5/16/2023 0 Comments Smart shooter vs capture 1 proFurthermore, the sub-folders help to organize the files outside of C1 for easy access directly out of the file system. For client work this sort of structure makes good sense as it allows me to shoot tethered to one drive, then copy to my main drive once I’m back the office and easily be able to open it without re-importing or re-mapping anything. Furthermore, each session contains a session file that can load the session contents into C1 regardless of where the session is located. A session is a organized into a session folder containing various sub-folders such as Captures, Selects, Output and Trash. Sessions differ from collections in that they are more portable and transactional. While Lightroom is a collections based system, C1 offers the option of both collections (catalogs) and sessions. As I explored it a bit more and began using it on a more day-to-day basis, the design began to make more sense. The process was different to what I was accustomed to with Lightroom and so I immediately chalked it up to being worse. My initial foray into managing my image library with C1 was met with a lot of curse words. The less intimidating interface of Adobe Lightroom Library Management Studying the images between the two converters creates the impression that you’ve gotten an upgrade on your camera gear without shelling out thousands of dollars. They appear more natural and representative of the original scene compared to Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. Another area where C1 shines is the reproduction of tones. One could argue that through a series of adjustments and filters you could achieve the same result as what C1 offers out of the gate, but I still feel as though the image is cleaner from the start and the work is done for you. Although the images were sharper out of the gate, the sharpness wasn’t harsh and didn’t display any artifacting. Working with the original NEF (Nikon’s native raw format), the images felt crisper, cleaner and not as washed out as they do in Lightroom (see comparisons below). I have since asked the folks at Phase One about this and they have confirmed that it's best not to use DNG files with C1. Rather than loading in the native manufacturers raw file, I loaded in a DNG file that was already converted with Adobe DNG converter. My more recent experience made me quickly realize the error I made in my first test. My excitement quickly turned to disappointed as the images looked no better, and in fact worse once I began to push the exposure and highlight recovery sliders. When I first got my copy of C1 a few months back, I decided to put this claim to the test and loaded in some images from a recent beauty shoot. I’ve heard people going on about the improved image quality and tones out of Capture One (C1) for some time now, but always felt that these were overblown claims which varied by photographic genre, or were reserved for owners of the expensive Phase One Medium Format cameras. After spending a fair amount of time with it, I thought I’d share some findings to help you make the right choice for the sort of work you do. This was enough to encourage me to forge ahead with Capture One and further explore its options. It immediately became apparent that the quality upgrade I was seeing was the result of Capture One’s raw processing engine and little else. I initially suspected that this might be due to the expensive Broncolor lights and parabolics that we used throughout the shoot, but to be sure I decided to pull my images into Lightroom for a comparison. After completing the three days of shooting I began inspecting the images and while pulling them into Photoshop, I couldn’t help but notice that the quality felt better than what I’m accustomed to. While I’ve had Capture One installed for a few months now, my initial impressions weren’t positive and so it sat idle on my computer. A few weeks ago when while filming a new fashion, beauty and portraiture course for PRO EDU, I was forced to shoot tethered and decided to do so with Capture One. For the majority of my work I avoided shooting tethered due to the pervasive connection issues that plagued Lightroom - my go-to raw processor for the last few years.
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