Capture One Pro Review | PCMag

Capture One Pro photo editing software, sometimes known as C1, offers digital photo importing, image adjustment, local and layer editing, and some organizational features. But the software stands out for its top-notch raw file conversion results. Capture One also excels at tethered shooting (aka capturing, hence the software’s name), with a live monitor view and camera setting controls. The latest version adds more tethering options and refinements to unique existing tools like Smart Adjustments, Style Layers, and Live Collaboration. Capture One is a strong competitor to Editors’ Choice winners Adobe Lightroom Classic and DXO PhotoLab thanks to its deep arsenal of professional photo editing tools and flexible interface, but it lacks the former’s slick interface and the latter’s top-notch automatic image corrections, not to mention that it costs more.

How Much Does Capture One Cost?

You can buy Capture One Pro outright for $299 ($199 upgrade) or subscribe for $24 per month or $179 per year. The subscription price is steep when you consider that you can get Adobe Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop bundled together for $9.99 per month. With Capture One Pro, you do get three activations for your money, which is more than Adobe’s two-computer maximum. A free, fully functioning 30-day trial of Capture One lets you test the software before deciding to buy it.

Using Capture One’s mobile apps (available only on Apple devices) requires a subscription ($4.99 per month) for the online storage needed. Alternatively, the All-in-One Bundle ($259 per year) gets you both the desktop and mobile functionality.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

For comparison, DxO PhotoLab goes for a one-time price of $219 for three activations; CyberLink PhotoDirector costs $99 as a one-time purchase or $54.99 for an annual subscription that includes a good helping of stock images from Getty and Shutterstock; and ACDSee Photo Studio costs $99.95 for two perpetual license keys or $8.90 per month as a subscription.

Capture One Pro System Requirements

Capture One Pro is available for macOS 11 or later and 64-bit Windows 10 (builds from 1607 to 22H2), or Windows 11. Both the macOS and Windows versions require a machine with at least a dual-core processor, 8GB RAM, and 10GB of free disk space. You also need a monitor with a 1,280-by-800, 24-bit resolution at 96dpi. Apple Silicon-based Macs get native support.

I tested the Windows version, which took up a little more than 1GB of space on my hard drive, significantly less than Lightroom Classic’s 3GB. I had to upgrade my image catalog upon first running the update, but doing so was quick. You activate the software using a Capture One account as well as a serial number. In all, installation is no harder than getting going with Lightroom.

What’s New in Capture One Pro?

Here are some highlights of new features recently added to Capture One in version 24:

• Luma Range Masks in Styles

• Copy AI Masks between different photos

• Auto sensor dust removal

• Face and Eye focus finders

• Tethered shooting improvements

• Improved AI Auto-Masking

• Integration with Glass photo-sharing site/app

• Workflow performance boosts

• Smart Adjustments for a similar look across images

In case you missed it, the previous update included the following important features:

• AI-Assisted culling, a tool that groups similar shots automatically and lets you apply tags and ratings during import

• Live collaboration

• A Magic Eraser that gives you a way to select and remove areas selected by the Magic Brush tool

• Speed editing that lets you edit using keyboard shortcuts

• Panorama Stitching and HDR Merge

A Professional Interface

When you first run Capture One, you can choose a layout, with the tools and browsers on the sides you want. The program then automatically sets up hardware acceleration based on your system. A six-step tutorial walks you through the interface. Clicking on the head icon at the top right shows a panel with tutorials on basic photo editing procedures in the app. The tutorials work with live sample images and the app highlights parts of the interface you need to interact with as you go.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

The Resource Hub shows you tabs for What’s New, Tutorials, Webinars, Support, and Plug-In Shopping. If you dismiss it, you can get it back up from the Help menu.

The dark (adjustable) gray program window has large buttons along the top, with defaults of Import, Export, Cull, Share Online, Reset, Undo, and Auto Adjust. You can customize it with more than 20 additional buttons; those interested in tethering will want to add the Capture button. Tethered shooting is a focus of Capture One, which continues to improve and add features for this kind of photography. One notable feature is you can save images both to the computer and camera card simultaneously. Another is ReTether, a feature that lets you disconnect the camera for up to two hours and after you reattach it, automatically import any photos you took in the meantime.

