Capture One

Capture One has announced that the company is discontinuing the free tier of its software, Capture One express. The software will no longer be available to download after January 31st, 2024.

For the last few years, whenever I wrote about Capture One, I would invariably get a comment from someone about how poor the performance was in the software. Try as I might, I could not replicate the results, so the reason behind this perplexed me. To be honest, I had assumed it was some external factor causing the issue. Well, I owe my readers an apology on this because, after recently upgrading to a new computer, I too now have this problem, and it seems to be due to running the software on a 4k display.

Earlier in the summer I spent some time in New York City and I took various photos while there, although I’ve been a little behind in editing them. As part of the trip, we spent some time in Brooklyn and I got some good shots, but I am only getting around to properly editing them now. I thought this might make a good video, so I recorded a session of editing 4 of these using Capture One.

A while ago, I wrote an article on this blog my perspective on Capture One vs Lightroom, as I regularly use both applications. I tried to present a balanced opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of both. I’ve updated that article since the first version of it came out, and since I last updated it, there have been some significant changes in both Capture One and Lightroom. I feel that these changes require a whole new discussion, and therefore a whole new blog post.

In this post, I express my frustration with Capture One (the company, not the software), regarding recently announced changes to their licensing model for perpetual licences that will take effect in 2023. I express disappointment with this change, as I feel that it makes perpetual licences unattractive and forces customers to switch to a subscription, which I previously criticised for being overpriced. I also feel that the company's timing of the announcement, after the upgrade cycle for Capture One 23 had ended, left some customers feeling duped.

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.

Alexander Svet from the popular Capture One focussed site “Alex on Raw” has released a new book on Capture One. Titled “Capture One Hidden Features”, the book contains “200+ Pro Hints To Enhance Your Capture One Workflow”. Alex was kind enough to send me a copy to review, and also provide my readers with a 10% discount.

I this video we edit a series of Landscapes in Capture One, starting with some very simple edits and working up to more complex images. I show you both the tools to use, and also share some of my philosophy on editing landscapes.

When Capture One released the latest version (15.3) one of the key “features” was a re-designed layout of the tools and tool tabs. This seems to have been done for consistency with the iPad version of Capture One, but some people may still prefer the old layout. Luckily, you can revert to the old style arrangement of the tools, although there are still some changes. In this post, I’ll show you how to do this.

After several months of being in beta, Capture One for iPad is now available. The App, which you can get now from the App Store, offers a subset of Capture One for desktop’s functionality, so it is limited. However, it does use the full capture One Raw engine, so images processed on an iPad will be as good as those processed on a desktop.

Seems to be the day for updates! Not long after Adobe went live with the latest round of updates for the Lightroom and Photoshop ecosystem, Capture One has released the latest update for Capture One. Bringing the version number to 15.3 the latest update to Capture One 22 features several new features, a refined interface, and improved tethering.

Capture One has announced the release date for the iPad version of the Capture One software. The iPad app will be out on the 28th of June and will be available on the iPadOS App Store on that date. The iPad version of the software will require a subscription of $4.99 a month.

Last week Capture One suffered a service outage that affected users of the companies software. The issue was caused by Capture One’s payment provider, Fast Spring, and it caused the software to temporarily stop working for some users. Needless to say, people affected by this weren’t happy. Luckily, Capture One seems to have realised the seriousness of this, and yesterday they addressed it in a Tweet on the companies official Twitter Account.

Most people think of Styles when thinking about saving process recipes in Capture One. Styles let you save a wide range of settings into a file that can easily be recalled, and work great as both a time saver and for creating looks that you can apply to a photo. However, you shouldn’t forget about Capture One’s other recipe saving tool: presets.

I’ve been using Capture One for quite some time now (since version 6 I think) and in that time it’s come a long way. With recent versions, they’ve been adding a lot of features that people have requested for a long time, but there are still areas where I think the software could be improved. Moreover, some recent decisions by the company are somewhat perplexing, and there are areas there that could be improved too. So, in no particular order, here are the five things I would love to see improved in Capture One

Capture One has just released a new version of the software with some new features, bug fixes and improvements. This release brings Capture One to 15.2. The big new feature is an AI-based auto-perspective-correction tool, similar to Lightroom’s “Upright” feature. Also included, is an improved auto-straighten tool.