Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Lightroom 3 wins over Capture One Pro 5

That's it. Being a very organized person, the workflow in Capture One is too messy for my liking, not to mention that it crashed once on me. I think I'll stick to Lightroom 3. I've spent a whole day today trying to see if Capture One can actually do a better job at Raw conversion. Well, I really can't tell much difference between the two. To test this out, I used the same images to do the same enhancements on each program, going through several of the tools I am familiar with. While Capture One has a moire tool that Lightroom 3 does not have, and a better set of Style presets, it does a truly horrible job at vignetting. Lightroom 3 has red eye correction tool, gradient tool, and a very useful adjustment brush, all of which Capture One does not have.

What Capture One does poorly in terms of library structure and workspace organization, Lightroom does remarkably well. I love the fact that Lightroom does not create any files or folders in my photo archives until I am ready to export. In Capture One, each time I import an image or start a session, a folder is create in my archive. Lightroom completely keeps of out my archives, no matter how many folders I import into Lightroom to work on.

I love the big Reset button in Lightroom that allows me to immediately go back to the starting point. I love being able to remove any of the changes at any time with gradient, red eye correction, spot removal, and adjustment brush tools. In Capture One, I'll have to reverse my steps one step at a time. Lightroom tools are more logically organized. Hence I spend less time on the job. In Capture One I have to spend more time opening tabs to get to the tools.

I am happy to stick with Lightroom 3 and ready to drop Capture One Pro 5 for now. Well done, Adobe!

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