanted to be able to edit the output as a fully functioning raw file, not as a flat TIFF or JPEG. And with Capture One 22, that feature has now been added. 

While a successful panoramic stitch is as much down to the way the individual frames are captured as it is the software that joins them together, Capture One’s new feature has been designed to work on the full range of input shots – from a row of handheld snaps, to automated drone sequences, through to calibrated multi-row captures using a nodal rail.

So here’s how to get started:

1. Lens corrections

Having shot a series of images, ideally with a 30-40% overlap between each one, you’ll import your sequence of shots just like any other.

From there, in order to get the best out of Capture One’s Panoramic Stitching you’ll need to adjust the “Lens Corrections” to load in the correct profile (or “manufacturer profile”) and set “Light Falloff” to 100% (where available). This is critical to avoid the “bumpiness” in any sky as the lens vignettes from frame to frame.

2. Basic adjustments

Make any basic adjustments – white balance, sharpening, noise reduction, any dynamic range recovery – to the “middle” shot, and apply the exact same changes (through copy/apply) to every other shot in the sequence you want to join together.  If there are variations between the images, it will be apparent when you see the output.

3. Stitch the panorama

Select the images you want to stitch in the browser, and right-click, choosing Stitch to Panorama…

The new interface has been slimmed down to the essentials, with four 'projection' methods and a simple output size drop-down.

Each projection method is worth experimenting with:

• Spherical: Ideal for “multi-row” sequences, or aerial drone shots, but can “bend” straight lines.

• Cylindrical: Ideal for a single row of images to produce an ultra-wide field of view.

• Perspective: Creates an image where lines are straight and true, as-if you’d shot the sequence with a single ultra-wide lens.

• Panini: If shooting into the distance with converging lines, this is a great combination of cylindrical and perspective methods to deliver a realistic appearance.

You’ll also see a Stitch Size option.  You can use this to reduce your output file size for faster processing, or to keep it within the DNG limit of 65,000px wide on any edge or 715 megapixels overall.

Once stitching is complete, you have a raw file ready to be further edited to your choice of look – it behaves just as your original raw files, but as one big stitch of multiple images, blended together by Capture One.

When to use pano stitching

Panoramic stitching allows for more creativity, in terms of both shooting style as well as giving the viewer an “impossibly wide” view of the world around us.

By bringing us the ability to stitch that content together, while still able to edit the output as a raw file in itself, Capture One gives us a valuable new tool to produce such views.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

HDR photography is both a creative tool and a technical solution. HDR can be used to create intense and dramatic effects, but in the world of professional photography it's just as likely to be used for ultra-high contrast scenes where you don't always want the technique to be obvious. This is what Capture One 22's HDR feature is designed for. It can merge multiple bracketed raw files into a single DNG raw file which you can then edit like any other.

HDR techniques can be used to capture the detail in a landscape’s shadows and highlights for which there’s no “ideal filter” that can be used in front of the lens;

Or we could find ourselves shooting an interior where the contrast between the view through a window and the dark room inside is too great;

Whatever the reason, every now and then we’re faced with the challenge of needing to “blend” exposures to create a final image.

Historically that’s needed a plugin to achieve with Capture One, resulting in a flattened image that can’t be edited with the same tools as a raw file – until now.

With Capture One 22 comes native HDR blending to a single raw output file. Having streamlined the process and interface, Capture One now makes things easy when it comes to blending a bracketed sequence of exposures together.

1. Shooting an HDR sequence

Typlically, we’d aim for between 3 and 5 individual shots of the same scene – with a fixed aperture, fixed focus, fixed White Balance and fixed ISO – the only thing that should be changing between each frame should be the shutter speed.  Many cameras offer an automated exposure bracketing function to achieve this, but if not, aim for around 3 stops of difference between each capture. Then, once the images are inside Capture One, the process becomes easy

2. HDR merge in Capture One

After importing your sequence into Capture One, you’ll need to make any lens corrections up front – diffraction correction, chromatic aberration, light fall-off and so on. Once complete, you’ll select the images you want to blend together, right-click, and select “Merge to HDR”.

There is one single dialog box that appears, and this is the only interface you’ll see with the new function, asking two simple questions:

• Auto-Adjust: Do you want Capture One to apply some adjustments to the output raw file to deliver a “middle-exposed” shot with detail in shadows and highlights, or would you prefer to do this yourself?

• Auto-Align: While not recommended at the point of capture, if your individual frames moved (or were handheld), Capture One can align them automatically and merge the relevant parts.  If you shot on a tripod, this shouldn’t be necessary.

The output, after processing, will be a DNG file created alongside the images you selected in the browser – and is fully editable just like any other raw file you’ve used.

You may find you need to adjust the HDR sliders to pull down some of the highlights in the final merge, but given it’s a raw image, you can make any such changes to your taste.

You don't need to use HDR merge all the time. Very often, it's possible to use the regular HDR panel within Capture One to recover the dynamic range in a single frame raw file. 

However, there is one other benefit to using the new function with bracketed shots: Noise reduction. Noise is random, by nature – so part of Capture One’s algorithm delivers clean shadows as it blends the multiple frames together, removing unwanted noise from any given area.  While it’s possible to “push” the shadows in a single shot, the result from an HDR blend can be a lot less noisy in the shadows. 

When to use HDR

Merging multiple frames into an HDR image isn’t for everyone – and there are certainly examples of overdone blends that we’ve all seen out there.

But used correctly, to deliver a realistic mix of detailed shadows, clear highlights across a noise-free image, the new raw output HDR Merge function in Capture One 22 can be a powerful tool for landscape, architectural and commercial photographers alike.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Capture One Live offers real-time remote collaboration with colleagues and clients anywhere in the world. It’s Capture One’s first step towards a full end-to-end cloud-based system, and chips away at Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering.

Capture One Live will work with Capture One 22, but will be a separate subscription based service costing an introductory $9.99 per month. There’s no word yet on how much storage this will include, but it sounds in the same ballpark as Adobe’s 1TB cloud storage for Lightroom. 

What does Capture One Live do?

This new feature does not include a mobile app and remote photo editing and organisation – yet – but Capture One has said that this is part of its roadmap, and this kind of mobile cloud editing could level up Capture One with Lightroom once and for all.

Capture One Live is being described as a first step, but it’s an important one for the kind of pro photographers Capture One attracts. It enables you to share a Session or a Collection in a catalog via a shareable URL, and password if required, so that clients and team members can view a Live Session for seven days.

Live Sessions can be viewed in any browser and viewed by up to 25 collaborators simultaneously. Any adjustments you make in the catalog or session will be reflected in real time in the browser via a ‘Follow’ setting – which will also show live tethered shooting sessions and live edits.

Clearly, Capture One Live is not made to compete directly with Lightroom and its cloud-based organization/editing. Instead, it’s designed to be a collaboration tool for live projects, reflecting the kind of client-driven workflow of commercial photographers. The ability to collaborate remotely has become very important in the wake of the COVID pandemic, and the travel costs and time savings of remote collaboration are obvious even without that.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Most of us know what Curves adjustments are. Capture One has these amongst its regular adjustment tools. But it also offers 'Base Curves', which control the way Capture One renders the tonal distribution of your raw file before you carry out any other adjustments.

Out of the box, Capture One is designed to deliver images from your raw data that hold the right blend of contrast, colour fidelity and tonal range with very little effort.

But what happens when the default characteristics don’t quite hit the mark, especially in a challenging high-contrast image? Well, that’s where adjusting the “Curve” value in the Base Characteristics panel can help.

By default, Capture One uses what it calls the “Auto” Curve when you import any image. On certain cameras (for example, Fujifilm), it will read any film simulation you applied at the point of capture and apply that curve here, but for most cameras this is left to match the “Film Standard” curve.

In many situations, this is a good call – that curve that is automatically applied adds a bit of a “boost” to shadows (darkening) and highlights (lightening) to deliver a pop of contrast that works.  The problem is, when dealing with an image that already holds a huge range of tones, this can push our highlights and shadows too far and we need to start closer to the raw data.

In this case, it’s worth considering one of the other Capture One curve profiles.

1. Where to find these Base Curves

You’ll find the profiles in the drop-down below your ICC Profile. With “Auto” being either a pre-loaded film simulation from the camera or “Film Standard” to most of us, it’s the Linear Response curve that often comes to the rescue where the result of the higher-contrast curves is unwanted.

2. Linear response

Where extra contrast is added for Auto/”Film Standard”, you’ll see the histogram is squeezed more towards the middle when selecting Linear Response.  

This curve tends to be more “true” to the original raw data that the camera recorded, resulting in a flatter output that has highlights and shadows protected, while potentially needing extra contrast to be added by the user later on.

3. Film Extra Shadow

For those wanting to keep the high-end contrast “pop” but prevent shadows from dropping down too low, there’s also the “Film Extra Shadow” option – which results in lifted lower tones but highlights that remain protected.

As with other tools in Capture One, it’s often worth looking at its impact before making a decision. If you hover your mouse over the different profiles while keeping an eye on your “Curve” tool (as well as any areas of concern in the picture itself), you’ll see the values, and image, change to allow you to make a choice.

The Base Curve is your starting point

Remember that your Base Curve is a starting point for how Capture One is being asked to present your raw file to you for editing. You’re never actually adjusting the underlying raw data, so you could achieve similar results in the following ways:

1. Start with a Linear Response Curve, but then add Contrast, use the HDR sliders to reduce shadows and increase highlights, and potentially add an S shape to your luma curve.

2. Start with an Auto/Film Standard Curve, but then recover highlights and shadows in the HDR sliders and decrease contrast to protect the extremes.

