Why Capture One Is Better for Professionals

We all know that Lightroom has its ever-growing list of issues. Yet for IT-illiterate folk like myself, the change can be daunting. However, my move to C1 is perhaps the best thing I have done in 2019.

I was constantly dogged by issues with Adobe Lightroom. It was slow, it would crash, and it really didn't read the raw files all that well. I started using C1 to tether a Phase One back and instantly saw the pros of their system. 

As a food photographer, I often need live view for my stylist to see what is going on in the set while having the ability to tether a camera that is out of reach. In Lightroom, that meant having Canon EOS utility (for live view), shooting to desktop, and then auto-importing to Lightroom for the edit. The system was ok, but I would say that three times a day, we had to fully reboot the computer, as it would just stop. I tried better cables, plugging in the cameras, and making sure that nothing else was running on my computer, but still Adobe failed to tether in a stable manner. 

For any working pro, this is a real issue. I assumed it was just me at first (being IT illiterate), but as I spoke to more and more of my peers, I realized that I wasn't alone. 

At first, I started to use C1 just for tethering, then I edited in Lightroom, as I was more accustomed to it — that was until shooting a chef in his chef whites on location and being really pleased with the files, only to return to the studio to edit them and find that the chef's whites were completely blown out in LIghtroom. When I reopened the files in C1, all of the detail was still there, and the colors (especially skin tones) were far better too. I would liken the difference as being the same as going from 35mm to a 645 digital camera and for the price, a far better investment. 

I am still getting to grips with C1, but so far, I haven't found any downsides.  

Scott Choucino's picture

Food Photographer from the UK. Not at all tech savvy and knows very little about gear news and rumours.

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It sounds like your Lightroom is badly set up. You mention that you're having crashing issues, and that it takes overnight to convert 1000 pictures from RAW to TIFF/JPEG eg. for a wedding. We do this all the time, and it takes most of our computers around 10-15 mins to export/convert that many edited full res RAWs. Even my very low powered MacBook takes around 20 mins. And I don't recall Lightroom crashing on any of our computers for the last few years of constant everyday use, its a stable programme. Admittedly we don't use Lightroom for tethering, and have no doubt that Capture One is better for that, but the rest just sounds like you have a problem with your Lightroom setup for some reason. As for colour rendition, so much depends on how you have your colour profiles etc. set up.