A three-dot overflow menu lets you add or remove the buttons. Dragging the buttons reorders them. And you can move the whole menu to the right side. The app’s panels are draggable and can float freely on the screen, ideal for dual-monitor setups. I appreciate having clear Undo, Redo, and Reset buttons, considering how error-prone photo editing can be. A split view shows a before-and-after comparison; the Split View button (top right) also offers full-screen before-and-after views. I also like how adjustment sliders snap back to the default position when you double click them, as well as the fact that clicking and holding the cursor on the adjustment’s name temporarily shows the image with that adjustment set to default.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Unlike Lightroom Classic’s interface, Capture One’s is not modal. That is, it doesn’t present different workspaces for different functions, such as organizing, editing, or output. Instead, you do everything in one interface. You use buttons on top of the left-side control panel to switch between eight views based on what you’re doing at the moment—Library, Tether, Shape, Style, Adjust, Refine, Export, Quick, Color, and Metadata.

Along the top, a dozen always-present cursor tools let you switch among Select, Pan, Loupe, Crop, Straighten/Rotate, Keystone, Mask, Healing Mask, Erase Mask, Dropper (for white balance and other adjustments), Apply Adjustments, and Draw Annotations. Just as in Photoshop, right-clicking (or click-and-holding) any of these buttons opens a drop-down of more cursor choices, including Zoom and Pan. The Apply Adjustments cursor lets you copy and paste adjustments between images. The paste functionality is smart enough to not include spot removal and cropping.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

The program offers good right-click menu options and keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can use C for a crop, Ctrl-T to hide or show the Tools menu, and Ctrl-D to export to disk. The Import interface has a little shortcut cheat sheet informing you that Pick is the S key and Unpick is A. You can even create your own shortcuts for any of the program’s menu options. Question mark icons in every tool take you to the appropriate help entry—very helpful indeed.

A simple roll of the mouse wheel quickly zooms your photo. Capture One can’t zoom to a specific percentage. Instead, it stops at set amounts, such as 25%, 33%, 50%, and so on. There’s no indication whether the photo you’re viewing has been fully rendered (Lightroom gives you a Loading… message). In my testing, however, photos rendered faster in Capture One than Lightroom Classic.

A full-screen view in Capture One shows both the side panel and your image, but it’s less useful than Lightroom Classic’s true full-screen view. I also find that the basic action of switching between gallery and image view is less intuitive than it should be. Sometimes I hit the multi-image button and the program keeps me in a single-image view. In Lightroom, it’s a simple matter of double-clicking an image.

Powerful Importing

As an alternative to the Import button, you can set Capture One as your default AutoPlay option when plugging in camera media. The import dialog is powerful. It lets you choose the source, destination, file renaming, and copyright metadata. The program can perform a simultaneous backup during import, and even apply adjustment styles and presets such as Landscape B&W, midtone boost curve, and sharpening. Autocorrect is another useful import option.

At import time, you can zoom the preview thumbnails, view single images, and choose which images to import. And since version 23, you can rate or tag them before importing.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Automatic Groups

Another helpful option during import and in the Cull view is automatic Groups. Capture One analyzes images to put similar ones together. It takes a bit of processing but can be helpful in culling. The groups are temporary, and you can set a percentage for how similar the images should be. It’s useful for types of photography that involve taking many similar shots, like wedding shoots or wildlife photography.

In the Import or Cull window, you can switch between Grid and Viewer views. The latter lets you see the group members full-size so that you can choose the best ones.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Another boon is the program’s duplicate detection, which (like that in Lightroom) saves you from having unnecessary copies on your drive. I had no trouble importing raw files from recent camera models such as the Nikon Z fc, the Canon RF, the Fujifilm X-T4, and the Sony a7 IV.

Like Lightroom Classic, Capture One stores information (including any edits) for your imported photos in a database called a catalog. The actual image files can be stored in a different folder location from the catalog, or right inside it. Keeping them separate means you can have the large image files on a NAS drive, for example. Unlike Adobe’s app, Capture One lets you have multiple catalogs open simultaneously. The default is to open the catalog you’re importing to as soon as the import starts.

A double progress bar shows both the overall import and current file operation progress. Capture One imports faster than Lightroom, PhotoDirector, and ACDSee Pro. You can start working on photos before the whole import finishes, which is handy. A minor quibble is that I couldn’t use the End key to quickly take me to the bottom of an import set, and had to move the scrollbar all the way down; when I resized the thumbnails, my place in the set changed, too.

