Breaking up is hard to do!

This has been a long time coming, but Ann and I thought it best that we make the announcement to everyone at the same time.  Ann and I are breaking up . . . with Lightroom.  Lightroom has served us well these past few years, but as I’ll explain below, it was time to call it off and move onward with our lives.  It wasn’t an easy decision to make, nor has it come without costs, but we’re convinced it was the right one.  We remain friends with Lightroom, but as we move forward in our photographic journey, our organization and image developing tool will be Phase One’s Capture One.  

OK, Ann is giving me “that” look about the last paragraph, so I apologize if you thought I was talking about something else.  She says I’m cruel.  She’s probably right.  But it does reflect how major of a change in our photographic system moving over to Capture One represents.  Furthermore, I felt a need to give you a heads up because it will likely, at least for awhile, have an effect on postings.  In part, that’s because of the time it will take to competently adapt to a new editing program.  But also it’s going to take a bit of time to transition completed work done in Lightroom to Capture One.  In short, it’s going to be a grueling process that will take quite some time.  Time I might have spent coming up with new stories.

The question you’re probably asking yourself (if you think about these things) is, “Why?”  As complete a program as Lightroom is, we’ve had a few frustrations with it that are a bit complicated to explain.  Frustrations that never quite got resolved despite our efforts to do the best we could with the program.  And while most of the frustrations are very nuanced, undetectable by the untrained eye or at certain viewing scales/devices, they are nevertheless very real and we’re aware of them when we’re working with and viewing our work.  

I’ll try to keep the technical stuff straight-forward, but it’s worth an explanation if you’re into details like that.  Fujifilm came up with a photographic sensor “hack” that did away with a sensor filter (called a “low-pass” filter) that, in-effect, blurred the image while it was doing what it was supposed to do.  The low-pass filter was necessary to prevent moire patters from forming in images recorded by digital sensors.  Fuji wanted to do away with the filter so that its sensors (for the same number of megapixels) could produce sharper images.  It did this by re-arranging the configuration of red-green-blue pixels on the sensor (each pixel on a sensor can read only one color at a time).  The traditional filter has these colors arranged in a very regulated fashion (called a Bayer pattern) that can induce moire in certain types of textures.  The low-pass filter eliminated moire patterns on Bayer sensors, but because it came between the sensor and the light from the image, it softened the image a bit.  Fujifilm broke from this tradition and re-arranged the pattern of red-green-blue sensitive pixels, into a pattern that is much less susceptible to moire patterns than Bayer sensors, thereby eliminating the need for the low-pass filter.  Fuji called their sensor an X-Trans sensor.  

However, everything comes at a cost.  The negative side of Fuji’s approach is that it is much more complicated to translate what is recorded on an X-Trans sensor (called demosaicing), than it is images from a Bayer sensor.  But, as noted above, the advantage to the X-Trans sensor is that it can produce a much sharper image using the same number of megapixels.  

Lightroom, for whatever reason, has always had problems translating X-Trans sensor images.  Fujifilm realized this problem several years ago and teamed up with Adobe’s Lightroom team to work on improving Lightroom’s processing of X-Trans sensor RAW files (RAW files are base files that hold all the information possible from an exposure, while other files, such as .jpg do not contain all the information possible that was recorded).  And while they made some improvements over time, Lightroom’s X-Trans sensor images still had remnant artifacts that never looked quite right (often appearing in my beloved compositions as unnatural textures in the surface of subjects) and they never quite got sharpening right - which lost one of the advantages of going to the X-Trans sensor.  Yes, processed images were sharp, but there was an un-naturalness to the sharpness.  You could tell that by comparing the image sharpness from a RAW file to that of a .jpg image (processed in camera by Fuji) or when the RAW file was processed in Fujifilms very difficult-to-use RAW software.  Lightroom is a much better overall program and also allows you to organize images - so we opted for Lightroom instead of combining several programs to manage our images.  Still, we were able to produce decent enough images.  

