Hoggy
Never take life, or anything in it, too seriously.
I decided to try out Capture One Pro 8 recently. It had nothing to do with the recent Adobe fiasco, as I wasn't really affected at all by it - in fact the new HDR improvements were a boon.
At first the interface seems kludgy, and in ways I still think that - like some windows not staying with the maximized application, and following you to other programs (as if it turned 'stay on top'). However, I'm finding that otherwise the interface is highly customizable.
But anyways, on to the important issue - the image adjustments.
While this is extremely preliminary, the starting image quality seems much better - and with an Auto-adjust that actually works most times.
Yet mainly, several tools seem to be light years ahead of LR. Like the color adjustments, levels (in addition to curves) and many clarity options in particular. There also seems to be masking and layers support as well, but I haven't gotten that far on understanding those yet. It's also much faster overall (though tool tab switching is rather slow, even for previously visited tabs), and seems to use only 1 type of preview - smart previews - with adjustable size (2560 default) from 640 to 5120.
And judging by what I saw from a test online (I still need to check for myself), LR may be behind in the noise reduction department as well.. The tests I saw showed DXO was better, and COP-7 on top, with more retained details. Although, there are fewer controls in COP8 than LR.
However, the downsides are many to me. Like no 'alt/option previews', no integration with publishing services, no raw-HDR/panorama creation, loss of integration with PS, and no snapshots, per se, that goes hand-in-hand with not being able to write to DNG-xmp for a belt-and-suspenders snapshots backup - and no DNG image data verification. And I just can't shake the feeling that LR seems much better for DAM purposes - although maybe it's that I'm just not use to COP-8. EDIT: There is also seemingly no way to change what the color labels mean - which I took for granted in LR.
I understand that such develop options might make the program a bit harder to learn for new users, but I can't help but wonder if at some point there should be an 'enable advanced features' checkbox in preferences to deal with that.
I'm curious as to what other people might think...
At first the interface seems kludgy, and in ways I still think that - like some windows not staying with the maximized application, and following you to other programs (as if it turned 'stay on top'). However, I'm finding that otherwise the interface is highly customizable.
But anyways, on to the important issue - the image adjustments.
While this is extremely preliminary, the starting image quality seems much better - and with an Auto-adjust that actually works most times.
Yet mainly, several tools seem to be light years ahead of LR. Like the color adjustments, levels (in addition to curves) and many clarity options in particular. There also seems to be masking and layers support as well, but I haven't gotten that far on understanding those yet. It's also much faster overall (though tool tab switching is rather slow, even for previously visited tabs), and seems to use only 1 type of preview - smart previews - with adjustable size (2560 default) from 640 to 5120.
And judging by what I saw from a test online (I still need to check for myself), LR may be behind in the noise reduction department as well.. The tests I saw showed DXO was better, and COP-7 on top, with more retained details. Although, there are fewer controls in COP8 than LR.
However, the downsides are many to me. Like no 'alt/option previews', no integration with publishing services, no raw-HDR/panorama creation, loss of integration with PS, and no snapshots, per se, that goes hand-in-hand with not being able to write to DNG-xmp for a belt-and-suspenders snapshots backup - and no DNG image data verification. And I just can't shake the feeling that LR seems much better for DAM purposes - although maybe it's that I'm just not use to COP-8. EDIT: There is also seemingly no way to change what the color labels mean - which I took for granted in LR.
I understand that such develop options might make the program a bit harder to learn for new users, but I can't help but wonder if at some point there should be an 'enable advanced features' checkbox in preferences to deal with that.
I'm curious as to what other people might think...
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