You’ve invested many hours into finding or creating the presets that work perfectly with your unique style. However, this might seem difficult to do. If you’re like most of us, you’d love to take your favorite Lightroom presets along with you to brave new worlds of photographic innovation. One drawback? If you’ve already found some amazing Lightroom presets that you love, you may not want to leave these behind to start using Capture One. However, the Capture One plugin gives you more options for controlling the color and layering of these images so you can capture your vision more easily. This is particularly true of more delicate color grading, where Capture One really shines, along with processing RAW photos, where the RAW converter of the latest version seems particularly fine.They have amazing potential to instantly add drama and flair to any photo, usually with just a few clicks.Ĭapture One styles of the Capture One plugin are similar to Lightroom presets in the way they can transform your images effortlessly. Overall, Photoshop does still give you more precise control over your complex edits, particularly when it comes to masking, but as subsequent versions of Capture One are released with an increasing number of complex tools, there is less and less need to go to Photoshop than there used to be, and I often find that edits can be entirely completed within Capture One.
Really, they are different programs that are good for different things, rather than being direct competitors (although there is some overlap in editing), with Photoshop integration into Capture One meaning that it is now possible to prepare RAW images in Capture One using their excellent camera profiles, before exporting to Photoshop for your final, more complex edits. In Photoshop, it can be a pain to spot any issues you introduced during RAW conversion as you have to go back into Camera RAW to see the settings you used – Capture One has them displayed prominently from start to finish.Ĭapture One isn’t better than Photoshop in the strict sense – Photoshop has many more features and tools – but Capture One does complement Photoshop as a program for photo organization and for more basic edits, where it is much quicker than Photoshop. The one advantage of Capture One’s RAW processing is that it is not done in a separate window as with Photoshop – you edit photos in exactly the same way whether it is JPG, TIFF or RAW, which makes edits you don’t like far easier to undo. Whether you prefer Capture One or Photoshop for RAW processing is essentially down to personal preference of how you like your colors and contrast to look, so it’s a good idea to try them side-be-side with your own images to get a feel for this. Comparing Camera RAW vs Capture One, many photographers think that Capture 1 seems better with their RAW processing, and this might be the case for specialized cameras like the Fuji X series, where Capture One has specific profiles stored, but in general I don’t see any major difference.
Both Photoshop and Capture One process RAW files very well.