In early 2018 we incorporated a Lightroom plug-in program call Iridient X-Transformer which we would use to convert the RAW files (Fuji’s .raf format) to DNG (.dng, Adobe’s RAW format) files.  Instantly we were able to obtain better sharpened images with fewer artifacts.  We felt like we’d made a major improvement on things. Life was good, or at least much better than it had been.

Then, Lightroom issued an update just before our fall trip and . . . everything seemed worse again.  Iridient then issued its update in response and, while it improved things a bit, things just seemed a bit off again.  Some of that was due to Lightroom having changed its default settings on certain controls, especially sharpening, but other issues seemed to persist no matter how we tweaked things.  It seemed like two steps backwards.  At a certain level, our fall images were worse technically than those from the previous year.

Now, pretty much none of this is evident on images that appear on the blog site - everything is just at too small of a resolution.  They were, however, evident on our larger monitors and in photographic prints, even relatively small 8x10 prints.

And speaking about prints, Lightroom seemed to be having issues (for me at least) with images that included pinks and magentas - colors that are prevalent in many of our pre-dawn images.  When I told that to the printing guy at Pro Photo Supply up in Portland, he suggested I print using the Canon print program.  That worked (giving me great results using the exact same ICC color profiles for each paper I was using with Lightroom), but it meant using yet another program when I shouldn’t have to.  Plus, some of the artifacts and texture issues with Lightroom that were evident on a large monitor are still readily apparent in those prints.  

Same story with Black and White - everyone recommended getting one or another software plug-in to get better control over black and white images.  But that would mean exporting images out of Lightroom and changing the negative format from .dng to .tif (another format that retains tremendous amounts of data that can be further developed, but that has huge file sizes).  Yet another program to buy, learn and use, plus the change in file type - I wasn’t having it.  Though I must admit, I’d been looking at a range of B&W options during this Thanksgiving - Christmas period.  The frustration was real.

So, while the results we were getting were far superior to what most people get from the camera shop/home printer, we’d gotten to the point in terms of our skill levels to know we were having to compromise.  

Then, before the Christmas season, we became aware of a new version of Capture One - Capture One 12.  As part of that release, Phase One explained that they’ve been working with Fujifilm to get the best images possible out of the X-Trans sensor.  Word was that, even before version 12, Phase One’s Capture One produced the best sharpened Fuji images out there (Iridient was considered #2, well, the Fuji Software was considered #2 but nobody, absolutely nobody, uses it, it’s so bad).  Now, not only had Capture One’s sharpening improved yet again, they were managing to get the Fuji colors out of the files. I started wondering . . . .

After processing some of the Death Valley images in Lightroom, and suffering some of the same frustrations I’d been experiencing before, I decided to read a few reviews and to watch a few videos about processing in Capture One.  It didn’t take me long to decide it was time to give Capture One a try.  I eventually downloaded a trial version of the program.

It was an incredibly disorienting experience.  While many of the same “tools” are there to control the same variables in an image, they’re organized completely differently in Capture One and often operate in very different ways.  Generally, they offer more control than the Lightroom version does, but that often means more things to think about and fiddle with.  Plus, there are things in Lightroom that Capture One doesn’t have (though fewer than I first had thought - finding them was often an issue), and things in Capture One that Lightroom doesn’t have (new tools to learn).  But I decided to give it a serious test and uploaded a handful of images that represented a range of image types.  And I cleared my plate to give myself a few hours on multiple occasions to work on images to learn the basics of the program and to see the results.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that Capture One’s algorithms (and that’s all a development program really is) are better.  Pretty much, across the board better.  First off, the .RAF files (the file name for Fuji RAW files - Capture One will not convert Fuji .raf files to .dng - that’s another change we’ve had to make) were sharp.  Even without additional sharpening, they were sharper than I’d been able to get even using Iridient, and the sharpness looked natural.  And the colors and tonal values looked superb - without any adjustments.  It seemed like I needed to do much less work to produce beautiful results than I’d had to do with Lightroom.  Some of that may be that some of the images were older images so I did a lot more tweaking before when I didn’t know Lightroom.  Still, the images seemed easier to work with in Capture One to produce results I was satisfied with.  Ann felt the same way. 

