In a lot of my articles, I go on about how incredible Capture One is and how every photographer (with a few exceptions) should switch from Lightroom to Capture One. In this article, we will finally take a deep dive and see for ourselves why it’s worth considering the switch in 2023.
Tethering
If you are shooting tethered, Capture One is pretty much the only viable option. Having tried tethering into Lightroom exactly once, I saw how inefficient and slow it was. Even on a modern computer, with a 20mp camera, it was still far too slow to be considered adequate for a fast-paced professional workflow. Additionally, Lightroom didn’t allow for the advanced tethering features that Capture One has. Capture One provides more control over your camera, live view, focus adjustment options, and so much more that Lightroom lacks.
The only benefit I see in tethering into Lightroom is being able to see the image you captured on the back of your screen, however, why would you want to do that if there is a full-scale preview available anyways?
So, if you shoot tethered and want a faster, smoother workflow that doesn’t stall production, go for Capture One.
Customizable Workspace & Capture Pilot
This one is another big one for me, as I tend to use my laptop in combination with a monitor, as well as a phone. For workspace for photoshoots is vastly different from my editing workspace. Because I don’t want people tampering with anything on my computer besides rating and tags, I set up the workspace for shooting to only display the image, file name, star rating, and color tag. While the client sees this, I can be at the back making some adjustments via my laptop and displaying them on the big screen to the client.
Another big one for me is Capture Pilot. Capture One allows users to connect to a local network and preview as well as rate the images. This app is completely free, and I love using this on big productions to make sure that the client has their own preview and is not crowding the monitor area. This is also useful for me as I can be far from the monitor but check images on my phone easily.
Export Menu
I always deliver my files in at least two formats: full-res and web. This helps my clients save time and upload an image that is plenty for social (web), while also giving a full-resolution file to crop, adjust and print on large format media. Usually, however, there are even more formats that the client requests. You often find yourself having to export the same image in multiple variants, sizes, and versions. This is exactly where the proven recipes and the export menu of Capture One are irreplaceable.
The ability to create custom process recipes, save them and use them over and over again for a specific client or purpose has saved me hours of time. The ability to make each recipe export to a particular folder, have the file named after the version it was exported as, and be able to track what was exported and what was not is a game-changer for my workflow. It just helps me keep everything organized, especially on large productions. This all may sound unnecessary to a beginner photographer, which is where Lightroom wins: its export menu is simple and easy. Then again, I don’t see Capture One’s menu being that hard to navigate. 
Session Functionality & Organization
Another bonus of Capture One over Lightroom is the ability to make each production into a session. I title my sessions in the following format: dd—mm—yyyy-shoot-description. This helps me to determine what happened and when. Each raw file captured in that session is also named like this, as well as each exported file contains the name of the raw file and +the export version (full-res, web, etc).
Each shoot is a session, which gets its own name. Capture One will create 4 folders: Capture Output, Selects, and Trash. All of the files that I shoot go into capture, finals go to Output, and retouched images go into Selects. This way, all of my shoots are organized, and I can easily navigate thousands of images to find the one I want. Unfortunately, lightroom does not provide photographers with this functionality, which often leaves you disorganized and looking for files in the wrong places.
Raw Image Processing
A lot of photographers tend to say that Capture One processes colors in a more natural film-like way. This leaves Lightroom users with a clinical, almost too perfect, version of the same file. While being a valid point, I think it’s too vague and out there to be able to base an argument over. Instead, I want to talk about the ease with which Capture One lets you do post-production. In Lightroom, the editing panel is condensed to a develop tab. There you will find all adjustments, including color grading. I found Lightroom to prompt me to use the more basic sliders, and never actually go down to color grading. At the same time, one of the first things I discovered about Capture One was the ability to color grade like never before.
Nowadays, I love playing with their color grade panels, and especially a tool unique to Capture One: skin tone. This tool alone was enough for some photographs to make the switch from Lightroom to Capture One. It essentially reduces the amount of retouching you have to do, and sometimes, there is virtually no retouching you need just because of how capable this tool is.
Closing Thoughts
To close off this article, I want to say that I still sort of use Lighroom. Not to edit or process images, but to catalog them. The organization within a session is good for one shoot, but when I have to sort through thousands of final photos, I do prefer lightroom. So at the end of the day, while 90% of everything I do is in Capture One, a small fraction of my workflow is still in Lightroom. My advice to someone who is on the fence between the two: go Capture One or go home.
What is your experience with using Capture One and Lightroom? Which one do you prefer? Let us know in the comments!
I agree C1 produces superior images but LR Ai and masking has changed the game. C1 needs to catch up
Interesting comments on this article, been using the Adobe CC subscription since release and for the price it's a no brainer to sign up.
