Can Capture One’s New Retouching Tools Replace Photoshop?

Capture One recently came out with a pretty significant update, making retouching as well as organizing your digital assets a lot easier. With the new update, you can make pretty impressive adjustments to people’s faces without ever having to open Photoshop. But just how impressive are they? I tested it on my own images.

Capture One Has Always Been Great – But Not for Retouching

Capture One has historically been great software for editing images, not retouching them. I’ve loved and used Capture One since the day I realized I had to tether—which was quite some time ago in the grand scheme of things. It has always been a great tool for editing. In my opinion, it was superior to Lightroom in how it interpreted camera colors and tones. I could never get the same edits out of any other software, no matter how hard I tried. Capture One also seemed to listen to its user base more than Lightroom did. This is why I was hesitant to review this feature when it just came out, as I was curious where it could go next, as it was missing quite a lot. It seemed not quite finished upon release. Fortunately, it is now.

Why I Use Capture One

I chose Capture One because I work in the fashion scene. Everyone was using it, so I started using it too. Of course, I began with Lightroom, but that was mostly for event pictures and landscapes. Lightroom was great for that—also because I didn’t know any better at the time. Could I use Lightroom for my work now? Sure, I know how it works on a basic level. But would I switch? Unlikely. Capture One has also been a great and simple tool for organizing images.

At the same time, I was using other apps like Photoshop to make fine adjustments and retouch images. Although I’m no professional retoucher, I know the basics and can easily jump in and fix bits that my retoucher might’ve missed.

Capture One and Retouching

Capture One is no stranger to retouching. A while back, they added a feature where you could smooth out skin tones using color adjustments. Earlier this year, they introduced retouching as a smart standalone feature that works not just with tones, but also with textures. While not perfect for more significant changes, it was decent for small fixes. I actually used that tool many times on set for skin adjustments.

The in-app retouching in Capture One became quite impressive earlier this year, but it felt like it was missing something. Upon release, you could only retouch the face, which was fine if you weren’t concerned about the neck areas and so on. Just go on most influencers’ pages and you will see what I am on about—the faces look perfect, while the neck suffers. This is a greater issue—many people skip the neck when doing skincare on their face.

There are several features that make the retouching so useful for me: blemish removal, dark circles, even skin, contouring, retouch teeth, and impact.

Features

Blemish removal is packed with a slider and a checkbox for the neck area, which is crucial in retouching. You can also mark areas to protect, which makes keeping birthmarks and other imperfections easy. You can, likewise, highlight extra areas to fix. Capture One does a really good job of selecting the right area, so you rarely need to use that tool.

Dark circles is a feature for all of us who love to lose sleep before a shoot day. While you as a photographer won’t find yourself in front of the camera, your subject will most definitely find this feature useful. I love this feature because it lets me save so much manual retouching effort. It works really well, and I can’t say anything bad about it.

Even skin is yet another something we will be familiar with. It has two sliders, amount and texture. Once again, you can include the neck area, which is super useful. I rarely use the slider on maximum settings just because it’s so easy to overdo this tool. It’s interesting how Capture One made the sliders: amount and texture. When you adjust the amount slider, the skin texture becomes quite even, but only from a tone perspective. When you start pushing the texture slider, the skin texture gets adjusted as well. I found that pushing both to about 50 to be a good starting point in this case.

Contouring is especially useful if you’re not super proficient with light. If you are, and have all the tools in your box, you might not need it as much. But features like blemish removal and skin evening are much more universally helpful. They become essential if you’re working without a professional makeup artist on set—which, depending on your field, might be the norm.

Retouching teeth is yet another important feature that I like using. While most people do have good dental hygiene, it does help to brighten up those pearly whites, especially in pictures where they appear to be yellow. Unfortunately, Colgate ads made us think that the normal color for teeth is white, so whitening teeth is an important feature that adds to the quality of your pictures. That said, I don’t really use this, as generally I don’t tend to have people smiling or showing teeth in my work. At the same time, if you shoot quite a lot of headshots, you would’ve most definitely come across someone who doesn’t quite brush their teeth as much as they should.

Last but not least, impact is like a general opacity slider in Photoshop. After you’ve made your adjustments, you can always make them stronger or weaker. I tend to put mine at around 70, so I can always add more and take out. Generally, I take it out.

The retouching panel is quite good, especially for high-volume shoots. For example, headshot photographers will benefit from this quite a lot, as now you are able to edit a ton of headshots in minutes. Even better, you are able to use it on set, so when your subject checks the screen, they see a final result already. This helps boost confidence and strengthen client relationships. Another use case for this is e-commerce productions, where there is simply no time or budget to retouch. Although makeup does fix quite a lot of imperfections, you can go a step further and retouch the images in Capture One, which will increase the quality of the deliverable. Once again, a huge benefit.

Overall, the retouch feature is quite helpful for quick adjustments. It uses some AI behind the scenes, which makes it more precise. I’m quite satisfied with how it works overall. To be safe, I tend to underdo the retouching—but that’s just my preference.

The Second Game-Changer: Better Session Organization

A much more objective and overdue improvement is the second big feature: session improvements for better organization.

I work on many projects that span several days. I also often need to group images by look, for example, when doing e-commerce or editorials with 15 different outfits plus extras. Previously, I had to group these manually and figure out how to stay organized. There was no consistency, and I’d often lose track.

It got even worse when I had to organize by subject. Let’s say you’re shooting several models and want Kate Moss’s photos tagged accordingly. You can now set up this file structure at the beginning and just drag the respective images into the folders. Capture One will organize them for you.

This is incredibly useful for anyone using Capture One.

Imagine you’re a headshot photographer shooting 50 people a day. There’s no way you’ll remember who was John Doe, who was Lorraine Ipsum, and who was Tim Apple. Now, you can have each person type their name, which will automatically create a folder inside your Capture folder. It sounds complicated, but once you try it, it’s irreplaceable.

One more thing: I bet John Doe doesn’t want to see photos of Lorraine Ipsum. John and Lorraine might rate their images differently in Capture One Live. Now you can create separate links for each subject. They’ll never see each other’s images, while you can monitor all selections from one central session. This changes the way photographers use Capture One Live, allowing them to auto-generate galleries for as many clients as needed.

Capture One Studio users can take it further with tokens to automate session folders. If you’re running an e-commerce production and tagging images with barcodes, you can now automatically create a folder for each item you photograph.

This makes organization significantly better. Trust me, manually sorting 70 items by barcode is no fun.

Closing Thoughts

These are the two biggest updates in the new Capture One.

I’m quite content with the retouch feature, and I’m a huge fan of the automated folders feature. It’s so good that I’d consider switching to a Studio Plan if I shot more e-commerce in my studio. Since I don’t, I’ll continue to input things manually for now.

Overall, well done to Capture One.