Martin Bailey, one of the photographers we follow and whose opinion we respect, said that if you want the highest quality image production tool - Capture One is the starting point.  And he  doesn’t photograph with Fuji cameras, so it’s not just an X-Trans sensor thing.  He has also raved about Capture One’s handling of black and white images (he no longer uses another program - one we’d been considering), and even prints directly from Capture One (on a Canon printer).  I tested out Black and White - he was right, the harsh tonal transition issues I was having with Lightroom seemed to disappear with Capture One.  And as you might suspect, the first print I did was one of an early morning in Bandon - with lots of subtle pink/magenta skies.  You can guess how that turned out.

We pulled the trigger and bought Capture One licenses.

Unfortunately, moving my (our) libraries from Lightroom into Capture One is not an easy process.  First off, we knew that there were supposed to be “quick and easy” ways to transfer the images in one big dump, although we also knew knew that some adjustments to images would not be preserved.  That meant the fine tuning of the finished work would be “lost,” but that was pretty much unavoidable.   Still, the big dump, or a series of them, seemed the most efficient way to go.  I first tried to do it one folder/year at a time even though that created more work for me because I had to export each as a catalog, and then bring that catalog into Capture One.  But I would immediately end up with the Capture One file structure I wanted.

Well, there were gross problems with images within the first couple of catalogs I tried transferring, which led me to wipe everything and start again from scratch.  Then I tried the Lightroom import tool, thinking I’d import my entire Lightroom Library and then break it up into smaller Catalogs to make Capture One more efficient.  Again, there were huge issues that introduced even more problems with the images (I swear, I have no images that have a heavy turquoise color cast to them) and, in any event, they didn’t bring over any of the images in a finished form.  Once again, I wiped everything and started from scratch.  I was going to have to do it the hard way.  I decided to start from the beginning with unadulterated files.

Part of our photographic routine is that, when we import images we make a backup of the originals onto another hard drive (and eventually back-up the originals, as well as back-up the imported images that are on our computers, and of course everything gets backed-up to the cloud - you can’t have too many backups).  So I’ve gone to my originals hard drive (the untouched original .raf files) and I am importing them into Capture One, folder by folder (which is a slow process).  Capture One imports them into a “Catalog”, and I’m creating one catalog for each year of work (I’ve completed 2018 and 2017 at this point).  Capture One stores the .raf file (the photograph) onto a new hard drive that will house the images, while inserting information about each image into the Capture One catalog.  In the future, I’ll import images from my camera SD card through Capture One, which will place the RAW file on the new hard drive and a copy into my Originals hard drive (just as I was doing before with Lightroom).  Conceptually, the Capture One Catalogs are small databases that contain a little bit of information/instructions about each image and how it gets developed, but then points to the original of the image itself on a hard drive - my Photographs Master Library hard drive.  The program then applies those instructions to “process” an image that I see on the screen (or print out).  Just as with Lightroom, the original photographic file is never altered.  I’m leaving my Lightroom Library, and the hard drive that houses the images that database works with, alone for reasons I’ll explain later.

As we photograph in 2019, I’ll create a 2019 catalog in Capture One and process everything normally there.  It’s the backlog of work that will be time consuming.  

First off, as explained above, I’ll be importing the original files from my backup, into catalogs created for each year so I’ll have all of my photographs accessible by Capture One.  None of these images will have been worked on (all of the developed images were done in Lightroom).  I plan to do some basic tagging of images and developing some of them, but not seriously working on most of them.  My primary goal is to get all of my images into the Capture One system in an organized way, with as much “potential” for each image as possible (which I was not getting with the rapid import of previously worked-on images).  To give you a rough idea, my computer tells me that I’ll be transferring nearly 41,000 photographs (that estimate is wrong and way low - that number comes from my Lightroom program and does not include all of the images I deleted from the Lightroom Library that are still on the original download hard drive . . . ugh).  Now you understand why I was hesitant to leave Lightroom, and why this will be such a time consuming process.  

