7 reasons to choose Capture One instead of Lightroom, plus a bonus for Sony users

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

When you want to edit your photos, you have quite a wide choice of photo editing programmes.

What may determine your choice is whether you want an editing programme for occasionally editing a photo, or whether you are looking for a programme that contains your entire workflow, from organising to editing to exporting.

There are not that many workflow programmes. If you ask the photographers around you what they use, many will say Adobe Lightroom, but here and there you will also come across people who prefer Capture One.

After using Lightroom for years, I switched completely to Capture One a few years ago, mainly because of the bonus reason at the end of this article, but number 1 also played a big part.

I still use Lightroom regularly, including recently. The reasons I mention here still apply, including to the latest versions of these programmes.

1: RAW conversion

Think of it as ingredients used for different dishes. The same ingredients can still be used to make a completely different dish.

When I open a photo in Capture One, I find the colours a little more vibrant and the image immediately looks more 'finished'. I often spend less time getting the image how I want it in Capture One than in Lightroom.

In the image under the heading, you can see the differences in brightness, skin tone and shades of blue, such as in the jacket.

2: Luma curve

The disadvantage is that this also changes your colours. It will often add more saturation as well, which you would then have to adjust.

Capture One has a “Luma” curve, where only the brightness gets that S-curve, and not the colours. You can then add contrast without changing the saturation.

3: Apply intelligent masks to multiple photos

You copy and paste your edits onto the photo you want, and Capture One will then recognise the subject, background or person or people in that new photo and apply the edits there.

4: Layers

In Lightroom, you can achieve something similar with masks, but I find it much more user-friendly and clearer in Capture One.

5: Match look

Unlike with a preset, you can see exactly what has been adjusted to create this look. You can therefore easily change an edit if it does not quite fit with the rest of the series.
This feature works best when you give Capture One several photos to base the look on.

I also never use this feature at 100%. 80% or lower often gives a better result, and it also makes a difference whether you edit many photos at once or a smaller number. For me, a smaller number would be 25, for example, while many would be 100 or more.

So if you have edited a photo that you think turned out really well, you can recreate it by applying Match Look. You can use photos from the current catalogue or session for the Look, but also photos stored elsewhere on your computer.

You drag them into the Match Look window and then choose which photos you want to apply it to. Ideal if you have a large series of photos that you want to give a consistent look.

6: Sessions and catalogue

7: Exporting

You can adjust these 'recipes' to suit your own needs. For example, I use the option to automatically rename the photos during export to match the folder they are saved in. But the possibilities are almost endless.

Bonus reason for Sony users: You can shoot tethered with all cameras

Especially if you use the Studio version of Capture One, you can perform intelligent crops directly during portrait photography, for example. In all versions, you can use an overlay so that you can see exactly where text would appear on a photo, for example, or if you want to recreate another photo precisely.

On Photofacts Academy, you can take both a basic Capture One course and a brand-new course covering more extensive and newer features!

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