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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