I just used Capture One full time for one year. These 3 things must be changed.
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I just spent a year away from all Adobe products and used Capture One exclusively during all of 2024 for all commercial assignments and personal content. I actually cancelled my Adobe Photographers subscription at the end of 2023 to ensure I would not be tempted to go to the dark side during my testing period. See my article: https://www.robertallen-photography.com/blog/2021/4/what-happens-after-you-cancel-your-subscription-to-adobe-lightroom-classic
There is no better way to find weaknesses in a post production product than using it solely for an extended period of time, in this case for one calendar year (2024), plenty long enough to expose any deficiencies that might be lurking underneath an otherwise flashy Capture One feature set. Sure enough, many things jumped out as being problematic but these 3 that I will delve deeper into below are serious issues that need to be addressed.
1) 16 Layer Limitation:
Dialog box popup indicating maximum layers (16) has been reached in Capture One.
The one limitation that really stands out is the limited number of layers that are permitted to be used on a single photo. I can not for the life of me figure out why this limitation exist. It may be from an earlier version of Capture One that was written in 16 bit (or 8 bit) code that was never upgraded to 32 bit code that both Windows and MACs can easily handle now days.
I should not be limited as to the number of adjustments I want to make to an image. Adobe products do not impose a maximum number of adjustments on a photo and Capture One shouldn’t either. I use a lot of healing in my retouching and each one has it’s own settings as to transparency. This plus other adjustments such as cloning, masking of the face, graduated filters and etc, you can see that the one can get up to 16 layers pretty fast.
To make things worse, with the latest version of Capture One (16.5.5), it’s now possible to have each face related mask as shown below on separate layers, making the likelihood of reaching the 16 layer maximum even greater.
Additional layers are needed most likely beyond the limit of 16 if one is to take advantage of these new masking features.
2) There is no way to tell if a photo is part of a collection
In Lightroom, if you have badges turned on while in the Library module, a small square appears in the bottom right corner of the photo indicating that this image is part of a collection. Better yet, if you click on the little square, it tells you all of the collections that photo is included in and can even take you to the those collections.
In Capture One, nothing indicates that a photo is part of a collection, making it impossible to go to the collection(s) if it’s included in one. This is an obvious issue and could easily be solved by adding some programing code that puts some sort of small graphic icon overlay indicating if it’s part of a collection and if so, what collection and a hyperlink or path to that collection. Without this feature, one could end up deleting photos that are part of a collection that were intended to be retained and or intended to be delivered to a client.
This photo shown in Capture One with no indication that it is part of a collection called Headshots and is to be delivered to a client.
This photo in Lightroom is clearly denoted as being part of a collection(s) (see third icon from right).
3) An absolute flaw in the software: Global adjustments should change all layers. They do not in Capture One.
In Lightroom, if you want to do an overall change to the entire image such as adjusting the white balance, the whole image is adjusted, even all of the local adjustments. Not so in Capture One!
As the image below shows, when I adjusted the overall white balance (I slide it all the way over to illustrate the point), you can see that the mask on the face is excluded as well as the background mask. This absolutely should not be how the software behaves! And yes, before you ask, the Image Layer was selected when this global adjustment was made along with the Select cursor tool.
When making an overall global adjustment in Capture One to the white balance (Kelvin temperature), only some of the adjustment layers are changed while others are excluded.
Well, there you have it. If these 3 things were fixed, it would make Capture One a more compelling option compared to its competitors.
Let me know in the comments below if you are aware of any work a rounds for this issues.
With a release date of October 2020, the Z7II offers plenty of opportunity for updates and changes, much of which are overdue. Just like the Z6III, I think similar changes could be made to the Z7II to bring it up to date with the release of the Z7III. Here is what I think could the specs of a refreshed Nikon Z7II could be.