In either case, you’ll end up with a similar result – it just depends on whether you want to begin from a flatter, more “true to raw” image, or if you’re happy to recover any parts of the Auto curve that were pushed too far.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

No lens is perfect. All lenses, especially zoom lenses, have lens aberrations to some degree, whether it's distortion, chromatic aberration or corner shading, and the most effective way to correct these is digitally – and Capture one can do this both manually and automatically.

Each of our cameras, lenses, sensors and filters work together to deliver a different characteristic with each click of the shutter button. Sometimes those characteristics are wanted, other times they can be a distraction – and Capture One offers up a series of corrections to fix any undesirable aspects of a lens’ performance with just a few clicks.

In general, we should look to make any and all lens corrections prior to performing any other edits to an image – otherwise, we may make editing decisions based on a false underlying image such as oversharpening an image when it didn’t need it, or worrying about a curved horizon.

So our first stop after importing images should always be the Lens Corrections tool under the Lens tab.

1. Embedded profiles

During the import, Capture One will attempt to identify the lens used at the time of capture – and if it cannot find an identical match in its database, it will then rely on either the embedded “Manufacturer Profile” or the “Generic” lens profile if all else fails.

Using an embedded profile isn’t a bad thing – it relies on the information your camera has stored within the raw file itself – but in general, our goal is to find our specific lens and apply that profile as a starting point.

2. Manual corrections

Once confirmed, we then work down the list of corrections available to us (these can also be applied to images where no profile has been found):

• Chromatic Aberration: an unwanted flaw in the lens’ ability to resolve all colours to the same point. While the default correction is perfectly fine, telling Capture One to “Analyse” your specific image on your specific camera with that specific lens (by clicking the […] drop-down) will present a much better result for your individual picture.

• Diffraction Correction: this will attempt to correct any softening of the image (particularly at the edges) through the use of a small aperture. This is often unnecessary on lenses when shot wide open (f/2.8 – f/8), but smaller than f/8 you may find some improvements to sharpness by enabling this option.

• Distortion Correction: this allows us to correct for pincushion/barrel effects of lenses that have a pronounced distortion to them (especially with straight lines and horizons). If you find the distortion for an unknown lens needs to go “the other way”, try the “Generic-Pincushion” lens profile first.

• Sharpness Falloff: we all have that one lens that’s sharp in the middle, but slowly softens as it moves to the outside. This slider is to help with this specifically, like a radial sharpening mask that only affects the outside areas without oversharpening the middle.

• Light Falloff: think of this as an “anti-vignetting” slider, allowing Capture One to brighten the corners of a lens that produces darker edges.

• Purple Fringing: this slider actually goes from left to right, to correct for green and purple fringing at high contrast points. It’s part of the Chromatic Aberration profile of a lens, but is normally found at the edges in these two specific colours. Use this only as much as is needed to remove the colour fringe, and no more.

Lens corrections make a real difference

No lens is perfect, but with the selective, careful, use of these tools we can correct for many of those characteristics with very little fuss. Just be careful to only use these sliders where necessary, not just as a matter of course, and you can be sure that Capture One will deliver an image that shows the best of what your camera (and lens) can do.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Like Lightroom and other non-destructive photo-editors, Capture One can apply one-click adjustments and 'looks' to your photos. However, it goes further, offering both Preset AND Styles, and adding in a Style Brush feature for local adjustments. Our series of pro editing secrets for Capture One software continues...

Capture One’s styles, presets and style brushes have become a key creative ingredient in many peoples’ workflows – but many of us forget that we don’t need to stick with the stock versions that have been purchased or installed – we can create our own to reuse in future edits too.

In face, Capture One offers three different types of saved settings:

• Presets: A single tool’s settings, saved within that tool, to be recalled in the future on other images.

• Styles: A series of settings and adjustments made to a layer using multiple tools, saved so they can be applied together on to future images.

• Style Brushes: A series of settings and adjustments saved as a brush, allowing multiple tool changes to be painted in together onto future images and variants.

Styles can be applied to an overall image (on the background layer) or onto their own new layer by right-clicking on the Style name, regardless of whether it’s a pre-built one, or a series of edits you saved yourself.

1. Presets

Creating a preset is easy. Simply make the adjustments within the single tool you wish to replicate and then click the drop-down preset icon (a button with three horizontal lines) on that tool. You’ll see a list of presets already saved for that tool, along with the choice to save a new set.

Having opted to save, Capture One will ask you which specific parts of the tool you wish to include (based on which parts you edited) and what name you want to save it as.

From there, you’ll find your preset available to use across all images, regardless of what catalog or session they’re stored within.

2: Styles

For single tool changes, a preset provides the ability to replicate those settings very easily, but if you want to include changes across several tools – you’ll need to create a Style instead. Styles, remember, can be applied to an entire image’s background layer, or a new layer of its own.

First, create a layer on which to make the combination of changes.  Once you’re happy with the changes as a collection, right-click the layer name and choose “Save Adjustments as Style”. In the same way as when you save a Preset, Capture One will ask which tools you want to save the changes from (with the tools you’ve adjusted selected by default) and for you to give your style a name.

From there, you’ll find that Style appears in your Styles tab under “Custom Styles” for future use.

3. Style Brush

Once applied to a layer, your new Style can be applied to any form of mask (including that of the Magic Brush), but if you want to specifically create a new Style Brush (that allows you to paint the effect on to an automatically generated layer), then consider using “Save Adjustments as Style Brush” instead.

When saving to a brush, you’ll also need to tell Capture One if you wish to store the brush and eraser properties – but once saved, your new Style Brush will function the same way as the stock ones delivered with Capture One, usable across all images, and found under the “Custom Style Brushes” drop-down.

The power of Capture One's layers and masks

Part of Capture One’s power lies in stacking multiple adjustments together into layers, masks and tools – and being able to repeat those changes across many images. 

By building your own series of tool presets, global styles and style brushes, you’re building a library of powerful adjustments that help speed up and simplify your workflow for all future edits.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Until now Capture One as been offered in a full ‘all cameras’ edition – Capture One Pro – but with much cheaper Fujifilm, Sony and Nikon editions for users of those camera brands only. From today, though, these branded editions will no longer be available for purchase.

So where will that leave users? In a pretty good place, it seems. Capture One is keen to stress that these branded editions will carry on working exactly as before, and that bug fixes and feature updates will continue for two years from the initial Capture One 22 launch.

It is, however, offering upgrades and inducements to switch to the full Capture One Pro product either at no cost (for users of the latest 'branded' versions) or at reduced cost for older Fujifilm, Sony or Nikon editions.

Capture One Pro upgrades and offers

If you’re currently using Capture One 22 for Fujifilm, Sony or Nikon. On April 5 2022 you will get a free upgrade to the full Capture One Pro edition, so you’re not going to lose out. Users will get an email about how to claim their upgrades nearer to that April 5th date.

If you’re using an Capture One 21 or older for Fujifilm, Sony or Nikon, you can upgrade to Capture One Pro at the same price you would pay to upgrade to the latest branded edition – this offer is available until April 18th 2022.

If you are using Capture One 22 for Fujifilm, Sony or Nikon on a subscription, you’ll carry on paying the same price you do right now for as long as you remain a subscriber.

So why the change?

Capture One says it is clearing the decks ahead of some major new features, including a powerful new way to collaborate with Capture One Live, and the company’s first iOS app with Capture One for iPad.  

This promises to put Capture One head to head with Adobe Lightroom – it will be very interesting to see how Capture One’s cloud solution compares with Adobe’s.

We continue our series of pro editing secrets for Capture One software with a look at Capture One's Luma Ranges. With these you can make adjustments based on brightness value without the need for time-consuming manual masking.

Capture One has an amazing array of helpful tools designed to select and adjust specific sections of your images – from Gradient Masks to the latest “Magic Brush”, Auto-Mask and, of course, the standard brush.

But it’s sometimes easy to forget one of the most powerful tools available to us in terms of isolating areas of a challenging shot, that can be applied to each and every type of mask – The Luma Range.

With the ability to select specific brightness values of an image, not just being based on a pixel’s position, the Luma Range offers up an unique way of selecting certain areas of a complex photograph in a way that can get the very best from your camera’s dynamic range while keeping the shot true to life.

Often when we’re shooting in high contrast scenes, we’d like to separate out the bright areas from the shadows and treat them differently. While the HDR sliders can help us with brightness, it can’t help adjust white balance or other aspects individually from the rest of the shot, resulting in compromises needing to be made.

When we know there is a set region (in brightness terms) of an image that has more detail available to us, but where a blanket change to, say, Exposure won’t help – the Luma Range allows us to refine the selection to only certain values for ultra-sharp, accurate, natural masks.

Step 1: Create a mask

On any mask layer, having created some form of initial mask, click the “Luma Range” tool at the top and you’ll see the popup appear.  That popup will start out with the initial “ramped” selection – starting at 0 masking for values of 0 on the histogram, increasing (ramping up) to 100% mask for values above 20.

Likewise, for the highlights, the default mask will include anything below 235 on our histogram and then slowly fade to having 0% mask on anything that’s 255.

Step 2: Adjust the Luma Range

In this case, we want to include the brightest parts of the sky, so we slide the upper value to be 255 as well (so there is no falloff, everything under 255 but before 20 is now included). You’ll see the mask itself adapt to show you what’s now included.

Step 3: Exclude the darker tones

Doing the same with the shadow end to exclude the mountains, we now slide it up until the mountains are outside of the mask but everything else remains.

Step 4: Check the edges

One quick check on the tree-line (or hair-line, area around the subject, etc) and we can see there’s some mask artefacts around the details. This is simply a by-product of the selection that’s been made to decide what’s included or excluded, and we need to soften that transition.