However, I don't know how you manage to keep a stable tethering with Lightroom and your camera...
Tried with various Canon cameras over the years, MacBooks and my favorite surface book 2 using specialized USB cables, cheap cables but never managed to NOT crash and burn shooting tethered with Lightroom.
Least time I tried tethered shooting with LR it ended up with a broken catalogue and such a hard freeze of the laptop it took an hour to get it up and running again.
Ended up downloading the C1 pro trial to be able to finish the photo shoot and the whole experience were r.o.c.k. s.o.l.i.d.
Not a single glitch and blazing fast, even switched to a longer cheap USB cable and it worked flawless.
So yes, anyone shooting tethered and care about a no fuss solution should try C1 pro. That's my experience at least.
Ofc photography isn't immune to personal taste and preference but I do like how much better the raw conversion comes out even at default on C1 then LR and as someone mentioned, just the "skin tone" feature should do make the choice easy for anyone shooting a lot of portraits. It's that good.
So my only gripe with C1 pro is the price, for someone like me, a really enthusiastic "hobby" photographer (don't make any money from photography compared to what i paid for my gear) I can't really justify paying a subscription for C1 pro nor buying the full price version that I know won't see any updates.
Weirdest part is I was in a test panel/interview for C1 pro pre- subscription came out and I asked them "why isn't there a cheaper standalone option for Canon like a lot of the other camera brands? It's weird a Sony or Fuji or Nikon owner gets a discount but a Canon owner has to pay more then twice as much. Also, you should have a subscription/full price option that's a lot cheaper for us amateur/hobby photographers that doesn't make any money from our pictures but really loves the software but can't afford it justify the cost"
The C1 team said "that's a really great suggestion and a few things that might surprise you in the near future"
The result?
A more then twice as expensive sub compared to Adobe CC and no cheaper standalone for Canon and raised prices across the board...
So still hoping for that cheaper option and I do know the regular C1(non pro) is cheaper but the tethering isn't in that version neither the really great presets so it's pretty pointless compared to the pro version.
Guess I will be stuck using the trial versions when I do my occasional portraits 😂👍
I started using C1 a long time ago as I bought a Phase digital Back and that was their software. It’s brilliant and so much better than Lr in many ways. It’s laid out better, more intuitive and has better features.
Now I mainly use a Hasselblad X1DII, I have to use Lightroom to process my images and it’s the downside to an otherwise brilliant camera.
In the hope that there are others who use the same camera desperately want to use C1, I have messaged them a few times asking them to make their software compatible as it’s so much better. There was even talk of them doing so in the professional media, but still nothing materialises! 🙁
I have switched to C1 several years ago, and I am not a happy camper. I could write a similar list "Why to switch to Lightroom from Capture One." My motivator to go to Capture 1 was the dislike of the subscription model, but in the long run, with all these high discounts for new versions taken into account, C1 costs me on average $30 a month. But all this is secondary, I am just mentioning it. Let me enumerate a few aspects which make me disappointed in C1:
1) Great many not supported cameras. When I imported my LR catalogs into C1, in every case I ended up with THOUSANDS of messages "unsupported image format". C1 focuses in its origin on top of the line equipment. If you are a prosumer, chance are many of your "lesser cameras" will not be supported by them. In one of these versions they started at the least to generate a text file with the list of ignored images, when importing a LR catalog. For example Leica V-Lux 3, or numerous of the Lumix models.
2) Not supported lenses. If you have a new lens model, chances are they will not support their profile for a very long time.
3) Importer is extremely inefficient. I am usually copying all new images into a dedicated directory and than import that directory. Thumbnails never show timestamp, whereas Lightroom can display the images sorted by a day on which they were taken.
4) Long drama with HEIF images, for many years. It took a lot of time to finally somewhat support these files. The importer doesn't show the HEIF thumbnail in many cases, it displays only gray placeholder. You simply might not see what exactly you are importing.
5) On the development screen timestamp and the other metadata does not show. One needs to select the metadata panel and only than this information becomes available. Very cumbersome. SO simple to fix, so much free space to display this vital information.
6) LR has a good interface for 3rd party plugins, such as negative film images, to name one example. Virtually no one provides these for Capture One.
7) No ability to adjust times of images in the catalog when merging several cameras to together, and some images have e.g. invalid time zone. LR supports it forever.
I could continue like that with more annoyances. I pleaded with C1 for several years to address these issues. They are maybe top in image processing, I grant them that, but they disregard the "boring stuff". A professional with $200,000 Phase One or Hasselblad system, and an amateur with a $1000 body pay the same price for the software, but the people with "lesser equipment" are far more frequent, they generate the revenue. These people are the most important money bringer, yet C1 seems to focus on the top 0.1% , so to speak.
