Are we crazy? Dumb? Or just plain stupid?
I’m not the kind of guy who likes to change things up a lot. I like my routines and I like things to work. Once something works, I usually stick with it. For example, once I find a pair of shoes I like, I tend to buy the same pair over and over as I wear them out until they discontinue the model or make a fundamental change (usually in the construction) that makes them no longer work for me. I’ll admit, I have GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) as much as the next photographer, but I usually don’t act on it, and when I do, it’s after I’ve thought long and hard about why I want it and what it might do for me. I tend to know why before I jump onto something new, which means I rarely regret my decision when I do jump.
But things don’t always work out, and sometimes you have to reassess. To cut to the chase, Ann and I are making a big photographic change . . . again. We’re moving back to Lightroom from Capture One. After switching over in January 2019, it’s time to switch back. Believe me, it is not a decision we made lightly, nor has it been an easy process. It has been extremely time consuming and painful to do, though I have to admit that Ann has done most of the hard work, testing out approaches for how to do it efficiently. But there is no “easy” way to make such a change, especially given that all of the edits I’ve done on RAW images in Capture One will basically be lost in the process (as they were in the change over to Capture One). And, because for some reason all the file names of the main photography files got changed in switching over to Capture One, it’s not as simple as pointing my old Lightroom catalog to those files to preserve the edits I’d made on my pre-2019 images. Switching back means all of my old files are like old negatives and any future work will have to be from scratch. (Ok, I’ve exported a bunch of .jpg images to use as reference images but . . . that’s of little comfort.)
You may ask why? Why would we do such a thing? Especially if it’s so painful? Well, there are several reasons: some things about Lightroom that we didn’t realize we’d miss (and did terribly), others about Capture One that we’ve become . . . let’s say, tired of, some things Lightroom has fixed and, the conclusion we were willing to give up some things that Capture One gives us that Lightroom doesn’t. Oh yeah, and for the past 8 months - over two different computers, a new operating system and two different versions of Capture One - Capture One keeps crashing on me, multiple times on many occasions, every time I try to do much work in it. Anyway, if you don’t care about technical stuff, you can just zoom through and look at the photos - they’re just here just for visual entertainment anyway. If you want to learn a bit about what’s important to us (and maybe a bit about us in the process), keep on reading.
As good a place to start as any is DAM - digital asset management. It’s not a very sexy term, but I can’t tell you how much I missed the way it is implemented in Lightroom. I hadn’t expected to miss it, but there is a reason folks say it’s head-and-shoulders above most other systems. Basically, it’s how the files are organized and managed and able to be worked with (both individually and collectively) once they’re entered into the system. On the surface, most DAM systems appear to be similar, if not even identical - it’s a way to store, organize and use your images. At least for Capture One, that is not the case.
Perhaps the biggest failing is that CO is said to have “issues” when the catalog gets to be a certain size. We read that from more than one reliable source when we transferred over to CO, so we did what they recommended - we made a catalog for each calendar year to make sure we didn’t get near the catalog size issue. Sure, we could have done several year groups per catalog, but we decided to follow good advice. The problem is, I hadn’t realized how often I flip back and forth between the years to look at and work with images. For example, I’ve been to Devil’s Garden in the Grand Staircase Escalante 5 times and when I look at the images I made on my trip with Len in 2023, I think of and want to look at the images I made the first time there - in 2015 - or maybe from the stops in 2017, 2018 or 2019. In Capture One, I had to open up another catalog (switching from one year to another) to look at them. And there was no easy way (note the word “easy”) to group images from multiple years together so I could look at them, evaluate them and learn from them collectively. In Lightroom there is one catalog. One catalog that holds everything, which means you can group images from different years together. As my Lightroom catalog is populating (making the 1:1 preview images), it tells me I have 118,000+ images. Now, that number includes multiple file types of the same image (.jpg and .RAF for example) or even variants of the same RAF file, but it’s still a lot. Most importantly, the one Lightroom Catalog goes from an image from 2001 to ones taken two weeks ago. In Capture One, I have 14 catalogs (and would have started a 15th in 2024). As for size limitations, we did our research and as one person explained, he has a professional colleague with 6 million images in a single Lightroom catalog. I’m not likely to hit a size limit with my catalog. Now I can look at an image from 2017 next to an image from 2023.