Step 5: Radius and Sensitivity

Using Option+M, we can bring up a greyscale mask, along with the Luma Range, where we can now use Radius and Sensitivity sliders to soften those boundaries for a perfect line.

Once complete, you now have a selection that only includes the chosen parts of your image based on their initial position (through the brush/gradient tool) and then also their value on the histogram from 0 to 255 (or any range you choose within).

Step 6: Make your adjustments

With that in place, you now have complete control of that area to adjust it independently of the rest of the image, allowing the edit to matches what you saw.

Luma Range can be used for any mask

There are a number of different ways to create a mask, but remember, the Luma Range can be applied to each and every one of them to further refine your selection. Especially useful in detailed areas, or where Magic Brush can’t quite guess what you’re trying to do, it’s one of the most powerful ways of selecting a region of an image that exists in Capture One. 

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Very often it's the subtle touches that separate professional photography from amateur snaps, and one of the key examples is perspective correction – or 'keystone' correction in Capture One. The human eye is very sensitive and even a small degree of skew, tilt or convergence can spoil shots of buildings and landmarks.

Whenever we shoot off-plane from an object, with standard lenses, we introduce perspective distortion. This is the effect where the part of the subject that is further away from us becomes smaller in the scene.

While this can sometimes be useful to give a feeling of distance or height, when we want a cleaner head-on shot, we only really have two options: Either making use of a dedicated tilt/shift lens, or correcting it in post-processing.

For those without such a specific lens, Capture One’s keystone tool can fix  things in a few clicks.

Capture One Keystone tool

1. Where to find the keystone tool
The keystone tool can be found in the top menu bar, but bear in mind there are three versions of the tool (vertical lines only, horizontal lines only or 4-way keystone correction) which can be found by holding the mouse button down on the tool itself.

2. Numerical values
It’s also worth remembering that the tool is actually just a graphical interpretation of the numbers in the Keystone tab on your tool panel to the side. As you move the anchor points, the tool interprets these into numerical values that are delivered to that panel.

3. Visual adjustment
While you can use the sliders in the tool panel to make adjustments, it’s often easier to use the anchor points and their guidelines in between to let Capture One do the calculations for you.  

4. Aspect ratios
The goal is to put the anchor points on a line that SHOULD be straight but isn't (not that’s already correct).  In the case of vertical only, that means a line that should be straight up-down.  In the case of a horizontal keystone adjustment, that’s lines that should be perfectly flat and level.

Dragging those points to their respective areas will show you (with the joining lines) what else between those points will be levelled up, and once happy, click apply.

If the result now appears too “squashed”, consider using the “Aspect” slider to stretch or flatten the image to suit.

5. Check the crop
You will lose some of your wider image to the crop, as a result of the correction – so it’s worth checking the uncropped version to see what’s been pulled out of the frame.  Also bear in mind the default “amount” of correction is 80 – not entirely handy for architecture that you need to be 100% straight, so it’s worth setting that back to 100 once you’ve set your anchor points.

6. Four-way adjustment
The four-way tool works in exactly the same way as the horizontal or vertical version, only it allows for a complete transformation of an object in one go.

Just like before, simply select 4 points that should all be linked in a straight rectangle and hit apply.

There will always be a need for getting things exactly right in-camera when it comes to architectural photography – and for those moments, a tilt/shift lens can be the winning tool.

But for those who find themselves having to make minor adjustments, infrequently, or if you don’t shoot enough of these images to warrant the investment in a dedicated lens, the keystone correction tool is there to help in a few clicks.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Read more:

• Best tilt-shift lenses
• Best tripods
• Best photo editing laptops
• Best monitors for photo editing
• Best portable hard drives

Welcome to this series on pro editing secrets for Capture One software. In this instalment Capture One expert Paul Reiffer explains hot pixels and what you can do about them. If you've never seen one, maybe you're not looking hard enough...

Sensors heat up when they are in continual use. And when sensors heat up, there is a chance that several pixels will become stuck, or “hot”, leading to a bright red, green or blue pixel that stands out from all others. It’s perfectly normal, and not considered a fault by the camera makers, it’s just a side-effect of long exposures, especially when capturing dark images.

To help, many cameras capture a second frame or “dark curtain”, following such exposures to find out where the hot pixels are. That map of hot pixels is then removed from the original frame so you don’t notice. But what happens if your camera doesn’t have this function, you forget to enable it, or it doesn’t quite do the job?

The good news is, Capture One has a specific tool for this – the Single Pixel slider – and it’s really good at making hot pixels go away.

How to find and use Capture One's Single Pixel tool

Found within the “Noise Reduction” tool (by default you’ll see it under the “Details” tab), the Single Pixel adjustment is a simple slider with a range from 0 (default) to 100 (max).

In order to work on these stuck/hot pixels, you need to be viewing your image at a minimum of 100% magnification – less than that will result in Capture One displaying the pre-built preview image, which is not affected by the slider. This is a close-up tool, which demands close-up attention.

Start by finding any isolated red, green or blue pixel within your image, then simply slide the bar up from 0 until it disappears (you’re effectively telling Capture One how big your hot pixels are).

You may have to wait a second for your computer to process the result after each step, so go slowly, but what Capture One then does is fill in the removed hotspot with an average of the surrounding area.

Now check the other parts of the image for similar issues and tweak the amount as necessary.

Aim to have the slider as low as possible. For astro shots, it has been known for small stars to be seen as hot pixels too, so this is a case of “less is more” – but use enough to resolve the issue across your entire frame.

• Hint: For any remaining stubborn pixels, sometimes it can be wise to leave the slider at a lower setting and manually heal them out instead of risking Capture One removing other pixels you wanted to keep by having the value set too high.

Remember that when zoomed out again, the effect of your hot pixel removal may not show as it’s relying on the inbuilt preview, but rest assured, those hot pixels will be gone when you’re ready to export.

Long exposures and hot pixels go together

Hot pixels are a problem for most sensors during long exposures – but they don’t ever have to make it through to your final image thanks to Capture One's Single Pixel tool. Just be sure to check for them at 100% zoom (or greater) and only use as much of the tool as absolutely necessary, not a single click more.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Welcome to this series on pro editing secrets for Capture One software. In this instalment Capture One expert Paul Reiffer talks about a powerful portrait enhancement tool in Capture One, and then uses it for something completely different...

Landscape photographers will know that many factors can cause an uneven sky in your images – using a polariser on an ultra-wide lens, a filter placed in the wrong position, or even just the natural variation of color and brightness from the sun across the width of a scene.

Controlling or reducing the amount of tonal difference across skies is one of the many subtle professional touches that can separate professional-quality images from also-rans. If you do need to control or reduce the amount of tonal difference across areas like these, there’s a specific tool within Capture One that’s designed to do exactly that, although it’s somewhat hidden under an unusual name.

Originally designed for use on portrait images (for variations and blemishes on human skin) the “Skin Tone” tool can be an equally useful addition to a landscape photographer’s toolkit when it comes to evening up the sky (or ground, for that matter) in a few clicks.

The Skin Tone tool allows us to select a range of colors in an image, choose a target value to shift colors to when selected within that range and then “smooth out” all the other shades to match. As such, if we have variations in the green grass of a field, or a sky that has an inconsistent tone across the scene, we can use this tool to make them more even.

Step 1: Where to find the Skin Tone tool

So here's our start shot. As you'll see, the sky has a (perfectly natural) color shift from left to right, but it just doesn't look right and it needs to be fixed... with the Skin Tone tool.

You’ll find the Skin Tone tool in the “Color Editor” tool, within the “Color” tab (by default) – you can click the gadget in the top right corner of this screenshot and all the others to see a bigger version. 

Next to “Basic” and “Advanced”, you’ll see “Skin Tone” – and clicking it take you to the tool. Don’t be alarmed by the empty color wheel, we’ll be adding our selection in a moment.

Step 2: Draw a mask over your target area

Because the tool works on a color range, not a specific area of the image, to ensure your changes only affect the region of the image you want to alter – draw a mask over your target first. That could be the sky, the grass, or (as originally designed) somebody’s skin.

You'll find Caputre One's masking tools on the top toolbar. The regular brush tool should be fine for this.

Step 3: Select a target color

Click on the color-picker icon in the Skin Tone tool, and select the target color that’s closest to the middle of the range of tones in the problem area for your image. (In this case, the average tone of blue in the middle of the sky). You’ll see the color wheel in the tool then highlight that specific color and those which surround it.

At this point, press M to disable your mask if it’s showing. Checking the “View Selected Color Range” box will turn all non-selected colors to greyscale to allow you to focus on the range that’s been selected. 

Step 4: Amount and Uniformity

You’ll then set the following sets of values:

Under “Amount”, you’ll set any changes to hue, saturation and brightness that you want to apply to the target color.

Under “Uniformity”, you’ll set how closely aligned all other colors in the area selected in the color wheel will become in relation to that target color.

Step 5: Changing the color range

The higher the uniformity values, the closer all other colors will become. If you want to affect a broader range of colors, just drag the wedge in the color wheel to be wider and select a higher “smoothness” value.

Just be careful with clouds, as they need to stay neutral to remain realistic!

The Skin Tone tool is not just for skin tones!

The Skin Tone tool really should be renamed as the “fix color differences tool” – but for now, you can use it as a secret weapon should any issues occur in an area of an image that you expected to be more uniform than it turned out. You need to be careful to stay true to the image, but a small amount of tweaking here and there to these regions can add a much-needed finishing touch to a landscape shot.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Capture One has launched a new Capture One 22 version of its premium image editing software. The Lightroom rival unveiled today that the newest version is optimized and compatible with Apple M1, M1 Pro, M1 Pro Max, MacOS Monterey, and Windows 11. 