After I watched several videos from A. Morganty about LR subscription, and what will happen when they subscription lapses, I am now more confident about preserving my work in LR. For the time since LR6.14 I will now return to Adobe.
Yeah, I really need help deciding which editing software would be best. So many to choose from. I'm not necessarily looking for the 'ultimate' number one. Just one that is very competent and easy to follow for an intellectually challenged person like me. Really not that tech savy. LR looks to be what most ppl are using, but I've heard lots of good things about others as well.
Do not switch to Capture One (C1). It is buggy and locks up and crashes frequently. The first catalog i created in Capture One was imported from Lightroom and it took six months before I was succcesfully able to finish the import because C1 kept crashing before it ever got close to finishing the import., When It finally finished, C1 had created a variant of every image in my database so I would see two of every image. I had to delete them all (20k+) manually. From then on, when I ran the "Backup & Verify" option in C1, it would always tell me that my catalog had errors and offered to fix them. When I let it try to fix them it would always come back and sat it couldn't fix them. Everything seemed to work OK anyway but I was worried about this for a long time.
I tried upgraded to a new version 20,? 21?) awhile back but it wouldn't upgrade. Turns out a previous version of C1 had left a directory that the newer one didn't recognize and the upgrade threw a fit. I let their tech support team know and a few days to a week later they released a fix and I was able to upgrade. I would have thought they would have caught this in testing before releasing the new software.
They recently added a mask "wizard" - click on a color in your image and it will select all areas of that color adjacent to your click or everything of that color in your entire image (your choice). Similarly they added a "magic eraser" that does this same thing but erasing any mask over those areas. Very useful, even if stolen from Lightroom a decade ago. Unfortunately, it locks up if I select more than about three of these areas, and it stays locked up for about ten minutes. I see this all the time. I wrote up a case for tech support maybe a month or month and a half ago and I have heard nothing.
This brings me to another point - their tech support is incredibly, massively slow about responding to customer issues.l They've always been slow as long as I've used C1 but they're far, far slower now. Part of it is that they have people working in Ukraine where they are at war with Russia, but tech support was slow before the war too, It is also my experience that their tech support isn't very technical nor very motivated to help you. There are some customer service people who are very good but it feels to me like most dont really know the product and they don't have any tools to help figure out problems. No code debuggers, no knowledge of or tools to use with their database (their "catalog" is just a SQL database). Also, their favorite solution to any problem is, "sorry - we can't do anything about it, go away". I've been a commerical software developer for decades and this, for me, is a sure sign that the person you're working with is not interested in helping you (lazy or just don't care). The last issue I wrote up they had me try ONE thing to fix it. After that, they kept telling me, "give up - we've EVERYTHING", Somehow I don't think that trying ONE thing is the same as trying "EVERYTHING".
The last time i upgraded (to v22), C1 destroyed all of my existing masks on 20k+ files. The masks are listed on the images in C1 but there is no mask visible anywhere - an empty mask. You can't see it on the screen and adjusting it does nothing. This is for all of the images I've tried already (quite a lot). I'vw created tens of thousands of masks over the years and now they're all gone thanks to their "brilliant" upgrade. They told me that this is fixed in the new code and I have that code but the problem continues. I told them I wanted them to fix my masks, after all, they destroyed them with their bugs. They did tell me that the software developers are working on a fix that might be able to fix my masks problem in a new release but this is a little too "mafia" for me - they destroy my masks then tell me that trhey'll fix them for more money. That's like the mafia trashing your store and then telling you they can protect you for regular "protection" money. I AM not going to pay them another US $300 to fix the disaster they caused!
I don't think they test their new releases very well. I think that either they just don't do a good job of testing or they're under pressure by management to get new releases out and quality be damned.
Unless you have a high pain tolerance and are able to tolerate poor or non-existent tech support, I cannot recommend C1. The worst thing is that they can trash your environment at any time due to software bugs and lack of testing of the product.
When I moved from Lightroom to C1, those were pretty much the only two software packages on the market that did this sort of thing with whole groups of files. Today there are a LOT of competitors in this space and the reviews of most of these I've seen make them sound like they are serious competitors to C1.
These articles come up periodically. The common thread is that there is always a comparison to Lightroom. Why? Lightroom is the market leader. In my case, it was LR that persuaded me to leave the wet darkroom and go digital. Lightroom has a decided advantage because it’s the lead horse in the race. Adobe is now improving LR with AI advanced in selective masking, noise reduction and resolution enhancements. With all of that including access to photoshop, I have no reason to switch.