A Top Choice for Raw Camera Files

Many raw camera files I tested in the program look noticeably better than the unadjusted Lightroom and ACDSee equivalents, and even better than in the excellent DxO PhotoLab. Capture One supports DNG images created by Adobe programs, treating them as original raw files. Even with them, I see more detail in Capture One than in the Lightroom’s initial conversion in some photos for some camera models. Capture One’s documentation states that its raw conversion process “uses an extremely sophisticated and patented algorithm.” But for some photos, it’s a draw as to which conversion is better.

(Credit: Capture One/Adobe/PCMag)

Above, you see Capture One’s raw conversion on the left and Lightroom’s on the right. The Capture One image has more detail in the chest feathers and more accurate colors; both have no adjustments applied. That’s, of course, just one example, and you can find pictures that Lightroom renders better, but you don’t lose anything by using Capture One, and with both programs, you’ll want to make further adjustments after the initial import.

Capture One uses magic-wand icons for autocorrect adjustments in both the top toolbar and each adjustment section (white balance, exposure, and so on). You can undo the autocorrect changes of any given setting individually, without undoing the others.

The Curve presets in the Color section have Auto, Film Extra Shadow, Film High Contrast, Film Standard, and Linear Response options. The first few modes are more saturated, and the last two give the most detail.

Fast Import Speed

I tested import performance with 200 raw files from a Canon 80D to my Windows 11 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM, Windows 11 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM, a 3.6GHz Intel Core i7-12700K CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti discrete graphics card. Capture one took 67 seconds to import the set, which led the pack. Capture One’s preview creation added to the import time, however, for a total of 124 seconds. Both results were very close to Adobe Lightroom Classic’s. With either, you can turn off preview creation if you’re in a hurry. Note that some apps—such as DxO PhotoLab and Skylum Luminar—don’t bother with an import process, instead letting you work with photos wherever they’re stored.

Organizing Photos in Capture One

Capture One lets you add star ratings at the bottom of thumbnails and at the lower-right corner of the main photo view. It also lets you apply color tags for organization, but there’s no simple Pick or Reject option for people with less granular processes.

The Keyword tool accessible from the Metadata tab lets you add keywords to build a Library. The next time you start typing in the text box, any matching entry in the library is suggested. You can even import or export keyword libraries and add hierarchical keywords. The program doesn’t, however, give you a prepopulated keyword library. I prefer the treatment of keywords in Lightroom Classic, which offers exhaustive help and presets for organizing your photos.

You can create your own albums (including smart albums based on ratings, color codes, or search criteria), projects, and groups (which can include any combination of the above). But forget about integrated geo-tagged maps or people tags, such as you get in Lightroom. Capture One does offer good search options by date, filename, rating, and keyword.

One helpful organizational tool in Capture One is called Variants. Similar to Lightroom Classic’s Snapshots feature, Variants lets you create multiple copies of a photo with different adjustments and edits.

Organization may not be Capture One’s forte, but in its selection of standard adjustment tools—exposure, contrast, shadows, highlights, white balance, and so on—Capture One is up there with the best. The program lets you adjust the histogram, HDR, and clarity, too. Clarity offers a few modes of its own, with Punch, Natural, and Neutral being more effective than Classic mode, which just seems to sharpen images.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One’s Smart Adjustments lets you set a reference photo after tweaking its exposure and color settings, after which you can apply the resulting look to multiple other images. The trick is that it’s not simply pasting the exact settings, but instead adapting them to the target image’s lighting and colors. It worked as advertised in testing, but I wish more adjustments were included, such as noise reduction.

Styles With Layers

Capture One includes a modest set of filters, which it calls Styles. Modest, that is, compared with what you get in programs like Skylum Luminar or Exposure X7. You can, however, buy more online from Capture One or from third-party sites, or you can create your own custom Styles based on lighting, color, and other adjustments. Newer program updates let you add Styles to layers, and restrict their operation on Luma range masks. You can combine multiple styles into an image and individually adjust the opacity of each style in its layer for a customized look. Right-click on the Style entry or in the Layers panel by choosing New Filled Adjustment Layer > Apply Adjustments From, and then pick the style you want.

Better Haze Removal

The haze removal tools in DxO PhotoLab and Skylum Luminar work better than the ones in Lightroom, which adds a color cast. Capture One’s Dehaze tool lets you adjust the shadow tone with a dropper, which yielded a vastly superior result (left below) compared with the horrific color cast created by Lightroom’s Dehaze (right).