New features of Capture One 22 include the highly requested panorama stitching as well as HDR merging and unique batch auto-rotate tools. An updated performance architecture enables support for newer cameras including the Sony A7 IV and Nikon Z9.

· Read More: Best photo editing software

For those that may be unfamiliar, Capture One editing software, originally developed by medium format camera maker Phase One, is highly regarded in the photographic industry and used as a premiere resource for editing RAW image files with non-destructive editing. 

Editing software from Capture One comes in several editions, including free Capture One Express software with limited features specifically for Fujifilm or Sony files. The award-winning Capture One Pro software is for all camera models at a premium price, but it can be cheaper to purchase a single-brand subscription or license if you're exclusively loyal to Nikon, Fujifilm or Sony brands.

Wireless tethering for selected Canon cameras is among the new features available with Capture One 22, the Canon R5, R3, 1Dx II and 1Dx III are now fully supported whereas only preliminary support is offered for the Canon R, R6, 5D IV and 90D models. Newly supported Canon lenses with Capture One 22 are the :Canon RF 85mm F1.2L USM DS, RF 50mm F1.8 STM, RF 85mm F2 MACRO IS STM and the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS II USM.

Rafael Orta, CEO for Capture One, says:

"Capture One 22 boasts even more powerful editing tools, from Panorama Stitching to HDR Merging to Wireless Tethering to our first AI feature, Auto Rotate—all equipped to serve the needs of photographers worldwide". 

Capture One 22 lays the foundations for a suite of exciting new products and features we can expect to see in 2022, with a focus on multi-device connectivity, including the first of Capture One's cloud and tablet oriented products coming early next year. 

· Read More: Capture One is coming to the iPad in early 2022 – Lightroom mobile will have a rival!

The proposed Capture One iPad app is currently in a closed alpha test, with the company aiming to release a more open beta in the first few months of 2022. Capture One 22 supports the newest three MacOS versions, although it may be worth noting that MacOS 10.13 (High Sierra) will not be supported.

If you already have a Capture One subscription you should have access to all latest versions of the software, including Capture One 22, at no extra cost. Simply download Capture One 22 software and activate it using your current license key.

Capture One 22 is available as a one-off perpetual license or monthly/ annual subscriptions. A Capture One Pro 22 (all models) license will cost you $299 / £226 / AU$418, whereas a monthly Pro subscription starts at $24 / £18 / AU$ 33 per month.

All versions of Capture One come with a full, free 30-day trial. You can download a trial here.

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Welcome to this series on pro editing secrets for Capture One software. For this instalment, we’re taking a close look at Capture One’s Clarity tool, which can add real mid-tone contrast without pushing your shadows and highlights off the scale.

The Clarity tool is one of Capture One’s most powerful features for cityscape edits – adding a much-needed boost to mid-contrast elements in your shot. In a sense, it can be seen as a “mid-tone enhancer” for areas that need some extra definition, but there are four different modes of Clarity enhancement that are included in Capture One – with each offering something quite different to your edit.

Capture One Clarity settings

If using the default workspace, you’ll find the Clarity tool in the Exposure Tab, in its own tool along with Structure – but it’s the drop down just above the sliders we’re interested in. 

In plain English, what the Clarity tool is effectively doing is looking for areas with subtle differences and forcing the lighter area to become lighter still, and the darker area to be even more dark. As such, it adds an extra level of contrast that’s particularly noticeable in the midtones of your image.

The style selected tells Capture One how to interpret the micro-contrast changes, and what to add (if anything) in the process, and there are four to choose from:

1. Classic: this is the original type of clarity that was first introduced in Capture One 5 (yes, a long time ago!). It’s one of the most subtle contrast changes, with no extreme shift in colour or saturation, but when overdone it could deliver a “cartoony” feel with halos around stronger contrast areas such as light trails against a dark background.
2. Neutral: offers the heaviest level of contrast change, but doesn’t affect colours or saturation to any noticeable extent. It’s more forgiving than Classic on strong contrast points, and works very well when boosting architecture shots while keeping colours that are true to life.
3. Punch: probably the most noticeable form of clarity enhancement available within Capture One, combining the heavy contrast change of Neutral but with an additional saturation increase. It can look very unrealistic if pushed too far, but has the most immediate impact out of all the styles.
4. Natural: the culmination of many years’ worth of tweaking and improvement of all these styles, delivering a mix of mild contrast enhancements, protected highlights and a slight (perceived) boost to colours. The result is pleasing, but sometimes not quite strong enough to make enough of a difference in extreme cases.

For most cityscape shots, we’d look to use either Neutral or Natural to ensure colour fidelity while boosting midtone contrast.

When using Clarity, there is a general “stop!” warning that’s useful to have in your head (and it goes for Structure too): If the slider is higher than +30, are you sure you want to do that?

Overdone Clarity can result in dark “halos” around high contrast points (see the image below). This is a sure-fire giveaway that someone has used, and abused, clarity to deliver the level of contrast they’ve achieved.

Be really careful with this, and stop short of such artefacts appearing. The careful addition of the right amount of Clarity can take a cityscape image from “cool” to “wow” in a few clicks – but don’t overdo it.

Knowing the different types of Clarity that Capture One can apply will help you select the right enhancement, and always fall on the side of conservative instead of risking a shot that looks cartoon-like and over-processed.

About Capture One

Capture One is an all-in-one non-destructive image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tool, and its closest rival is Adobe Lightroom Classic. Capture One regularly features in our guide to the best photo editing software, thanks to its high-quality raw processing, in-depth color controls and layer and mask based editing.

Capture One has released a 14.4.1 update for Capture One 21 which supports three new cameras and adds automatic lens correction profiles for eight new lenses. The 14.4.1 update also includes “added support for Windows 11.

Capture One is a high-end alternative to Lightroom which offers the same combination of image cataloguing and non-destructive editing tools, and with high-quality raw processing and advanced, layers based local adjustments and masks.

It’s more expensive to buy than Lightroom, but many may consider its results and its tools worth the extra outlay. It’s also available for a single licence fee as well as a subscription.

Capture One for all cameras is the top-end version, but there are also less expensive Nikon, Fujifilm and Sony editions for users of those cameras only.

Capture One 14.4.1 update details

The new cameras supported are the Sony ZV-E10 vlogging camera, the Panasonic Lumix GH5 II hybrid stills and film camera, and the Fujifilm X-T30 II, a light update of the original X-T30.

Here’s a list of the new lenses supported:

• Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8-25mm F4.0 PRO
• Canon RF 24-70mm F2.8L IS USM
• Sigma 35mm F1.4 DG DN | A (L-mount)
• Sigma 35mm F1.4 DG DN | A (Sony E)
• Sigma 35mm F2 DG DN | C (L-mount)
• Sigma 35mm F2 DG DN | C (Sony E)
• Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN | A (L-mount)
• Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN | A (Sony E)
• Phase One RS 150mm MKIII Aerial
• Phase One Industrial - Schneider Kreuznach RS 80mm-Ar

You can download a trial version of Capture One 21 from the Capture One website, and if you’re an existing users you see a notification of the new version in the Preferences panel – or choose Check for Updates from the Capture One menu.

The headline news in Capture One 14.3 is the new Magic Brush tool, which lets you simply paint over areas you want to mask for quick and simple adjustments. Capture One says it will create a precise and refined mask as you brush.

The masking tools in Capture One are already very powerful, and used alongside Photoshop-style adjustment layers so that images can be edited and re-edited non-destructively.

The new Magic Brush adds to these with a quick and intuitive way to select objects or areas for adjustment in an even simpler way than the existing Brush tool.

Browsing enhancements in Capture One 14.3

While not as exciting sounding as the Magic Brush, Capture One 14.3 brings some important and long-awaited updates to the image browsing and organizing experience.

Until now, Capture One has one been able to show images in the folder you are browsing directly, so that if you store photos in subfolders, you can’s see them all at once. In this new version, however, you can opt to show images not just in the currently selected folder but in subfolders too – Capture One says this is one of its most–asked-for organization features.

The new subfolder support also extends to Capture One’s Synchronisation feature. Previously, it would only synchronise new files in folders previously added to the catalog, but now it will automatically import new folders too.

This brings Capture One 14.3 up to speed with Adobe Lightroom, which already offers subfolder browsing and folder synchronisation. For those who prefer Capture One’s editing tools and raw processing, it’s another good reason to make the swap.

Effortless Export 

Finally, Capture One has revamped the Exporter window to show all the export options in one place. There’s also a new Proofing Viewer to visualise images with all the export settings applied. 

And there’s one more thing: previously, if an identical file already exists, the exporter will now offer the option to overwrite it rather than simply creating an additional version – another top-requested features.

To download the update, simply click on the new link in the Capture One Welcome screen, or choose Check for Updates from the Capture One menu.

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Capture One has provided no details on the new Capture One for iPad edition, except to say that it will arrive in “early 2022”. It’s clearly a development announcement at this stage, but is nevertheless exciting news for iPad owning photographers.

Capture One for iPad will join several high-end mobile photography tools already available for the Apple iPad. These include Affinity Photo for iPad, Photoshop for iPad and Lightroom.

These programs all interface with the desktop version using cloud synchronisation tools. Photoshop and Lightroom use Adobe’s own Creative Cloud servers, while Affinity Photo uses Apple’s native iCloud storage. We have no information yet on how the iPad edition of Capture One might work, but if Capture One can leverage the tools in iCloud there may be not need for a separate subscription service.

• See also: Why I dumped Lightroom CC and went back to Lightroom Classic

Capture One and what it does

The existing desktop edition of Capture One is like a high-end Lightroom alternative, offering non-destructive editing and raw processing, seamless raw processing alongside regular JPEG and TIFF files, local image adjustments and preset Styles.

