It’s been a little while now since Capture One 21 was released. The new version of Capture One has been accompanied by a bit of a backlash about the amount of new features. Putting that aside for now, In this review I wanted to focus on a couple of things, namely the headline features of Dehaze and Speed Edit, and I’ll discuss some of the other improvements too. I’ll also look at whether or not the criticism of this release is justified.

Dehaze

For as long as I’ve been covering Capture One, people have been asking me about how to do Dehaze in the software. There are lots of techniques that you can use to approximate it, but there wasn’t a proper dehaze tool until Capture One 21.

Before I get into the new implementation, I need to clarify a couple of things about Dehaze, as there is a lot of misconception floating around about the adjustment. I’ve seen commentary suggesting that Dehaze is just levels, or curves, or a few people even suggested that Dehaze is just the same as using clarity. All of these comparisons are not true. A proper dehaze adjustment is actually a fairly complex algorithm. When I tried to recreate a version of it myself a while ago, I found that out the hard way. You can do it with a collection of tools and some masking, but it’s not the same as just using levels or curves.

So, in Capture One 21 they have introduced a new Dehaze tool, which in the default layout lives below the high dynamic range tool. This new adjustment comes int he form of a slider, and a colour picker with a pop-up menu allowing you to switch between automatic colour detection and manual.

So how does this work?

So basically you drag the slider like you do in most other applications to apply a level of dehaze. If you want to add fog, you drag it in the other direction. The colour picker allows you to select the shadow tone. Let me explain…

If you’ve used Dehaze in other software you’ve probably noticed that at high values, you often get a colour shift, usually towards blue. Well, by selecting a shadow tone using the Capture One Dehaze tool, you can compensate for this and the result is more normal colours. At least that’s the theory.

In reality, the results are a mixed bag.

Comparing it to Lightroom, I often find that the intensity is much less than you can achieve in Lightroom when using it at the maximum setting. You can get more natural colours by carefully picking the shadow tones, and sometimes you can get really good results, better in fact than you can achieve in Lightroom. On some images the results are really amazing. Other times though, they’re not so great.

Original Image

Capture One Version (Note Neutral tones)

Camera RAW / Lightroom - Note the blue shift

The big issue with Capture One 21’s Dehaze implementation is that there seems to be some bugs in the algorithm. Sometimes, depending on the image, when you drag up the slider you will get luminous blacks. The black levels will get pushed up and flattened, and take on a blue or other hue, and look like a luminous effect is going on in the shadow areas. You can sometimes correct for this by selecting a shadow tone using the colour picker on the Dehaze tool. Other times you can fix it by adjusting the overall white balance of the scene, or a combination of these. This issue seems to mostly occur when your image is mostly cooler tones or there are cool shadows, and sometimes just warming up the image can resolve it.

Either way, the results are a bit disappointing. They can be really good, but depending on the image you may get this luminous black effect that requires a bit (or sometimes a lot) of extra work to get around. If anyone from Capture One is listening, you need to work on this to eliminate this problem.

Speed Edit

The next big headline feature is “Speed Edit”. I love Speed Edit. It’s one of those things that once you get used to it, it will change the way you work with the software, especially if you need to edit a lot of images quickly.

So, before I explain what Speed Edit is, let me explain what it’s not. It’s not just some new keyboard shortcuts. I saw this narrative doing the rounds a lot, and it’s not really the case. Speed edit is a new way to edit using the keyboard and mouse, and allows you to go through images quickly without having to keep going to different parts of the interface.

Basically you hold down a certain key, and you can drag the mouse left or right to increase or decrease the value. You can do this for the main exposure adjustments, and the shadow and highlight adjustments.

The keys to use for this are as follows:

1 = Colour Balance
2 = Tint
q = Exposure
w = Contrast
e = Brightness
r = Saturation
a = Highlight
s = Shadow
d = White
f = Black

At first glance these shortcuts might make no sense, as they don’t seem to correspond to anything. In fact this was another recurring refrain from the folks who are angry about this. But it’s not about matching the key to something in the name of the adjustment. Instead it’s about the shape of the controls.

The first two keys of the numbers and first four keys of the first two lines of characters on the keyboard correspond to the controls in the three tools. This way your fingers rest naturally on these keys and you don’t have to move your hand or even look at the keyboard. Otherwise, you’d be moving your hands around much more and probably having to look to check which key you’re pressing. Using this for a short period of time it becomes muscle memory and it’s just natural.

It’s also really handy if you’re working on other tools in different tool tabs and you want to quickly adjust the exposure or high dynamic range tools. Once you get used to it, it really does speed up your workflow. Oh and it works really well with a Wacom tablet too. In fact, it’s really natural to use on a tablet, and makes editing with a tablet even easier than normally, as you can drag over a wider area than you would with just the normal sliders.

Pro Standard Colour Profiles

This was another “headline” feature that probably doesn’t seem like that big a deal for most users, and for the majority it probably won’t be. “Pro Standard Profiles” are improved calibration profiles for selected cameras. They are improved both in terms of accuracy, but also fidelity. This means that as you edit with them there should be less chance of colour shits and so on.

As I said in my initial article on Capture One 21, they haven’t really explained these in much detail, but I suspect that this isn’t just a simple re-calibration, but rather increased resolution colour profiles. In other words, if you can imagine using a number of colour swatches when creating a normal profile, these might use twice the number. This is just an analogy of course and pure speculation on my part. It mightn’t be anything like that at all.

