CONS

• Interface can get complex, especially with layers
• No face recognition
• Weak for online sharing
• Expensive

Capture One Pro is available for macOS (10.15 or later) and 64-bit Windows 8.1, Windows 10, or Windows 11. Both the Mac and Windows versions require a machine with at least a dual-core processor, 8GB RAM, and 10GB of free disk space. Apple Silicon-based Macs get native support.

I tested the Windows version, which took up a little less than 1GB of space on my hard drive—significantly less than Lightroom Classic’s 3GB. I had to upgrade my image catalog on 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.

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What’s New in Capture One Pro?

Since our last review update, Capture One’s developers have been busy adding features. Here are the highlights:

Speed Edit.

Speed editing lets you edit using keyboard shortcuts, saving you from finding the adjustment slider you want. Hold down the keyboard shortcut, and a slider appears over the image for adjustment, or you can click and drag to adjust. Cleverly, all the most common adjustments are the four leftmost keys—brightness, contrast, and so on.

Panorama Stitching and HDR Merge.

Other photo editing apps have long offered panorama stitching and HDR Merge, which finally are available in Capture One Pro.

Dehaze.

The new Dehaze tool, according to Capture One documentation, “uses deep analytic algorithms to assess and automatically adjust contrast, saturation and a matrix of other parameters to remove haze.”

Enhanced Tooltips.

Enhanced Tooltips are similar to the photo thumbnails in Photoshop that appear when you hover the mouse over a control button. They offer a quick way to show you what the tool does. If that’s not enough, there’s also a new Learn button that accesses tutorial videos.

Faster Asset Management.

According to company literature, “performance on Windows has been heavily improved, making it significantly faster to browse, filter, and search albums and folders.”

Improved Import.

You can now specify that all subfolders be included in an import, thumbnails are higher-resolution, and you can perform backup during import. It now also supports HEIC files, commonly used by smartphone cameras.

Wireless Tethering for Some Canon Cameras.

It does seem something of an oxymoron to say “wireless tethering” (where’s the tether?), but in any event you can now connect some Canon cameras directly to C1 and control shooting from the software.

Capture One Live.

Capture One Live is an online service for sharing photos either during capture or from the catalog.

Auto Rotate.

Auto rotate is another tool that other photo software has offered for a few years. Note that auto rotate isn’t to be confused with auto level, which C1 also includes.

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Interface and Import

When you first run Capture One, the Resource Hub pops up and 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. Just about everything in the hub opens a webpage in your browser, so I’m not sure why there isn’t just a link on the program window to a web index page with the same information.

Despite some interface tweaks, the app is still recognizable to longtime Capture One users. The dark (adjustable) gray window features three large buttons for Import, Export, and Capture (for tethering). Next to those buttons are clear Undo, Redo, and Reset buttons, which I appreciate in the error-prone field of photo editing. A split view shows a before-and-after comparison; the Split View button (top right) also offers full-screen before and after views.

Workspaces 

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, Capture, Lens, Color, Exposure, Details, Adjustments (including presets), and Metadata. You can remove any view or section of the sidebar you don’t use frequently and drag out any panel to have it float freely on the screen.

Toolbar Buttons

Along the top, a dozen always-present toolbar buttons switch you 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.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The program offers good right-click menu options and keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can use C for crop, Ctrl-T to hide or show the Tools menu, and Ctrl-D to export to disk. 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.

zoom

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%, 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 than in Lightroom Classic. A full-screen view in Capture One shows both the side panel and your image, but it’s far 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 single-image view. In Lightroom, it’s a simple matter of double-clicking an image.

AutoPlay option

As an alternative to the Import button, you can set Capture One Pro Crack 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. You can also 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 also a useful import option. You can zoom the preview thumbnails, view single images, and choose which images to import. You can’t rate or tag them before importing, unfortunately. The program’s duplicate detection (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.

Double Progress Bar

A double progress bar shows both the overall import and current file operation progress. (See the Performance section below for a comparison of import speeds; to summarize, Capture One imports faster than Lightroom, PhotoDirector, and ACDSee Pro.) You can start working on photos before the whole import finishes, which is handy.

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. Lightroom sometimes tends toward oversaturation, though increasing Sharpening brought the detail up to Capture One’s initial level in my test image. Capture One’s documentation states that its raw conversion process “uses an extremely sophisticated and patented algorithm.”

Above you see Lightroom raw conversion on the left, Capture One on the right, using the Adobe Color profile. The Capture One Pro Crack image has more detail in the back feathers and more accurate colors; both have no adjustments applied.

Magic-Wand Icon 

I can usually get a result that is as good or better looking using Lightroom Classic’s tools, even though Capture One gets more detail and more-natural colors at initial raw conversion. Where there used to be an A button, Capture One now uses a magic-wand icon 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.

You can switch the Curve presets in the Color section for rendering among Auto, Film Extra Shadow, Film High Contrast, Film Standard, and Linear Response. The first few modes are more saturated, and the last two give the most detail.

As its name suggests, tethered capture is a strong point for Capture One Pro Crack. It offers more than just about any competitor, with its live-view Sessions feature. There’s also an iPad app, called Capture Pilot, that lets you show, rate, and capture photos using Apple’s tablet as a remote.

Conclusion

Capture One 23 Pro 16.4.6.2414  offers pro and prosumer digital photographers excellent detail from raw camera files, as well as local adjustment, advanced color, and layer tools, but it still trails in photo-organizing features.