The differences between Capture One and Lightroom are mainly in their raw processing, Styles/presets and local adjustments. Capture One tends to produce finer detail with less noise, it has a smaller ecosystem of premium quality editing Styles (Presets, in Lightroom), and a more advanced system of local adjustments based around adjustment layers and both parametric (adjustable) masks and highly editable raster (bitmap) masks.

Unlike Lightroom, Capture One is available both on a subscription and as a single purchase. The ‘all cameras’ version is the most versatile, but there are also cheaper Nikon, Sony or Fujifilm editions for photographers who use those brands specifically.

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Capture One 21 is a direct rival to Adobe Lightroom and aimed squarely at busy, quality conscious professionals. This latest update should make image importing more selective and efficient, and adds quick Style Brush adjustments for faster editing.

If you’re already a Capture One 21 user, this is a free update and one that’s definitely worth installing. You should get a notification within the application.

The new Capture One 21 Import Viewer

You don’t always want to import every image off a memory card or from a folder on your computer, but previously you would need to import them all before you could zoom in and look at them properly, so it was somewhat inefficient to do your image culling after you had imported them all.

The new Import Viewer has been designed to allow effective image culling as part of the import process. You can now double-click an image in the Import panel to inspect it properly and there are shortcut keys for moving through your images picking or unpicking them as you go through. Capture One says the Import View is very fast, using the embedded JPEG previews in raw files.

Capture One 21 Style Brushes

This is a new tool in Capture One which is not unlike the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom. The new tool includes 26 built in Style Brushes for popular adjustments, such as brightness and saturation to more complex options like the ‘Deep Sky’ brush.

Choosing a Style Brush activates Capture One’s Draw Mask tool so that you can immediately start brushing the adjustment on to your image. The adjustment is saved as a regular adjustment layer and mask in Capture One, but is much faster to use than the traditional method of creating the layer first and then brushing in a mask.

Other improvements in Capture One 21

The Capture One 21 14.1.0 update also adds almost 30 new ProStandard profiles for popular professional cameras, for a more natural and accurate color rendition with these cameras, and Leica Live-View shooters get support for panning and zooming with Leica SL cameras and the medium format S3.

There’s new camera raw file support too for the following camera models: Fujifilm GFX 100S , Fujifilm X-E4 , Sony A1 (not yet with lossless compressed raw support), Canon SX70 HS, Panasonic DC-GX800, Panasonic DC-GX850, Panasonic DC-GX880, Panasonic DC-GF10, Panasonic DC-GF90, Panasonic DC-GF9.

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Capture One 21 Pro is a non-destructive image cataloguing and editing program that offers an almost identical set of features to Lightroom Classic. 

It is roughly twice the price of Lightroom, but it’s designed for professional workflows either with tethered studio shooting in ‘sessions’, or for large-scale Lightroom-style image cataloguing, organising and editing. It also has a more powerful layers-based approach to local adjustments, advanced color controls and a raw processing engine which produces smoother, crisper output than Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.

Capture One is a desktop application that uses desktop storage, so it’s closest to Lightroom Classic and quite unlike the cloud-based Lightroom CC. It was originally developed and sold by medium format camera maker Phase One, but it’s now been split off into its own company.

Capture One (the company) also makes a range of Style packs, which are the equivalent of Lightroom presets and can be bought separately or as bundles with the software.

Capture One 21 Pro: Specifications

Processor (Mac): Intel Core i3 (4-core recommended)
Processor (Windows): Intel or AMD CPU with 2 cores (4-core recommended)
OS (Mac): macOS 10.13, macOS 10.14, macOS 10.15, macOS 11.0
OS (Windows): Windows 8.1 64-bit, Windows 10 64-bit
RAM: 8GB (16+GB recommended)
Hard disk space: 10GB (SSD recommended)

Capture One 21 Pro: Key features

Capture One offers both a ‘sessions’ based workflow for studio photography, and tethered shooting is its speciality – Capture One has just announced a partnership with Leica to allow tethered shooting with Leica cameras for the first time ever. Sessions are ideal when you need to shoot, select and edit images for a client on a job by job basis.

Capture One can also work as a Lightroom-style cataloguing tool, storing all our images in a centralized catalog with tools for sorting, filtering and rating your images, and the ability to store them in collections and smart collections. Capture One says that searching and browsing is faster than ever in this latest version.

Capture One 21 can ‘reference’ your images in their existing locations, but Mac users may be interested to learn that it can also import them into the catalog itself, so that you get a single big catalog file rather than having your photos spread across your computer – just like Apple’s long-lamented Aperture.

Capture One’s editing tools are non-destructive, just like Lightroom’s, and organised into configurable tabs at the side of the screen. It doesn’t have the multi-module layout of Lightroom Classic, and all your tasks, including image export, take place in a single window, with the option to display the Viewer (for editing), Browser panel or both.

The global adjustment tools are very powerful, and include both RGB and Luminance curves adjustments, high dynamic range controls, advanced selective color editing and, in Capture One 21, a new Dehaze tool.

The local adjustments are especially interesting. Where Lightroom uses ‘pins’ to position adjustments directly on the image, Capture One uses adjustment layers with powerful masking options. Lightroom’s local adjustment tools are a subset of the full range, but Capture One lets you use all adjustments on any adjustment layer. You can even name them to remind yourself what you’ve done.

Other new features in Capture One 21 include support for 8-bit Apple HEIC image files, and new ProStandard Profiles for selected cameras, to give more accurate and consistent colors during adjustments.

Capture One 21 editions

If you go for the Pro version reviewed here, it works out at about twice the price of Lightroom. Lightroom is subscription-only, of course, but you can get a subscription to Capture One 21 too, and its twice the price of the Adobe Photography Plan at $19 per month. Alternatively, you can buy a perpetual license for $299/£299.

However, we always like to point out that ‘perpetual’ licenses don’t include version updates. Sooner or later you’ll need to pay to upgrade to a newer version, so subscriptions (which include updates) do make a lot of sense.

There are other Capture One versions. You can get Sony, Nikon or Fujifilm-specific editions at a much lower price of $199 for a perpetual license or $9 per month.

There are even free Capture One Express for Fujifilm and Sony editions, which are basic cut-down versions of the full software, but still deliver Capture One’s excellent raw processing and output.

Ease of use

You wouldn’t call Capture One 21 beginner-friendly, exactly, but for anyone who already knows their way around an image-editor, it’s perfectly straightforward. Initially, the number of tool tabs, and the number of panels on each, can look daunting, but you quickly remember where the tools you need are located, and there’s a Quick tool tab where you can gather together all your favorite settings.

The interface is very easy to customise, and each tool tabs has a fixed and a scrolling section where panels will expand and contract automatically to fit the screen space, or you can leave them open and scroll the panel up and down.

The local adjustment tools are really slick. The options are similar to those in Lightroom, with a manual brush tool, linear gradient and radial gradient, and there is an auto mask option and ‘luminance masking’ that applies a mask selectively, based on the colors and tones in the image.

What makes the differences is that your adjustments are stored on layers, and you can even rename the layers to remind you what you’ve done and where to find each adjustment.

Capture One is clearly trying to capture (sorry!) a broader audience, too. Capture One 21 has a new Learn button which display a curated set of tutorials.

Quality of results

If you’ve only ever used Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom for your raw processing, you might be surprised to learn that all raw processors are not the same. Lightroom is good at rendering textures but rather noisy, even in comparison to in-camera JPEGs. Capture One is completely different. Raw images are much smoother and much less noisy, and fine detail is rendered with biting clarity. Lightroom is all right, but Capture One’s raw processing is on a higher level.

There is a new Dehaze tool which is interesting, and it’s not like the one in Lightroom. It has a subtler contrast increasing effect without the increased noise and sometimes over-processed look of the Lightroom tool. It’s different, though not necessarily better.

Capture One doesn’t support quite the same number of cameras and lenses as Lightroom but it’s close, and you can check the Capture One cameras supported online.

There will be some things you can’t do in Capture One that require a regular photo editor like Photoshop or Affinity Photo, or a plug-in. Capture One does not support plug-ins in the same way that Adobe does, but it does offer round-tripping to external editors, which can amount to the same thing. Because the Nik Collection plug-ins also work as standalone programs, you can use them as external editors in Capture One too.

Capture One 21: Verdict

Capture One 21 is fast, efficient and polished. It has tutorials for new users but it’s not aimed at beginners. It is ideal, however, for photographers who already have a little experience and are looking for a step up in control, image quality and workflow.

It’s ideal too for professional photographers working in a studio, and held in high regard as the probably the best tethered shooting tool for pros.

But Capture One is not just for studio photographers – it’s perfect for anyone who shoots raw and wants to get the best possible results from their raw files. This is where Capture One really excels.

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Capture One does pretty much everything Lightroom does, but with more advanced processing and local adjustment tools, and Capture One 21 brings speed and workflow improvements and some interesting new tools.

Lightroom might be the photographer’s go-to image cataloguing and processing tool, but Capture One’s raw processing and masking tools are on a higher level. It’s also popular with studio photographers for its tethered shooting mode, where its session-based workflow is custom made for capturing, editing and sorting images on the fly.

With this version, Capture One has worked with Leica to add the Leica SL2 and S3 to its list of cameras supported with tethered shooting, with more to follow. The two companies have also been collaborating on tailored profiles for Leica cameras.

Capture One 21 new features

Capture One features a number of workflow enhancements, one of which is its new Speed Edit mode. This offers rapid editing adjustments for single images or across multiple photos without the need for individual slider adjustments – just hotkeys and scroll, drag or arrow keys.