The only camera I have that this works on is the Sony A6000 (Not sure why they chose to support this old camera before other newer ones, but anyway) and most of my images with that aren’t really the type that you would notice a huge difference with. This is really more suited to higher end studio and commercial work where colour fidelity is a big factor. I don’t think it’s really aimed at the amateur or enthusiast. Anyway, because I don’t have suitable Images I couldn’t do extensive testing on this. You can see a difference with my A6000 files, but it’s not huge. But then, as I said, my photos aren’t the right type to check this. I did notice that flesh tones seem a little better and the blues in skies are a little more pleasant.

New Learning Tools

This is another aspect that I think has been underrated and misunderstood. Capture One has always had a reputation for having a “steep Learning Curve” but in 21 they’ve done their best to address this. While the most obvious incarnation of this is probably the new “Learn” button on the menu bar, they’ve actually added a content right throughout the application.

First of all, clicking on the Learn button opens a new window with a curated set of tutorials covering the software, which are organised into a set of learning paths to cover the main functions of the software. These all link to video tutorials which are usually fairly short and concise and are pretty good for explaining how Capture One works.

Then there’s the new tool tips. When you hover over a tool panel or a tool in the menu bar, you get an enhanced tooltip which shows you a visual representation of what the tool does along with a brief explanation.

For the tool panels, this goes further and has a link to a tutorial explaining the function. On some of the tools (those in the exposure tab) there’s also a short video tutorial for the tool as well. It’s all easily accessible, and should make learning the software much easier and addresses the long running criticism that the software is hard to learn.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism online about this that it isn’t anything new or that its just rehashing old stuff, but that’s really not true. I was a bit cynical about it myself at first until I actually paid attention to what they have done here, and having gone through a lot of this, it seems to me like a good bit of thought went into this. I personally think that they did a good job on this.

Smaller Changes and under the hood improvements

There are also a number of smaller changes and some under the hood improvements.

Brush Shortcuts

If you’re fairly new to Capture One, and you use brushes on layer masks a lot, or even for cloning and healing, you’ve probably found it really annoying that you couldn’t adjust the brush size and other parameters with keyboard shortcuts. Well, finally you can, and they’ve used the same keys as Photoshop for the defaults.

HEIC Support

They’ve finally added HEIC support for devices which support the format. This is mainly geared at phone users. For some reason the software only states support for 8bit HEIC files (so the 10 bit files from some Canon cameras aren’t supported). I’m not sure why they limited it to 8bit but anyway.

Import Changes

Importing has been improved. You now get bigger and higher resolution thumbnails. You can now import from multiple folders at once, and there are new ways to mark files for selection to aid in pre-import culling. They still haven’t added the ability to view an image full size in the viewer, which I know some people have asked for. I haven’t tested these features extensively so I can’t comment on them too much.

Speed Improvements

Searching catalogues and sessions has seen speed improvements, as has other aspects of the asset management side of things. (Both Catalogues and Sessions). I haven’t really tested this or done a lot of comparisons with the previous version. It seems fairly snappy, but my computer is fairly old, so running benchmarks wouldn’t be that useful.

Conclusion and Controversy

This has been a difficult review for me to write, and I nearly didn’t write it at all. Not because there has been anything particularly bad or wrong with the application, but rather the acrimony about the release. It seems that even mentioning Capture One causes a bunch of hate comments to pile on about how terrible it is and how Capture One somehow cheated people. It’s kind of gotten a bit ridiculous. I was tempted to not touch on this at all, but I feel I have to correct a few misconceptions.

A lot of this was brought on by the pre-orders. Capture One offered a pre-order discount on upgrades a few weeks before the launch of the application. They didn’t release any feature details at the stage, and people were pissed about this. I can understand this reaction, and I can completely understand people not wanting to upgrade until they see what is in the upgrade.

But to play devils advocate here for a moment, they did this last year too, and there wasn’t nearly as much of an issue surrounding it. Also, part of the argument was, that there will be people who will always upgrade, so why not give them a discount. No one was forced to upgrade early or take advantage of the pre-order discount, but to hear some of the trolling, you would think that people were being forced to upgrade without ever seeing what was in the new version, but this wasn’t the case at all. It was merely an offer that you could take or not take. I understand both sides of view, but I do think that maybe this got a little bit overblown by one side. Capture One could certainly have handled this better PR wise, and I suspect that they will next year, but it’s hardly the end of the world level controversy that some were portraying it as.

Then there’s the issue of the update itself not having any real features, or not being worth it (according to the backlash). I went back and looked at the release notes for previous versions, and the number of improvements in this release are pretty similar to past releases. Some years there are a few more features, some years a few less. So again, nothing new, but the backlash was an order of magnitude higher this year than previous years.

I can completely understand if some people are underwhelmed by the feature list, and if they don’t need or want any of the new features. The beauty of a perpetual licence is that you don’t have to upgrade. You can skip this version if you want, and your existing version will still work. And if you are subscribing, you get the new features anyway.

For me, while I’m underwhelmed by the implementation of Dehaze, I love speed edit, and for me that alone is worth the upgrade, plus the upcoming year of support and upgrades that it brings. But I totally understand if it’s not worth it for you. At the end of the day, only you can make your mind up if its worth it or not. If you’re on the fence, I suggest you download the trial version and try it out to see if it suits your needs or not.

Pricing and Availability

Capture One 21 is available now

Capture One 21 is available as a perpetual license or subscription:

Capture One Pro 21:
- PerpetualLicense:$299
- Upgrades from select previous generations starting at $159
- Subscription starting at $20/month
Capture One 21 for Nikon, Capture One 21 (for Sony) and Capture One 21 for Fujifilm
- PerpetualLicense:$129
- Upgrades from select previous generations starting at $109
- Subscription starting at $9.99/month

For more information and full range of licensing options visit the Capture One store.

Note that this post contains paid affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links, which helps run this site.

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