Most importantly, I can organize and work with my images the way I want to without the limits CO imposed on me. I’m not limited by year, which really became a burden as I tried to draw on old images for blog posts, or to evaluate my images - to learn from them. Yes, I love to be out photographing in great locations most of all, but the reality is that I work most of the time from home and much of my “photography” involves working with the images I’ve already made, to think about them (You really think these blog posts are for you? You’re just an excuse to make myself put some of this stuff down in writing.), and to prepare for our next outing and, fingers crossed, next series of big trips (it’s been way, way too long).
So at a fundamental level, the change is as much about DAM as anything.
And then there is working with images and, as is often the case, the devil is often in the details. Just take versions of images as an example (“virtual copies” in Lightroom, “variants” in Capture One). Both systems are “non-destructive,” which means they never change the underlying RAW file (.RAF for Fujifilm cameras, .DNG for the Leica), but rather make all changes via a set of instructions that get applied to the file after-the fact. Create a virtual copy/variant, and you create a new set of instructions that get applied to the same base raw file - for example, to develop that same image as a black and white. On the surface, both systems are the same. But when you want to do something like print an image, that’s when things go haywire with Capture One.
As you’re well aware if you follow the blog, Ann and I enjoy printing our images (I’ve had to bump back a couple of printing sessions lately . . . ugh). Getting a print just right is not an easy task. Not only do you have to calibrate your monitors, but once you’re developed the image the way you want it to look (our monitors cover a much broader color gamut than most monitors), you then have to apply what’s called an ICC profile that renders the image to what it will look like printed (based on your paper choice and printer). So you get an image to look right on the screen so you know how you want it to look. But then you apply the ICC profile, which makes it It looks all screwed up on the monitor, so then you have to make adjustments to get it to look right again (with the ICC profile). Then you print that version of it on the paper the ICC profile is created for, so that the final print looks right. If you remove the ICC profile from the adjusted version of the image on the monitor - it looks crappy. If you try to print the original version that looks good on the monitor without the ICC profile - it usually looks off. In Capture One, you have only one ICC profile that gets applied at a time and it gets applied to everything. This means you have to switch ICC profiles as you hop between the print variant with the ICC profile to look at your original developed variant with the normal (ProPhoto or AdobeRGB) profile. And you cannot make a direct, side-by-side comparison. Lightroom uses a “soft-proofing mode” that attaches to the variant (oops, a virtual copy) and does not get applied globally to all of the images in the catalog. You associate an ICC profile to the soft-proofing mode on a “for printing” virtual copy and can compare how that image looks (using the correct ICC profile) side-by side with your original finished developed image (with the correct normal color profile). You can tell if the shadows are too dark, or too light in a way not possible with Capture One. It is much easier to make the variant intended for printing (with the correct ICC profile) look like the master image. Moving to Lightroom will make the creation of the file for printing so much easier.
While we’re on the topic of printing, Capture One’s print module sucks. Period. Lightroom’s is by far superior and, given that Lightroom is now subscription only, it comes with Photoshop. If we decide to (and we should) we can learn how to print from Photoshop, which is the best in the business for getting an image ready for printing. Yes, it will involve a learning curve, but given how we like to print, it’s one we should undertake. That and two or three other things that you can’t beat Photoshop for as a tool should make learning a new tool worth it. So printing our images is also one of the biggest drivers of the move back.
One of the primary reasons we originally switched over to Capture One was the poor way that Lightroom handled Fujifilm X-Trans Sensor files. It’s improved a bit over the years, but it’s still nothing like how well Capture One renders them. One of the reasons we even contemplated switching back is that a company, DXO, has come out with a Lightroom plug in that helps render Fujifilm files (while also sharpening them and clearing out noise) and it’s pretty darned good. Excellent, in fact (remember all that testing and stuff I said Ann did)! That’s in part what got us thinking about coming back. We have a sound solution to the green worms that Lightroom will occasionally produce with X-Trans sensor files. In short, we shouldn’t be sacrificing on image quality by switching back!