Capture One has also added a Dehaze tool, which is designed to cut through atmospheric haze by automatically adjusting a ‘matrix’ of contrast, saturation and other adjustments. We hope this will prove as useful as the Dehaze tool in Lightroom, which is great for adding depth and drama to all sorts of images, not just landscapes.

On the organisational side, Capture One says the image import process is now both faster and more selective, with better selection tools and high-resolution thumbnails. You will be able to import photos from more than one folder at a time, and once images are imported, searching a browsing should be faster too.

Capture One is also introducing ProStandard Profiles for selected camera models. These use new color science technologies to preserve authentic colors and prevent color shifts while making adjustments, which Capture One describes as a “game changer” for product and portrait photography.

Other enhancements in Capture One 21 include hover tooltips for controls and a new Learn button that displays editing tutorials. The new version also supports 8-bit HEIC image files from Apple devices and others.

Capture One editions

Capture One comes in different versions. The regular version is most expensive but covers all cameras, but there are Nikon, Canon and Sony specific versions at almost half the price. There is even a free Capture One Express version with a limited set of tools. 

Price and availability

Capture One 21 is available now either as a perpetual license at $299 or a subscription starting at $20/month. Existing users can upgrade from $159. There are specific versions for Nikon, Canon and Sony cameras costing $129 for a perpetual license, on subscription at $9.99/month with upgrades from previous versions starting at $109.

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Capture One 20 is a high-end alternative to Lightroom, and it's just been updated with a new look, some new tools and features and – most exciting of all – a new, cheaper edition specifically for Nikon owners. 

Capture One offers the same blend of cataloguing, editing and retouching tools as Lightroom, with ultra-high quality RAW processing and advanced layers-based adjustments. It's on our list of the best photo editing software you can get. It is more expensive than Lightroom for the full version, but you can still buy a licence outright OR take out a subscription, and there brand-specific versions for Fujifilm, Sony and now Nikon users which are a lot cheaper. In fact, these will sell for about the same price as Lightroom was before it went subscription only.

Capture One for Nikon

This new version offers all the tools of the full Capture One 20 Pro software, including all its advanced editing, cataloguing and workflow tools, but only edits RAW files from Nikon cameras rather than all brands. If you're a Nikon owner, that's fine – and you pay half as much for the software as you would for the full version. There are already Capture One Fujifilm and Sony versions which offer the same cost-savings for owners of those cameras. Rumors of a new Capture One Nikon version first surfaced when long-time Nikon photographer Joe McNally was quoted singing its praises.

Capture One for Nikon price and availability:

Perpetual license: $129/£129
Monthly subscription: $9.99/£9.99

New features in Capture One 20

The logo change will probably be the biggest shock for existing Capture One owners, but there are important changes to some of the tools too.

There are new Heal and Clone tools which automatically create an image layer of the right type (previously you had to do this yourself), there are now an unlimited number of heal zones per layer (previously it was one per layer) and you can now move and transform the heal and source zones.

A new Before & After tool offers a full view or split screen comparison of an image before and after editing – and not just one image at a time, but multiple images apparently.

And for users migrating to Capture One from Lightroom, there's an improved Lightroom Catalog Import process which not only replicates basic image adjustments and the catalog structure, but now imports off-line images too – reconnecting them when the drive is plugged back in.

The Capture One 20 update also includes support for new cameras and lenses, including the Canon EOS 250D, Canon PowerShot G5X Mark II, Canon PowerShot G7X Mark III, Nikon P950, Leica M10 Monochrom, Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III, Zeiss ZX1, Phase One iXH 150.

The Zeiss ZX1 support is interesting! Clearly this semi-mythical camera is closer than we thought if Capture One 20 supports it already. Normally, camera RAW support only arrives after a camera is already in production and on sale.

Capture One 20 price and availability

Capture One 20 is available now from the Capture One website, and is a free updated for existing Capture One 20 users.

Perpetual license: $299/£299, upgrade from $159/£159
Monthly subscription: $20/£20
Student price: Save 65% (with verification)

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Capture One is Phase One's answer to Adobe Lightroom, an all-in-one image organising tool, non-destructive raw processor, photo editor and effects program. It can also work in 'Sessions' mode as a purpose-made studio tethered shooting tool, where it's held in high regard by many professional portrait, fashion and commercial photographers. It's also on our list of the best photo editing software today.

This latest version skips a few version numbers, leaping from Capture One 12 (the 'old' version) to Capture One 20, swapping to what we assume is year-based numbering.

Phase One says this latest version has been developed from user feedback but with a few ideas of its own as well. The improvements are based around the editing tools, both in terms of output quality and overall workflow.

What's new in Capture One 20

Noise reduction gets a boost, with claimed improvements to color and detail retention at high ISO settings. Capture One now tailors the noise reduction for every ISO setting for each supported camera. The noise reduction tool tackles both luminance noise and color noise, and with improved recognition of patterns and edges and improved color accuracy. The Amount slider now has a stronger effect and noise reduction is increased for higher ISO images.

Capture One has always had strong color editing tools, and in this latest version the Basic Color Editor now offers eight color ranges rather than six, and a new Direct Color Editor cursor lets you drag any area on a photo to shift the hue, saturation and lightness of a specific color range.

The High Dynamic Range tool now looks a little different too (the equivalent of the Highlight and Shadow recovery sliders in Lightroom). Now, the settings adjustments are zeroed in the center, so you can make both positive and negative adjustments to either recover detail from the shadows and highlights or exaggerate them and boost contrast. There's no much more control over the way shadows and highlights are recovered and boosted.

Phase One has also modified Capture One's Crop tool for easier crop visualization and transformation. You can crop from the center, rotate the crop/image and use modifier keys to lock the aspect ratio.

Capture One 20 brings sundry other workflow and interface improvements, plus support for some of the latest cameras, including the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III, Canon EOS M6 Mark II, Canon EOS 90D, Nikon Z 50 and Ricoh GR III. It also adds support for the Panasonic Lumix S1H, Leica V-LUX 5 and (at last) the Pentax K-1 II.

 Capture One 20 pricing and availability

Capture One 20 is available now in several versions. The regular version, Capture One Pro 20, supports cameras from all major camera brands, but there are also cheaper Capture One Pro 20 (for Sony) and Capture One Pro Fujifilm 20 specifically for those camera brands.

You can buy a Capture One Pro 20 licence outright (unlike Lightroom) for $299 (upgrade price $159), while the Sony and Fujifilm versions are much cheaper at $129. Or, if you don't want the up-front cost, you can take out an Adobe-style subscription from $15 per month ($8 per month for the Sony and Fujifilm editions.

If you want to try Capture One 20 before deciding, you can download a fully featured 30-day Capture One Pro 20 trail to help you make your mind up. If you're an enthusiast or pro who puts a big emphasis on image quality, it's definitely worth a look. It's more expensive than Lightroom, but for many the results will justify the extra outlay.

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Phase One has just announced a huge 65% student discount on its professional image cataloging, organising and processing tool. A close rival to Lightroom, Capture One is renowned for its tethered shooting capabilities, editing tools and the quality of its raw processing, and it’s used widely in professional and commercial photography.

If you’re a student, or you know someone who is, it’s an opportunity to use one of the industry’s best photo editing programs for less than the cost of an Adobe Photography Plan, which starts at $9.99/£9.98 per month. Adobe does offer its own student discounts but only on its All Apps plan, which is more expensive. 

‘’See Beyond. Trust your vision. Trust your tools”

Under this scheme, qualifying students (see the Capture One website) will be able to get Capture One Pro for a monthly subscription of $7/£7 or an annual pre-paid subscription of $63/£63 – the discount applies to Capture One subscriptions, not the perpetual licence version. 

Software subscriptions are not popular with all photographers, but they do offer a much cheaper entry point for professional software than traditional one-off licence fees.

Students can get involved with this new Capture One initiative by sharing their work on Instagram under the hashtag #trustyourvision, and joining a new dedicated Capture One Creative Lab - Students Facebook group.

If you’re not a student, by the way, but you do use Fujifilm or Sony cameras, you still have until the end of August 2019 to get a perpetual licence for Capture One Pro for Sony or Fujifilm at half price.

You can find out more about this Capture One student scheme on the Capture One website.

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Capture One Pro is Phase One’s professional image capture, processing and cataloguing application and it’s aimed squarely at professional and commercial photographers. So as well as producing the software itself, Phase One also releases Styles packs to give your images instant professional ‘looks’.

Capture One Pro is one of the best photo editing programs for expert and professional users, and its Styles work just like the presets in Lightroom, applying a set of specific image adjustments with a single click. But where there are countless free Lightroom presets flooding the market and a host of paid-for third-party Lightroom preset packs, Capture One likes to produce its own presets in-house, commissioning professional photographers to produce their own distinctive ‘looks’.

The two new Styles packs just introduced are part of Capture One’s ‘Latitude’ series and are called ‘Pacific’ and ‘Infinite Peaks’. They’ve been produced by John Schell and Bryan Minear exclusively for Capture One, and these are pro photographers whose clients include the likes of Sketchers and Budweiser.

John Schell’s ‘Pacific’ pack includes seven styles called ‘Malibu Surfrider Beach’, ‘Ocean Beach’, ‘Rincon Point’, ‘San Onofre’, ‘Sandy Beach’, ‘Topanga’ and ‘Venice Beach’. He says, “”Taking inspiration from some of my favorite surf spots on the US West Coast, I used Capture One to push colors and tones far beyond what was previously possible. The result is rich, deep tones and low-contrast images which look like they were lifted straight from memory.”