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

In the example above, I set the correction to 100% to emphasize the difference. You’d probably use a more judicious amount of Dehaze, but you’d still see more color cast in Lightroom compared with Capture One (or DxO PhotoLab and CyberLink PhotoDirector for that matter).

Standard Lighting Tools and HDR

The Levels and Curves tools in Capture One’s Exposure panel are far more useful for making vivid images. Capture One is all about image fidelity, though there are styles that apply color and black and white effects, as well as a Film Grain tool.

The program’s High Dynamic Range section includes sliders for Highlights, Shadows, Black, and White. These tools let you create an image with better contrast. Adjusting highlights and shadows alone often results in a washed-out-looking image. The tool’s purpose is not to deliver special effects but rather to perfect an image, and for that it’s useful. By comparison, CyberLink’s PhotoDirector can create HDR images with extreme and artsy impact.

True HDR takes multiple images of the same scene shot at different exposures and creates one image from them. To use this tool, you select multiple images and choose Merge to HDR from the right-click context menu (you can also get to it from the Image menu), with Auto-Align and Auto-Adjust options. You get a DNG file that uses the dark areas in the overexposed shot and the bright areas in the underexposed for detail. There isn’t much in the way of options like those you get with ON1 Photo Raw and PhotoDirector. Note that True HDR and panorama stitching, mentioned next, each took about 20 seconds to complete on my test PC.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

To use panorama stitching, you select multiple images and either right-click or choose the feature from the Images menu. Options for the projection include Spherical, Cylindrical (the most convincing option in my test shots), Perspective, and the adorable sounding Panini. Disappointingly, though, it lacks Photoshop and Lightroom’s ability to fill the incomplete parts of the rectangle with AI-generated content. A simple option to have the final image be rectangular instead of having a warped edge, for instance, would be welcome. Then again, you could just use the Crop tool to get straight sides.

In its Refine section, Capture One includes profile-based tools for correcting lens-geometry distortion, though the EF 70-300mm Canon lens for my Canon DSLR still isn’t included. Chromatic aberration correction comes under this lens correction subset. A generic option did quite a good job in my testing. The Purple Fringing option is also effective. DxO PhotoLab remains my top pick for doing away with chromatic aberration, though Lightroom has also gotten very good at it.

A new Focus Area section of the Refine tab can hone in on a subject’s eye, which is often where you look to check focus.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One’s noise-reduction tools are respectable. I found that some images had less noise in the initial raw conversation, to the point that I had to apply 50% noise reduction in Lightroom to get the noise level down to Capture One’s initial rendering. It turns out that’s because Capture One applies that much noise reduction by default. DxO PhotoLab and Topaz DeNoise offer the ultimate in noise reduction, however.

Cropping and Color Management

Cropping is well done in Capture One. Select the rectangle you want, press Enter, and the crop will take effect even if you switched to another cursor. You can also simply start drawing the crop wherever you want, rather than having to start by adjusting the selection box edges, as you have to do in DxO PhotoLab. The crop tool helpfully shows you each side’s dimensions in inches or pixels. The straighten tool has you draw a line that will become the horizon, or you can manually tilt your photo while using the Composition panel’s Rotation tool, and the Auto Adjust magic wand button figures out the horizon in your shot and straightens it out automatically.

Color management is a special strength of Capture One. You can adjust color ranges or individual colors, and you can also fine-tune skin tones using a color picker. Other skin helpers are the Clone and Heal tools, which do a very good job of blemish removal. They work just about the way Photoshop’s similar tools have for years, but Adobe’s content-aware tools are more effective. The Mask From Color option in Capture One lets you create adjustment layers based on color-selected areas for local adjustments.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One offers a wealth of color-editing proficiency, with eight color ranges instead of six, and a Direct Color Editor tool that lets you adjust the color by dragging up and down right over the color you want to modify. When I did this, I couldn’t see the image being affected until I chose to view the background layer instead of the adjustment layer.

