Long-time readers of the blog will know that I have long been a proponent of Capture One, but lately, I haven’t talked about it much. That’s because, to be honest, I haven’t been using it that much lately. This is due to numerous reasons, which I’ll get into in a later post, but it’s mainly due to the performance issues on 4k displays, and the crazy licence changes from a while ago. That said, I still keep an eye on development and try any new versions when they come out. Recently, Capture One released version 16.5, and it has a few new features, one of which stands out above all others. That feature is the new “Match Look” tool.

What is the new “Match Look” tool in Capture One?

Match Look in Capture One 16.5 basically does what it says on the tin. You give it a reference photo, and it will match the look of it. It does this by making a series of adjustments automatically, either on the base layer, or optionally on a secondary layer. This is one of those things that could easily have been a gimmick, but it actually works reasonably well, and there are quite a few uses of it outside the main one.

It was my idea (Only joking - no it wasn’t!)

Funny story… I actually wrote to Apple years and years ago to suggest something similar for Aperture. At the time, Final Cut Pro had a similar feature for matching the colour of one shot to another. Aperture, meanwhile, didn’t have anything like the colour profiles we now use in modern cameras and software, so often the RAW files wouldn’t match what you saw in camera. I thought that this was a simple solution to the problem - use their shot matching algorithms from Final Cut to match the Raw to the Jpeg. Of course this never happened, and I was probably being incredibly naive about what would actually be involved in making it work seen as there was no real AI or machine learning back then. Anyway - it’s good to see something like this finally come to an application. And yes, it works quite well for matching the RAW to a Jpeg, but more on that in a minute.

Matching the look of an old Kodak Ektachrome Slide

What it does and doesn’t do

To use the feature, you simply drop an image file onto the Match Look drop zone and click apply. This can either be another image from within Capture One or an external image file. This will use AI to analyse the image and then apply a series of adjustments to your image that will try to match the tone and colour of the reference. You also have the option to apply the result to a new layer (which I strongly recommend.) It will also normalise white balance and exposure to match the source.

It only matches the tone and colour of the reference image. It won’t do more complex adjustments like clarity, or vignetting or dehaze or anything like that.

Based on a day of testing various images, I have to say that overall I’m impressed. It doesn’t match the source 100%, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all, but I would say it gets it to 90 - 95% of the way about 80% of the time (not in any way a scientific estimate of accuracy!). Often you will need to dial it back a little or make simple tweaks, but it does a pretty good job overall.

It helps if the subjects are broadly similar. If the reference and the image you want to match it to are completely different, it’s less likely to work.

Use Cases

The use case I see lots of people in various forums claiming it is good for is for matching the look you see of images you find online. It certainly does work reasonably well for that, although one could question the ethics of copying other people's styles in such a manner, especially for commercial work. I suspect that if you are on a client shoot and the client gives you a reference image, it is a handy way to match the look of said imaage. But there are some less obvious potential uses that, I think, are quite interesting.

Matching the look of In-Camera Jpegs

While Capture One does a good job matching the colours of some Camera's standard colour profile, it only includes other profiles for some cameras. For example, it has the ability to select colour matching profiles for Fujifilm’s various film simulation modes, but for Canon c cameras there is only the Capture One defaults and nothing to match the other modes. With Match Look, if you shoot RAW + JPEG, you can simply drop the Jpeg into the Match Look zone, and it will do a good job of matching the colours.

Matching Lightroom Presets (or presets from other software)

If you use both Lightroom and Capture One, but you have some presets that you really like in Lightroom, you can use this to get a reasonable translation of the look into Capture One. All you have to do is render an image out of Lightroom using the preset that you want to use, and then, with the same image in Capture One, drop the JPEG (or Tif) you rendered out of Lightroom onto the Match Look tool and apply the settings. It should reasonably match the look in Lightroom. You can now save this as a style in Capture One. I've tried this and while it’s not 100% it’s pretty good. It’s certainly better than a lot of the tools that claim to be able to convert presets between the two applications. The same should work with LUTs applied in other applications.

Match Fujifilm Recipes

Matching an in-camera Fuji Jpeg Film Recipe

Another idea I had was that this would work really well to match Fujifilm Jpeg recipes, although this idea isn’t quite as effective as I was expecting it to be. There are dozens of websites posting “recipes” for Fujifilm cameras to give you various looks and film styles using the in-camera Jpeg engine and film simulation styles in Fuji Cameras. Some of these fairly push the image, and if you wanted to keep these recipes but have the additional flexibility and image quality of RAW the Match look tool should be a good way to do it. The only thing is - in most cases you don’t really need to use it as many of the parameters are either brought into capture on anyway or aren’t picked up by Match Look.

I tried this on a few images with a few different styles shot in-camera and, to be honest, the results weren’t that different from what the RAW was anyway. However, I haven’t done extensive testing on this, so with some recipes, it may well work better than others. It’s an interesting idea, though.

Match the look of Film

If you want to match the look of a particular film stock, this tool should also work reasonably well. It will really only pick up the colours and elements of the tonality, though. You’ll have to match the grain yourself. For it to work the best, you would want to possibly shoot some of the same shots on film and digital, and then use the film shots as the Match Look reference to the digital shots. You can then save the results as a preset, and it should work with other images too. It will also give you some degree of success if you don’t do this by just using a film image as the source, but having two identical sources should work better for making presets.

From my (limited) testing, this does a good job of matching colours, but the overall brightness and contrast is quite a bit off, so it will require some tweaking. It does do a good job with the colours, though. For best results, I recommend applying the look on a layer so you can then use the slider to adjust the amount.

Conclusion

Match Look in Capture One 16.5 is certainly a powerful tool, and it presents plenty of opportunities for experimentation. However, Capture One’s pricing model may make it difficult to justify upgrading solely for this feature, especially if you hold a perpetual licence given that the company no longer offers upgrade pricing, and you would have to shell out the full amount of the software again. If you’ve exhausted your loyalty discount and are not on a subscription, it may be wise to wait until future updates offer more features. Unfortunately, performance issues with High DPI displays remain unresolved in this latest version.