Bryan Minear’s ‘Infinite Peaks’ pack also has seven styles, called ‘Blue Ridge’, ‘Cascade’, ‘Olympic’, ‘Olympic 2’, ‘Sierra’, ‘Smoky’, ‘Smoky 2’ and ‘Yukon’ (‘Yukon’ is a strong look – we like it). He says, “This pack was inspired by some of my favorite locations around the globe. I’ve spent years developing my personal artistic vision and created these Styles to make it accessible. With contrasty, emotion-inducing looks, I hope they inspire you to become a freer artist and more seasoned traveler.”

How Capture One Pro Styles work

Capture One says that its new styles have been designed to work across a wide range of image types from portraits to seascapes, though as with any preset a lot depends on matching the Style to the subject to get the right ‘look’.

But as well as using the Styles as-is, you can modify the settings to tweak the results, and Capture One Styles can also be applied to layers rather than directly to the image, which enables you to modify the opacity of the Style and even combine it with other Styles.

The Styles themselves take up very little space as they are simply sets of processing parameters, albeit carefully judged and combined by pro photographers. Once they’re downloaded, you simply import them into Capture One Pro where they are then available to apply to any image.

The ‘Pacific’ and ‘Infinite Peaks’ Styles packs can be purchased together at a special price of £49/$49 up until June 30th 2019.

After that, prices revert to the standard £34/$34 per Style pack or £99/$99 for the full ‘Latitude’ Style kit, which includes four Style packs – the new ‘Pacific’ and ‘Infinite Peaks’ packs and the existing ‘Deep Forest’ and ‘Sunbound’ packs.

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Capture One is an all-in-one image cataloguing, raw processing and editing program that competes head-on with Adobe Lightroom. It's famous for the quality of its raw processing, tethered shooting and editing tools, and it's also available for a single 'perpetual' licence fee, unlike its arch-rival Lightroom. (There is a subscription option too.)

Unfortunately, Capture One is also expensive, at £299/$299 for the regular version, so although it's always near the top of our list of the best photo editing software you can get, its price puts it firmly in professional territory.

But Phase One also makes cheaper Sony and Fujifilm versions made specifically for these two camera brands, and it's these that have had their prices chopped. So if you are a Sony or a Fujifilm user and you're looking for the best possible image quality from your camera's raw files, this seems like an unmissable opportunity.

It's especially good news for Fujifilm owners since most raw processing software tends to struggle with the Fujifilm X-Trans sensor's unique colour filter array (raw specialist DxO doesn't support X-Trans sensors at all). Lightroom doesn't do a bad job, but Capture One Pro leads the field here, especially now that Phase One has added in dedicated Fujifilm Film Simulation profiles to replicate the look of Classic Velvia, Provia, Acros and other film types from raw files.

Capture One: how it works, where to get it

Capture works in a couple of different ways. You can import images into a searchable catalog, just as you do with Lightroom, but with the added option of storing images within the catalog itself and not just externally as 'reference' files.

It also offers an alternative 'sessions' based workflow, both for tethered shooting and instant playback and editing, and for browsing and editing your images within their original folders, without having to import them into a catalog.

Capture One offers a similar range of adjustment tools to Lightroom, but with especially advanced local adjustments stored in separate adjustment layers, each with its own mask, and with all adjustment tools available on each layer.

You can find out more at the Capture One website, where you'll also find a 30-day free trial. If you like it, that should give you just enough time to buy Capture One Sony or Fujifilm editions before the August deadline!

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If you've always wanted to experience medium format photography but couldn't justify the cost, there's a fantastic deal right now that makes it a realistic option. The fantastic Fujifilm GFX 50R is currently available with £450 off the ticket price, taking it down to just £3,549. Trade in a qualifying camera and it costs just £3,279! 

On top of that, you can get Capture One Pro – one of the most powerful image editing packages, which is favored by professionals – for half price when you purchase it at the same time!  

We awarded this mirrorless camera a full five stars in our Fujifilm GFX 50R review, and it also ranks third in our list of best medium format cameras. 

The rangefinder-style camera (which is the 'R' in the name) is fully weather-sealed and boasts a glorious 51.4MP medium format image sensor. It's substantially larger (67%, in fact) than the sensors found in full-frame cameras, and offers truly enviable  image size and quality.

Weighing in at 775g (body only) and measuring 160.7 x 96.5 x 66.4mm, it's not a small camera but it's certainly the lightest and most compact medium format body around. This means you can take medium format images on the go, which has the potential to truly elevate the quality of your photography. 

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Many software publishers offer preset packs for different image styles, but high-end medium format specialist Phase One works with some of the world’s leading commercial photographers and retouchers. It has produced this Editorial Color Grading Style Pack in collaboration with three top names, Michael Woloszynowicz, Marie Bärsch, and Pratik Naik, whose work has appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and other prestigious titles.

These Style Packs work in conjunction with Capture One, Phase One’s professional image cataloging, raw processing and editing software, and a direct rival to Adobe Lightroom. Capture One is particularly well regarded for its studio-based tethered shooting capabilities and its ability to work with ‘Sessions’ or regular catalogs.

Capture One has been in the news recently with its new collaboration with Fujifilm and support for its Film Simulations and medium-format GFX models. Capture One has recently been updated to version 12.0.2 to include support for the new Fujifilm X-T30, together with a number of Fujinon prime lenses.

How Capture One Style Packs work

The Editorial Color Grading Style Pack is one of a number of Styles Packs available from the Phase One website. They combine carefully chosen image adjustments to create a certain ‘look’. They use tools and features already available in the software, but what you’re paying for is the skill of the photographer and retoucher in choosing, combining and balancing these adjustments.

Capture One Styles are easy to download and import from within the software itself. Once installed, they can be applied with a single click, and you’re then free to modify or add to the Style as you see fit.

The Editorial Color Grading Style Pack is available from the Phase One website. It includes seven Styles from each of the three photographers to make a total of 21, and sells for £68/$68. Alternatively, you can buy the individual photographers’ 7-Style packs for £34/$34 each.

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Update (5 December, 2018): DxO has announced that PhotoLab 2.1 has been released. This update adds file-indexing to the macOS version of the software. The software also adds support capabilities for three new devices, including the Nikon Z 7, Fujifilm X-A5 and the DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone.

DxO PhotoLab 2 will incorporate a brand new DxO PhotoLibrary feature so that you can not only apply sophisticated optical corrections, state of the art raw conversions and powerful local adjustments, but organize your photo collection too.

For most photographers DxO is probably best known for its Optics Pro raw conversion and correction software, but DxO’s acquisition of the Nik Collection of plug-ins last year enabled it to relaunch DxO Optics Pro as DxO PhotoLab, with sophisticated local correction tools. This new image organization capability brings PhotoLab 2 closer to a fully-featured standalone all-in-one photo organizing and editing solution to compete with the likes of Adobe Lightroom and Capture One Pro.

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That’s very exciting because DxO is a big name in optical science. It specialises in optical analysis and lens corrections, and in processing raw image data to extract the maximum possible quality. Behind the scenes, DxO technology has been incorporated into 400 million devices to date. It also makes the DxO Analyzer kit used by Digital Camera World in camera tests. 

The quality of the raw conversions and lens corrections in DxO Optics Pro was already outstanding, but the rapidly developing features in DxO PhotoLab have promoted it from a powerful but specialised tool into a very interesting mainstream photo-editor.

What’s new in DxO PhotoLab 2

DxO has updated the PhotoLab interface to accommodate the new photo organising features. The Organize panel in the previous version was a simple folder browser, but that’s been replaced by a new PhotoLibrary panel which includes both a folder display and a new image search tool. 

DxO says it has concentrated on PhotoLab 2’s search engine, introducing an auto-complete feature which suggests image metadata matches as you type, such as ISO settings, focal lengths, shutter speeds, filenames, star ratings and more. We’re told that keywords will be added towards the end of 2018.

At the same time, the company has upgraded PhotoLab’s ClearView feature, which is designed to cut haze in landscape shots but can actually improve contrast and saturation across a wide range of subjects.

The new version eliminates the ‘halo’ effect you could sometimes get around object outlines if the adjustment was pushed too far, and can be applied to the image as a whole or selected areas.

DxO has also added DCP color profile support to PhotoLab 2. These are special camera calibration profiles which can be used as part of an overall colour management workflow by photographers who need very accurate end-to-end colour rendition, a reflection of DxO’s ongoing drive towards technical accuracy.

Other DxO PhotoLab features remain the same. Lens correction profiles are applied automatically using the shooting information embedded in the camera’s image files, and to date DxO has produced profiles for 42,000 different camera/lens combinations.

PhotoLab 2 will also have DxO’s powerful PRIME denoise tool, which does require a longer processing time than regular denoising, though it’s now four times faster than when first introduced.

A new DxO website and a special offer

To top it all off, DxO is celebrating the arrival of PhotoLab 2 with a brand new website and blog, promising ‘a new way to interact with users’ not just with science, but with culture, art and technique articles too. Exciting times!

DxO PhotoLab 2 will be available in a cut-down Essential edition and a full-blown Elite version. Until November 18 2018, PhotoLab 2 Essential will be on offer for £79.99/$99.99 instead of the usual price of £99/$129, while PhotoLab 2 Elite will sell initially at £119.99/$149.99 instead of the usual price of £159/$199.

Capture One Pro is a high-end alternative to Adobe Lightroom, offering a similar combination of image cataloguing, raw processing and editing tools but with what's widely regarded as perhaps the best quality raw conversions, colour editing and workflow tools for pros, plus industry-standard tethering tools for studio photography.

The new version brings support for raw files from the new Nikon Z6 and Z7 mirrorless cameras, the Canon EOS R, EOS M50 and the Fujifilm GFX 50R.

