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Where Oh Where Will All My JPEGs Go… Apple Photos or Capture One Pro?

Lee Harris's picture
September 4, 2015 - 9:00pm

With the announced demise of Aperture I threw my lot in with Capture One Pro, and once again found myself a novice in the world of photo applications.

Capture One Pro is rather daunting at first glance, even though for me and many others it feels more like Aperture, than say Lightroom.

Anyway, it has been a while since I wrote anything new and this article has come about simply because I realised I have a workflow right now that consists of three applications where once there was just the one.

Capture One Pro is the one I am committing to, and almost all new work passes through it — be it paid, or anything I do for myself, including holidays — because I always shoot RAW.

Post boxes in GranadaI now do all almost all my colour and black & white post-production in Capture One Pro

I am still getting to grips with so much in the application and admit that I have been a little slack of late staying on the learning curve, but basically if I am motivated to give a photo some T.L.C., Capture One Pro is the place for me; I love the way things look and I hardly find myself ever leaving it and this has resulted in images that are much more subtle because they don't get overworked.

Also, in Capture One Pro, with my three year old laptop, if I start doing too much I notice it slows down and this, in a way has the benefit of stopping me doing more than I need to.

Traditionally in Aperture I was always round-tripping to the Nik Collection software for certain looks and now realise that once you take an image into such specialised applications there can be a tendency to, as they say, “over-egg the pudding”.  A case of “well now I am here I may as well try everything”.

At the time I had a formula in Color Efex Pro, that I had developed for weddings, but ended up using on editorial images as well.

Bohemian Beach Fashion in Barcelona, processed entirely in Capture One Pro

I started using it on wedding work in response to the desaturated filmic look that was and is still so prevalent (as to be almost cliched), so I went in the other direction. I then realised that some of the magazines I worked for had mediocre paper stock and by adding this formula I could often get images closer to how I liked them, the only trouble is that when I then posted the images on my website they tended, at times, to be a little bit too gaudy and I am way too lazy to rework old stuff!

So where does Aperture feature in my workflow right now? Well, I have a lot of work doing interiors for certain clients that does not pay so well but the quantity and speed with which I can do it makes it worth while. A combination of the perfect camera for the job and knowing the images are only for online sites means that if I can get it right in-camera, my post production time is minimal (maybe 10 minutes including posting to Dropbox).

Interior photography, in-camera jpegImage shot as a jpeg in-camera, with minimal post-production in Aperture

This work dates from my time when I worked exclusively in Aperture and because it is all JPEGS I created a special library and though I know I can import it into Capture One Pro, I did not feel the need just yet, because these jobs don't merit the extra time needed.

There is also another reason I am holding back… because although I have no real enthusiasm for the new Apple Photos app so far, it too had ended up in my workflow.

The reason right now is that in the old days all my iPhone images went into Aperture, as a separate project for each year, just because it was convenient, but now I kind of like dumping all those snapshots into the Photos app because it's painless; just plug in and voila!

However, the other more important reason is that maybe Photos will soon mature enough to allow me to do all I can do now in Aperture and with the same speed; the main thing being able to apply universal adjustments to all images at a click of a button, and if there is is also decent metadata/rating options, that would be a plus.

So basically I see the future being all real work (RAW) going to Capture One Pro and all iPhone snapshots heading to Photos, what remains to be seen is to which one of these will the JPEG work go; right now Aperture still works fine but sooner or later I'll have to choose.

About the author, Lee Harris:

Pro photographer for about 20 years, from the UK, but I left London in 2002 to go live in Argentina. In 2007 I moved to Barcelona.

Primarily  a photographer of people, I also love doing architecture/interiors, but living in BCN is not the easiest place to get work, so I will turn my hand to anything if needs be.

www.leeharris.eu

www.leeharrisphoto.com

Level:
Intermediate
App:
Apple Aperture Apple Photos for macOS Capture One Pro
Platform:
macOS
Author:
Lee Harris

Lee, 

Great to read some Capture One Pro comments on the site.  I’m a pure amateur enthusiast who has also thrown in with CO.  I can’t stomach the Lightroom interface at all, no matter how many folks are headed in that direction.  I keep looking for a site that is going to focus on CO and had almost given up.  More please.

Garyvanv

If you click the Capture One icon at the top of the post, you’ll see the rest of the C1 articles here. There’s a few!

@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?

Hi there, well thanks for the comment! I will try to write stuff more regularly, there are other people here also writing about C1 Pro as well.

Lee Harris, professional photographer based in Barcelona, Spain.

www.leeharris.eu
www.leeharrisphoto.com

Check this page out of FBhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/captureonecollective/

Also C1 has posted a number of videos on YouTube that are very helpful. The also have a free Webinar Series on most Wed.  Check out their Website for info on when and what.

Dick

That’s a major issue. no cross-platform suitable cross-platform dams for iOS and OS X.

I use Photos to import my iPhone photos. Then i use Photos to export all those photos to bake in all the adjustments. Then I use Aperture to import those photos with all the adjustments baked into the photos. So you can do the same with Capture One Pro.

It’s not seamless. All your adjustments you make will be baked into the image so there’s no going back.

Even with the arrival of iPad Pro, Apple will not provide a suitable cross-platform solution. It is what is.

Look on the bright side, Photos will get editing extensions so 3rd parties may or may not provide. Aperture is mainly a single cpu core app. Photos has better multi-cpu support with more “ridiculously parallel threading”. Also for current Aperture user on new macs, they will get improved performance due to Metal. Aperture does not have an engine from imagine processing. Instead, it uses Quartz built into the OS which uses Core Graphics/Core Image. Apple has stated that Core Image will use Metal on supported hardware (relatively new macs).

Robert Ke
twitter: rke21

also at:
instagram: rke21
facebook: outdoorphotographynow

How do others use JPEGs/TIFFs in their file organization? The demise of Aperture seems to point to the value of creating a baked-in image file for every processed – and especially every edited – RAW file as you go so there is no risk that those edits are lost if kept in non-destructive form because those non-destructive edits are dependent upon the continued viability of the RAW processor or DAM.  But there seems to be no universal standard for linking RAW files and JPEGs.  Aperture let you create stacks, but those are not readable by any other DAM, so the RAW file/JPEG file links I created via stacks will be lost as I transition to new software.  Apple Photos is particularly deficient in this regard because it has no stacks, and if you want to use iCloud Photo Sync you must have a managed library where you can’t use Finder folders to create say a “RAW” and “JPEG” folder for each project.  My initial concept was to process RAW files in Capture One, then export JPEGs to Photos to take advantage of the iCloud Photo Sync, but then the link between the JPEGs and RAW files is truly lost because of the managed catalog for Apple Photos. 

Hi There, as an amature i’m currently using aperture but looking to change soon as support dwindles, as for editing photos i only do that for stuff i want to print or upload for sharing. I’m liking the look of capture one pro but like the simplicity of photos for mac just for browsing. my library is a mix of iphone, canon 60D RAW and my trusty point and shoot. i,m thinking  of transferring everything to photos then when i what to edit just taking that selection over to capture one just for editing. i also have the NIK suit as well.

just wanted to get some thoughts if this might be a way to go?

Ben Rolfe

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