Following on from my first post I have now taken a look at what happens to images imported into Capture One Pro 8 from Aperture. Capture One attempts to re-apply adjustments created in Aperture when importing an Aperture library. This post only looks at some basic adjustments, but it's great to see that at least some of these will carry over. 

If people hoped for a perfect solution they will be disappointed, however I think there are a few ways to look at what one hopes or expects, and then accept that even if Capture One was somehow able to import all of Aperture's settings it would still not be 100% the same.

If I am importing older files for whatever reason there is a good chance that quite a few of them would have been run through some other programme (Photoshop, Nik, etc) and then had the post production “baked” into a TIFF file. But if I am importing RAW files then I would have to say that its highly likely Capture One does a better job of rendering the files than Aperture, so you would likely want to re-edit anyway to get all of the advantages.

For me the most important things to carry over are star ratings, labels, crops and any Metadata.

I have done some tests on what happens to files when imported and this is what I have found (I used Adobe 1998 Colour Profile in both applications for on-screen proofing).

Incidentally, curves and levels don’t seem to come across, and quite frankly I can’t understand why this is the case as you might think such settings would be based on some universal set of coordinates.

Comparisons

Let's take a look at some screenshots taken from each application. This screenshots are from the original Aperture library, then that same library imported into Capture One Pro 8.

First, a RAW file In Aperture without adjustments:

Screen-shot of an Original file in Aperture

And the same image as it appears once imported into Capture One Pro 8:

The same image as above as it appears in Capture One Pro 8

The most notable thing at this stage is that the Capture One Image seems to be more saturated. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on personal preferences.

Next we see an image where I bumped up saturation and contrast in Aperture:

Screenshot of an image in Aperture with a lot of saturation and contrast aplied

Here is how the same file looks in Capture One Pro 8:

Screenshot of the same image as above now in Capture One Pro 8 and its rendering of corrections imported from Aperture

Again it is apparent to me that the same image in Capture One looks more saturated.

Next, an image in Aperture with basic B&W conversion and a crop applied:

Screenshot of an image in Aperture with basic B&W and cropped applied

 And now how it looks in Capture One:

Here the Crop looks pretty much spot on and is of course editable. The B&W has a little more contrast, I think.

Note that star rating and labels have also been maintained, and my keywords came across intact, but not the flags.

Summary

One could run endless tests like this and I am not sure what it would achieve; it is obvious that the files will look different when dealing with the issue of colour interpretation, but as I said above if you have brought an image into Capture One it is probably because you want to take advantage of its RAW conversion and you are most likely only going to want to work on final selects, which if star rated, etc., will be very easy to find.

If you desperately want to hang onto a look you created in Aperture then you might want to make a Version of it and turn it into a TIFF.

I have to bring up one thing, before I finish, that has irritated me a little. I have seen opinions on other sites that suggest Capture One Pro 8 is in some way obligated to provide Aperture users with a perfectly identical user experience, as if Aperture was the gold standard they should aspire to. Capture One has been around a long time and was originally aimed solely at professional Medium Format users. If you are going to go with Capture One as your post-Aperture solution, then you will have to accept change, but also realise that with a little research you can customise Capture One to a degree that puts Aperture and Lightroom to shame and, as I said in other posts, out-of-the-box it is more in-line with the Aperture UI anyway; customise it a little, and you can really make it your own.