Adequate Masks and Layers

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Capture One is well behind Adobe’s software when it comes to masking. Capture One doesn’t have auto subject or object select options. That said, the program does offer masking with a feathering tool and refinements for difficult selections like hair or trees. Another selection tool is called Magic Brush, which automatically selects objects of similar colors, and the Magic Eraser lets you remove areas selected by the Magic Brush easily. Still, it doesn’t approach the Adobe tools.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

You can mask by luminosity as well as using linear and radial gradients. The luminosity mask option (called Luma Range and accessible from a button on the Layers dialog) is good for isolating bright or dark areas and especially helpful for selective noise reduction. There’s no blur tool for selective focus effects, but you can reduce sharpness and clarity using the mask. The gradient options are good for selective focus treatments. The Levels and Color Balance tools work in layers, and you can adjust the opacity of each edit layer.

The Annotations feature is useful for collaborative editing, so the initial photographer or editor can send notes to a retouching professional or client about areas on the photo. It’s basically a drawing tool that creates a layer, which you can hide or display and include as a separate layer if you export to PSD. You can choose pen size and color, and an eraser tool eases fixing mishaps. I am sorry to see that the tool doesn’t work with touch monitors for annotating with a stylus, which would be a perfect fit. Possibly even worse is that the annotations don’t show up in images shared with the Capture One Live web collaboration feature (more on that feature below).

Capture One’s Layer editing lets you copy specific layers to other images, even if the second image has different dimensions. It’s not a simple matter of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, however. You need to choose Copy Adjustments from the Adjustments menu and then after switching to the second image, Apply Adjustments. This adds the copied layer on top of the second image’s layers. Personally, I prefer Adobe’s strategy of hiding layers from you in Lightroom, for faster, simpler editing. If you need to work with layers, head to Photoshop. I suppose for some workflows it might be helpful to have both capabilities in one program.

Exporting With Capture One

Capture One includes a capable printing feature. It lets you select a color profile and offers standard layouts such as contact sheets and A3/A4 formats. You can customize layouts with your choice of column and row counts and spacing, and text and image watermarking are options. You can also save your own custom layout templates. The View menu offers a good number of Proof Profiles to show how your image will look on a selection of displays and print output types, but it doesn’t highlight nonprinting colors the way Lightroom Classic’s Soft Proofing feature does.

One weakness in Capture One’s usefulness as a workflow solution has been its lack of sharing to established online photo venues, but there’s a ray of light on this count. The software can now share directly to the relatively new but promising Glass photo community. Sadly, this integration is only implemented on the macOS version of Capture One.

The program also includes a Make Web Contact Sheet choice that creates HTML for a web server, but no integrated gallery creation like you get with Lightroom, though Capture One Live serves similar purposes in a more limited way. There’s no built-in export to more established online photo storage and sharing services like Flickr, Instagram, 500px, or SmugMug, nor is there any integrated book layout and export tool, both of which you get in Lightroom Classic. You do get support for export plug-ins in Capture One, and one works with SmugMug.

Capture One Live Collaboration

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One Live lets photographers share albums, either from live sessions or in their catalog, via the web in any browser. The cost for this service is $5 per month, but if you don’t pay you still get a single collaboration session of 24 hours, compared with multiple sessions that can last up to a month. Paid subscriptions also allow watermarking.

To use Capture One Live, you tap the Share Online button, and its dialog lets you choose a Collection to share. You get a link, optionally password-protected (but only for paid subscriptions), that opens a webpage showing your Collection. Collaborators can view large versions of the shots, color code them, and rate them from one to five stars.

Aside from that, it’s limited. There’s no keyword tagging or downloading, let alone editing or markup. With the latest update, web comments are synced to the installed program and you can share whole folders of images rather than just one photo at a time.

Live photo thumbnails appeared in the web view quickly after I started sharing, and my edits in the installed app appeared nearly instantly on the web version. A neat option is to share a tethered shooting session live. The images show up automatically for the web-based collaborator. Lightroom’s web access has the related Discover community of photo editors you can follow and see before-and-after edit views of their work and collaboratively edit. Lightroom even offers web-based photo editing.

For professionals who need tethered shooting and serious amateurs who want excellent raw camera file import quality, Capture One is a good but pricey option. Layer fans and those who need to collaborate on photo projects may appreciate it, too. Its developers continue to improve it and add useful features, but the program still trails our Editors’ Choice winner among pro photo workflow application, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, in terms of interface fluidity, organizational tools, profile support for cameras and lenses, and cutting-edge image correction and enhancement tools. It also trails fellow Editors’ Choice winner DXO PhotoLab, which offers better automatic corrections and noise reduction.