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Help me choose C1 or LR #1
Magnus von Brömsen's picture
by Magnus von Brömsen
May 15, 2016 - 6:56am

Hi

I’m a long time Aperture user, and need some help/input on which to choose as a replacement: Capture One or Lightroom (I have both). What was the reason for you to pick one?

They are both inferior to Aperture in the library area, and I don’t like the UI in none of them (Lightroom is slightly less bad in my opinion). I really dislike the pitch black and tiny letters in C1’s UI - with my old eyes they are so hard to read (come on software makers, not all of us are 25 years young!).

But, C1 have a very good tethering functionality with my Nikon D7100. Lightroom have better adjustments tools - especially the curve tool there you can drag just a part of the tone curve. Really like that.

 

Best, Magnus

The Raw conversion is quite similar in both, so in that part, it does not matter which one I use

GD Rothenberg's picture
by GD Rothenberg
May 16, 2016 - 3:45pm

Hello, Magnus.  I was in a similar situation.  As a Sony camera owner I was using a free, but limited, version of Capture One.  I liked it so much that I paid $50 to update to the full version.  I watched many of the hour long tutorials on C1 (both on their site and on You Tube) and even used the software to prepare 80 pictures that I subsequently inserted into Aperture to publish a book.  I was in the anything-but- Lightroom camp.  While I found C1 to be very powerful some simple things bothered me–no simple compare button, limited healing/cloning, inability to distinguish duplicate images when importing, no mapping functions, etc.  Perhaps these are now fixed.  In any case, I found ways to live with these differences.  I liked the fact that I could continue using managed libraries.

To be fair, I then tried LR.  First I watched some videos in Lynda.com and then many short ones by Julianne Kost. Despite what I’ve read from others, I found it quite easy to work in LR.  I like many of the features: lens correction, perspective correction, the compare functions, maps and the possibility of doing books.  There are peculiarities, no doubt.  Working referenced is an unexpected challenge as well as the constant switching between modules.  But using the keyboard shortcuts (there are probably 10-12 you must use in order to work the program halfway well) and being able to find so many answers easily on the web, made the transition easier.

Unlike others, I have not tried to convert old libraries to LR yet.  I’ve simply committed to using the software with all of my calendar year 2016 images.  So I haven’t had to deal with capturing old Aperture adjustments.

In sum, it was just the look and feel of LR that made my choice easier.  That, plus the incredible amount of help and instruction available.  

GD Rothenberg

Magnus von Brömsen's picture
by Magnus von Brömsen
May 16, 2016 - 3:53pm

Many thanks GD for a your lengthy and great answer! This draw me a step towards to pick Lightroom. Of two bad things (compared to Aperture), LR is the best choice it seems.

Best, Magnus

Walter Rowe's picture
by Walter Rowe
June 15, 2016 - 4:34pm

I was a long-time LR user, moved to Aperture and used that for 3-4 years, and have now totally immersed myself in Capture One Pro. I find the quality of output from Capture One is far superior to output from Lightroom and Aperture. I don't use the tone curve often so the difference you describe doesn't impact me.

For me, Capture One offers far better color control, and being able to select a color range that I can turn into a mask on a local adjustment layer gives me far greater control over what I am editing. I also find the Capture One GUI far more responsive vs Lightroom (much more like Aperture). Switching between modules and images in Lightroom takes longer than Capture One. How you selective copy-and-apply specific metadata fields and adjustments differs between all three applications (Aperture, Capture One, Lightroom), but they all offer the same feature. Producing output in Capture One is more efficient than Lightroom in that I can create and select multiple process recipes and simply press CMD-D to output in all of them at once, and each recipe can put their results in a separate sub folder and I can use the Output Tool to specify a single top-level folder where they all reside. Also, Capture One is effectively soft proofing all of time whereas Lightroom requires you have to turn it on and off. In Capture One you can even choose “Selected Recipe” as the Proof Profile and it will render the colors on screen based on the color profile associated with the recipe you have selected in the Process Tab.

If you haven't tried CO 9, give it a try.

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