Capture One 23 Released
Capture One has today announced the release of Capture One 23. The new release features improvements to importing, a new smart adjustments feature, the ability to save layers in styles, and fixes a long-standing limitation of variants. Capture One 23 also makes a limited version of Capture One live available for everyone.
Some key feature highlights are as follows:
Smart Adjustments
This is a new feature that they say was designed to help automate part of your workflow. Basically, it lets you set a reference image, and then will match other images to that reference. So for example if you had several photos of the same subject, all at different exposures, the smart adjustment feature is supposed to match the exposure to what you set, regardless of the image. I assume it’s using some kind of AI to do this, although it could be simpler than that, as they don’t mention AI in the release notes.
For now, it only works with exposure and white balance, and they say that the feature is targeted at portrait, wedding, and event photographers.
Improved Importing
Capture One 23 features changes to importing (again) and now includes tools for culling your images inside the import browser. A new function will automatically group images based on their similarity. There’s also a new “Cull View” in Capture One itself, that sounds very much like Lightroom’s survey view.
Layers in Styles
What it says, innit. You can now include layers in styles. Not much more to say about that.
Variant Improvements
They’ve fixed one of the most annoying behaviours of Capture One, and that was that in previous versions you couldn’t separate Variants from the master images. In other words, you were unable to store variants in separate albums from the primary image or each other. Now you can. Finally.
Capture One Live for Everyone
Capture One live is now free for everyone to use, to collaborate with clients etc. The free version has some limitations, such as session duration, and how many sessions you can run simultaneously, but it’s good to see them offering this service.
My Initial thoughts and Opinion
I’ll be honest, I was a little bit disappointed by this release. I think it’s the first time in a while that a release of Capture One has had nothing in it that appeals to me, except maybe the variant thing. Perhaps once I’ve tried it, I’ll have more of an incentive. I actually don’t think I’ll upgrade to 23 just yet. Given the price of the upgrade, this just doesn’t seem worth it. I still can’t get over the changes they made to upgrade pricing a few years ago, and the inexplicable reason that an annual subscription is more than the upgrade cost. This is despite being essentially the same thing, only if you stop subscribing it will cease to work. Surly, that should be less expensive than the permanent licence? I just don’t get the logic here, if there is any. I might wait for the inevitable sale. Incidentally, at the time of writing, the free trial isn’t working.
I’m also a little disappointed that there aren’t some other key areas addressed. Specifically, the syncing between the iPad and desktop version, which really needs improvement. Furthermore, with everyone else adding AI features and automatic AI masks, I’m surprised there weren’t at least some moves in this area.
Anyway, I’ll have a full review once I’ve had time to try it properly, but for now, you can find out more on the Capture One website.
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