Another thing Ann discovered while she was “testing” Lightroom again was the ability to code tools to use in the program. We now have a “Comments” section in the metadata area where we can add notes for a particular image, such as the paper and printer combination for a particular image that was color flagged as a variant prepared for printing (in my case color coded purple for printing). Or thoughts about how to develop the negative (RAW file), or thoughts about why the image was made. Again, little things, but little things that fit the way we work.
So what are we giving up? Well, as I noted, Capture One generally has the best conversion for Fujifilm files, though we have a work around for that. Capture One also has a more natural color rendering from files compared to Lightroom, which can appear a bit saturated. I will miss that color rendering, but it’s not as if it can’t be readily adjusted - I’ll probably go back to looking at the Fujifilm profiles more often again and picking the best starting point from those. And I’ll probably tone down the saturation a bit as part of my working process.
There are two development tools that I am really going to miss. The first is the use of layers. Capture One uses layers instead of a sequential history of edits like Lightroom does. With layers, you can turn them on or off, or go back and make changes to a particular layer if you need to (sometimes making a change to an image alters the visual effect of a prior development action and you need to adjust accordingly). Unfortunately, in Lightroom, if you go back to, let’s say, that step where you changed the contrast a bit - the entire history after that gets changed. So you just have to add to the sequence of adjustments you’ve made and try to tweak back the contrast as a separate action. It’s just a way of thinking and working, but I do prefer the layers approach. Now, Photoshop has layers, but I don’t want to dive too deep into Photoshop to do things I can more easily do in Lightroom, so I’ll have to live without layers and be more careful in being methodical in my approach to developing image so I don’t wind up with a hundred adjustments going back and forth with corrections.
The second developing tool I’m going to miss is a levels tool. It’s another one of those things that Photoshop has but Lightroom doesn’t (I guess that Adobe wants to keep some distinctions between the two programs). Capture One has both a levels tool and a curves tool (which Lightroom does have), and I’ve grown to use both of them because they act somewhat differently. Again, I’ve accepted that it’s a sacrifice I’ll have to make.
I’m sure there are more differences, but those are the big ones. Plus, I’m back to a big learning curve with Lightroom, both to re-learn preferred techniques and to explore and learn the new tools they’ve added since I last used Lightroom (I’m finding that there is a lot of them) and their potential. It will be work. Hopefully fun work, but work nonetheless.
I guess the final thing to note about Capture One is that over the past few years, Ann and I have come to learn that we are not their primary client types. Ann in particular has spent a lot of time working on images and has made several constructive suggestions to Capture One for how they can improve several features to improve user experiences. She’s pretty good about that and often the programmers (for other software) are very appreciative. Sometimes Capture One would respond they are working on it (nothing has changed in years regarding those recommendations), other times they would say that is not a priority (read: it isn’t going to happen). We’ve gotten to the point that we wonder if the target customer for Capture One ever prints their images. Capture One was originally developed for working studio photographers and if you need to tether your computer to your camera during a camera shoot, I doubt there’s a better tool out there. But that’s not what we do. Over the years we really didn’t see any effort on Capture One’s part going into the things we’re interested in (all along following the photo news and seeing the various advances Lightroom was making for amateur photographers). Capture One rarely improved those things that are important to us. Ultimately, enough was enough. Capture One is a great tool for what it does, but they really don’t seem to care about our photography needs or wants. So we’re moving on.
I’ve barely begun the transition, but already I’m appreciating the massive DAM improvement. I’ve got quite a few collections completed already and several more that are shells waiting for images to populate them. (In-between writing this blog and posting, I’ve discovered several collections of .jpgs I’d exported for the website and for my iPad portfolio app that I’ve put to good use re-importing into Lightroom and inserting them into the respective collections!) Oh how I’ve missed that!
Hopefully, we’ll be out there photographing again and I’ll be building up my 2024 collection of images. Until then, I’ll stay in out of the rain, finish up organizing my collections, practicing on a few images to re-learn Lightroom, and, with any luck, making time to print over the holidays.
Yeah, call us crazy.
Merry Christmas! And may everyone have a happy and enriching New Year!