Capture One Pro 12 also has a brand new Parametric Masking engine which lets you create Linear Gradient and Radial Gradient masks which can be modified later. This brings it into line with Lightroom's re-editable masking tools. Capture One Pro already has an internal adjustment layers system that makes complex adjustments easier to view and manage.

Taking the masking tools a step further, Capture One Pro 12 also introduces Luma Range luminosity masking tools which can create a mask based on the brightness of different areas in the picture. These can be copied from one image to another and will automatically adapt to the each picture. They can be used for selective noise reduction or highly selective colour or tonal adjustments.

It's all designed to make Capture One Pro even more powerful and flexible, and Phase One has also redesigned the interface with this in mind, with new icons, improved spacing, better sliders and a menu system that's been reorganised to be more logical and welcoming to new users.

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Great news for Fujifilm fans

Phase One promised at Photokina 2018 that it would bring support for Fujifilm's renowned Film Simulation modes, and this has been added in Capture One Pro 12. The software can now open raw files from all Fujifilm camera models and recreate 16 different in-camera modes, including Velvia, Provia and Fujifilm's Acros black and white Film Simulation.

This support extends to Fujifilm's medium format GFX 50S and GFX 50R models, which was one of the exciting announcements at Photokina – Phase One makes its own competing medium format cameras, so it was great to hear that the company's software would now support the rival Fujifilm models.

Pricing and 30-day trial

Capture One Pro 12 costs $299 for a perpetual licence (upgrade price from $149), but it's also available in brand-specific Capture One Pro Sony 12 and Capture One Pro Fujifilm 12 editions which cost $219. 

Alternatively, you can get Capture One Pro 12 on an Adobe-style subscription plan for $15 per month for the full version, or $14 per month for the Sony or Fujifilm versions.

If you want to try it out first, you can download a fully-featured 30-day trial from the Phase One website.

It is more expensive than Lightroom, but Capture One Pro 12 is aimed at a high-end professional market where its studio tethering tools, streamlined editing workflow and the quality of its raw processing have already earned it a formidable reputation.

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Fujifilm’s X-mount cameras use a special X-Trans sensor that can deliver superb results but poses tricky processing problems for some raw converters. 

Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom are the go-to raw converters for most photographers, but can produce strange worm-like artefacts in fine details – it’s a strange description, but you’ll understand it when you see it.

There’s always the free SilkyPix RAW FILE CONVERTER EX 2.0 provided by Fujifilm, but this is not great to use, and that other top raw processing application DxO PhotoLab does not support Fujifilm X-Trans files at all.

The one tool that’s both good to use and does a great job is Phase One’s premium-priced Capture One Pro. Until now, this meant splashing out a pretty stiff €180 (about $209 / £162) for an annual subscription or £289 (about $377 / €327) for a perpetual licence.

But Photokina 2018 brought a very exciting announcement. Phase One would produce an Express version specifically for Fujifilm cameras and, like the Express version it makes for Sony cameras, it would be free. You can download Capture One Express Fujifilm here.

That’s not all. Phase One also announced it would support the medium format Fujifilm GFX, a rival camera to its own medium format camera range. That’s great news for GFX owners (and for Fujifilm) because Capture One is the favourite tool of countless pro studio photographers.

Features

Obviously the Express version does not have all the features of the Pro edition. You don’t get layers based local adjustments, Capture One Pro’s tethered shooting tools and ‘Sessions’ based workflow, perspective corrections and spot removal. That sounds like a long list, but the list of what you do get is even longer.

For a start, Capture One Express Fujifilm has the full program’s cataloguing tools. Once you’ve imported your raw files into the catalog, you can organise them by folder or into Albums and Smart Albums. You get a full set of search and keyboarding tools too.

Capture One Express Fujifilm will also display images from other camera brands, whether they’re JPEGs or raw files, but other raw formats can’t be edited.

The editing tools themselves are straightforward and effective. They’re arranged into ‘tool tabs’ for Quick adjustments, Lens corrections, Color, Exposure, Details, Adjustments (Styles and Presets) and Metadata. Each tool tab has collapsible adjustment panels, so the Quick tool tab, for example, has White Balance, Exposure, High Dynamic Range (shadow and highlight adjustment), Black & White and Clarity panels. 

Without the advanced controls and local adjustments of the Pro version, there’s only so far you can go with your raw files before you need to swap to another image-editor for complicated effects, layers and local enhancements, but Capture One Pro can still deliver beautiful high-quality processed raw files to Photoshop, Elements, Affinity Photo or any other editor of your choice.

Performance

Capture One Express Fujifilm’s default raw conversion profile is remarkably close to Fujifilm’s own Standard/Provia JPEG rendition. Phase One has promised that it will offer profiles for each of the Fujifilm Film Simulation modes, but that’s scheduled to arrive via a later update. You might not miss them, though, because Capture One comes with some very nice one-click Styles – you can buy more Style packs or create and save your own.

The fine detail and noise control is the best we’ve seen from Fujifilm X-Trans raw conversions, though the out-of-camera Fujifilm JPEGs set the bar pretty high already.

Where Capture One really scores is its ability to pull back highlight and shadow detail with its High Dynamic Range panel in a way that looks very natural and doesn’t produce nasty edge effects.

Lens corrections are baked into Fujifilm raw files, so there’s little for Capture One to do here, though if there’s any chromatic aberration left over, there’s an Analyze option that does a remarkable job of removing any trace of fringing.

With precise tonal control via levels and curves, selective colour adjustments and the ability to output single files or batches as 8-bit JPEGS. 8-bit or 16-bit TIFFs, PNG or DNG files, Capture One Express Fujifilm offers a serious amount of power for a free application.

Verdict

Obviously you miss out on a lot of the full version’s tools, but Capture One Express Fujifilm still delivers superb conversions of your Fujifilm camera RAF files and it’s an excellent stepping stone to the full version if you like what you see – and it’s free!

Downsides? There’s only one. If you like what Capture One Express Fujifilm does, you’re almost certainly going to want the full pro version, and that’s going to leave you with a short, sharp sting to the wallet. But hey, you can spend that much on a tripod or a camera bag or a (cheap) lens, so it's worth keeping in perspective.

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Phase One is a high end maker of full-frame medium-format digital camera systems and imaging workflow software and it has announced a strategic software agreement with Fujifilm at Photokina 2018.

Phase One and Fujifilm are collaborating to extend Capture One's software support to Fujifilm's medium format GFX cameras, a vital step in breaking into this high-end photographic market. Phase One's Capture One Fujifilm edition includes support for Fujifilm's film simulation modes.

Capture One is a widely used professional image-editing, tethered shooting, cataloguing, editing and workflow tool. It has native support for more than 500 camera models, offering RAW conversion, image editing and asset management. 

In its press release, Phase One has said: "Fujifilm has a distinguished history of engineering innovative colour reproduction in its range of cameras. Thus, the collaboration between Fujifilm and Phase One is a natural development – based upon shared values such as the commitment to colour fidelity to achieve the highest image quality."

Phase One appeared alongside Fujifilm at Photokina 2018 to announce this partnership. Phase One's Vice-President of Software Business, Jan Hyldebrandt-Larsen, has said of the collaboration:

“Phase One has designed Capture One both to inspire photographers and to ensure the best workflow and user experience. We are proud to be working to share with Fujifilm shooters the opportunity to benefit from Capture One’s highly responsive processing engine, unmatched colour handling, precision-editing tools, and seamless tethered support.”

It's clear that both Phase One and Fujifilm have high ambitions for this collaboration, as this will make Capture One's RAW file support available for over 40 Fujifilm models, more than for any other camera maker. As Capture One development continues, the aim is to expand this collaboration further, with tethered support for more Fujifilm models, as well as further software support.

What is Fujifilm Film Simulations?

Fujifilm's Film Simulations aim to represent the colour and tonality of various photographic films in a digital capture. 

Currently, the camera has 16 modes available that suit various scenes and subjects. For example, “Provia”, ”Velvia” and ”Astia” reproduce iconic Fujifilm colour-reversal films; “Classic Chrome” conveys the iconic look and feel of photographic magazines from the 1950s; “PRO Neg.Std” and ”PRO Neg.Hi” reproduce professional negative film used in portrait studios; and Black and White “ACROS” reproduces smooth tonality, with a higher D-Max and richer texture.

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With more and more DSLRs, and even mirrorless cameras, boasting sensors around the 50MP mark, some photographers have remarked on the “approaching medium format” quality of modern 35mm-equivalents. 

Well, Phase One has just drawn a line in the sand with its announcement of three new IQ4 medium format Camera Systems – two of which boast gargantuan 150MP sensors, along with gargantuan price tags.

The XF IQ4 150MP Achromatic delivers 151 megapixels at a price of $54,990  (£42,614), with the slightly cheaper XF IQ4 150MP offering 151 megapixels for $51,990 USD (£40,290), while the XF IQ4 100MP Trichromatic gives you a comparatively conservative 100 megapixels for $47,990 (£37,189).

If you’re keeping track, that works out at about $344 (£267) per MP. 

On top of the raw horsepower, though, the new Camera Systems also boast ‘Capture One Inside’. Essentially, the core of the Capture One editing software has been integrated directly into the new IQ4 models, which are built on the new and expandable Infinity Platform. 

This enables a new degree of in-camera editing that was previously only possible using Capture One on a computer. On top of improved processing, live view and frame rates, the IQ4 also features Wireless, USB-C and ethernet tethering – it’s now possible to directly interface with all manner of hard drives, NAS storage and network solutions.

Whether you’d rather own a Jaguar F-Type for the same money, or even a dozen fully kitted Nikon Z7s, is another matter. There’s no arguing, though, that the IQ4 is the new king in terms of megapixel muscle and is the premier professional tool. 

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