As you know, I’ve extensively worked on a lot of images in Lightroom - so called final images.  The question is, what am I going to do with those images?  I’ve decided that I’ll just have to go through Lightroom year by year and identify those images that I’ve worked on to a point where I consider them final and worthy of showing.  Fortunately, Lightroom (as well as Capture One) has great organizational tools and I’ll be able to sort those into collections for export.  But I won’t be able to simply export them because Capture One can’t read the development instructions for the .dng files.  Consequently, I’ll have to convert them into much larger .tif files, which will preserve all of the changes I’ve made in developing the images and which Capture One can read, and still allow me to work on them in Capture One, or to print them from Capture One.  To give you an idea in the difference in file sizes - for one image that I tested, the .dng file was 13.5 MB, the .tif file is 73.4 MB.  Obviously, I don’t want to convert all of the Lightroom images I worked on, so I have to take the time and go through each year and identify the ones I want to save - call it the best of the best.  I’ll import them into Capture One, so I at least have the best of my older work available for show and further development if I want to.  And I can always refer to the metadata on those older files to identify the exact image file to work on if I want to start from scratch on an image - because that unaltered file will be in my Capture One catalog from the original imports.

This is why I’m also leaving the Lightroom Library  and the images it points to intact.  Once we end our Lightroom subscription, we’ll still be able to look at the images in Lightroom, we just won’t be able to work on them.  That way, if there is an image I think is worth while, I can see how I processed it previously and, if necessary go and grab it.  It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s the only way to truly carry images forward in time in the state where I’d deemed them “complete.”

It’s going to be a lot of work.  A whole lot of work.  Though I’m looking at it from a positive perspective.  I’m moving to a better tool, and this transition process (which I suspect will take the better part of the year) is an opportunity to revisit my previous work, see where I’ve been, and hopefully find patterns of work and images I hadn’t really seen before, which will benefit my work in the future.  It has been about 5 years of working hard on photography, 10 years in total since I started photographing again, so it’s about time to do that.  Thing is, I had a whole bunch of other things lined up for this year - some of it photographic, a lot not, and I hadn’t expected to commit to this type of effort.  It’s not as if I didn’t have enough on my plate.  There’s nothing to do but to get on with it and see it through properly.

Photographers generally have this habit of hopping from one “latest thing” to another.  I generally don’t do that, though I do love the idea of new gear.  My practice has been to master something before I consider other things.  That way, you have a sound basis on which to evaluate one product against another.  It was like this when I studied photography in the film days.  I did a deep dive into Ansel Adams’ The Negative and The Print, and realized that, technically there are multiple ways of doing almost anything.  And of course, there were dozens of film and papers and developer combinations.  How do you know what to try, and which combination is best for what situations?  After reading the books, I decided to pick a single film and developer combination (a highly recommended combination) that had particular characteristics that I had a preference for, as well as certain known disadvantages.  I stuck with that combination for three years before I even experimented with a different combination of film/developer.  After that, any time I tried another film/developer combination I could immediately tell the difference between the other films and/or developers, and explain how they were different (I also found out that I had made a good choice to begin with).  It was the same with paper and developers, though I didn’t stick with just the one paper for as long.  If you hop from one thing to another, you never learn a product’s nuances and until you really know one thing as a baseline, you really don’t have the skill to tell the subtle differences between similar tools.

So, the transition to Capture One wasn’t taken lightly.  And it was the several years of working with, and becoming proficient with, Lightroom that made it possible to tell the very subtle, and not so subtle, differences between the two programs.  Face it, most of the tools are conceptually the same, the real difference involves the end result.  I have Lightroom to thank for having the sensitivity to distinguish between it and other products.  But it is that sensitivity that lets me know that Capture One is a superior tool.  So it is time to change, despite the costs in time, energy and attention of doing so.  I have little doubt I’ll be pleased with the transition (I have to remind myself of that as I’m cursing myself for undertaking this task).  I just hope my image making keeps up with the improved tool.  

And in case you were wondering, these were the test images I processed in Capture One.