Capture one has long been a rival to Lightroom, and I’ve been suggesting its use for Fuji X-Trans shooters for some time. However, Capture One Pro 9 seemed to be lacking in the quality of its conversions for X-Pro2 users and there were a number of issues holding it back. Today, Phase One launched a new version, Capture One Pro 10, and I’m happy to say that those issues are gone.

There are a lot of improvements in the application in general, and there are some specific improvements that will affect particular for X-Trans users. I’ve only been using the new version for a few hours now but based on my very limited initial testing, I do believe that Capture One is now probably the best overall application for processing X-Trans files.

So what’s new? Well, quite a lot actually. Here’s a brief breakdown from the company’s website:

High Performance Engine The Capture One Pro 10 Engine increases Performance for faster browsing, zooming, panning, adjusting and faster switching between images.

Three Step Sharpening Full control over the sharpening process from Capture to Output. Diffraction Correction, new creative tools for Halo Control makes sharpening easier, and recipe independent output sharpening remove the need to guess amounts for final size.

Output Proofing Instantly take the guess work out of resizing images: Proof ICC Profile, scale, compression and output sharpening from the Recipe in new one-click Proofing.

Camera Focus Tool Focus your tethered camera from the computer. Those tough overhead shots have never been easier.

Tangent Panel Support Support for the Tangent range of professional input panels takes adjustment to the next level. The analogue solution for your digital darkroom.

Supercharged LCC creation LCC has been reworked with multi-threading support, making LCC's up to 10 times faster to analyse.

Folder Merging In Catalogs Folders can now be moved, re-organized and merged in Catalogs using a simple drag drop

Filter By Orientation Images can now be filtered by orientation to find Landscape, Portrait or Square images.

Auto Mask for All Automask functionality is now extended to images formats other than Bayer, like Fuji Xtrans, mRAW and sRAW.

Improved sRAW and mRAW Support Capture One’s full feature set for Lens Correction, Chromatic Aberration Analysis and LCC generation can now be used with most compressed formats from Canon and Nikon. See release notes for full table of support.

Apple Script Extended (Mac Only) Meta data fields, variant selection and EIP pack state can now be targeted for automation routines.

For Fuji X-Trans users there are a couple of specifics. First of all, lens correction now seems to be properly implemented for X-Pro 2 users. This was only half working in the previous versions. I’ve checked it out on my 18-55, and it definitely seems to be correcting the images, and the checkbox is checked for correcting distortion. There’s no correction for the 35mm f/1.4, but I’m not sure there is anyway. Chromatic aberration and purple fringing reduction now seem to be fully supported.

Also, auto masking is now supported. The big thing seems to be the improved sharpening engine. I’m also not sure, but it looks as if the actual RAW conversion is much better now too, but I don’t have any written confirmation of that, and I could be imagining things. I need to do some more testing. In the past, while the quality was always better from Capture One, there was still a degree of artifacting and the smeariness that you get with fine detail in Lightroom. It was much less, but there was a trace of it. Now though, at least on the X-Pro 2 images that I’ve been testing, there doesn’t seem to be any of that.

You still need to tweak the defaults though. I’m not sure why they insist on defaulting the settings to what they have them at because they’re not representative of what you can get from the images, or what the software is capable of. I will update my guide as soon as I can for the new version (I was planning a significant overhaul anyway) but it will probably be a little while because I need to get used to it and make sure I’m recommending the right settings etc. I will try and update the supplement that comes with it for X-Pro 2 users sooner though.

Some 1:1 Crops. Click to view large. (You may need to open in a new window if you have a smaller screen)

One other thing that seems to have been improved is the preview quality. This was one of the things that put me off switching to Capture One completely in the previous versions. I found the quality of the previews to be quite poor, and it didn’t reflect things like chromatic aberration correction and so on. Previews would be harsh and often looked like they were badly sharpened, or aliased a little. This meant that the only way you could really see your images properly was at 1:1 or exported. The new engine seems to have fixed much of that and now previews are nice and smooth (maybe a little too smooth if anything) and they also seem to be better at rendering adjustments to the preview image.

Again, I’ve only been playing with this for an hour or so, so I may change my thoughts once I’ve had more time with it, but the previews do seem to be much better. It also seems to be a good bit faster too, so I’m guessing the new engine does work!

I’ll post some more over the next few days. It’s getting busy for me covering all the raw software that’s being released, between this, On1 Raw (will be leaving that alone for awhile) and Luminar (I’m working on my full review of that - It may be delayed a bit now thanks to Capture One!)

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