Software Capture One Pro 23
Subscription or single-fee licence (see p116)
Professional software with organising and editing tools
1 Users can choose which Tool Tabs are displayed (eg Library, Adjust) to suit their needs.
2 Selecting one of the Tool Tabs opens a strip underneath that shows the relevant settings.
3 The main window shows either a thumbnail browser, a full-scale image viewer, or both.
4 Cursor tools are laid out horizontally for access to editing parameters like crop and brushes.
5 Toggle other useful controls here, like a Before and After screen split and grid overlays.
6 The image browser (as seen in the image on opposite page) can be displayed or hidden.
Capture One Pro is a high-end image organising and editing C tool that works along the same principles as Adobe’s Lightroom Classic, offering seamless non-destructive editing of raw files, tiffs and jpegs with the ability to create multiple ‘virtual’ copies of images (‘Variants’) to experiment with a range of different looks.
Capture One Pro’s particular strengths include tethered camera operation and professional photographic workflows, however, the steady addition of organising and editing features in earlier versions has made it a direct rival to Lightroom. Unlike Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, Capture One Pro is available both on subscription and with a perpetual licence, though Capture One is shifting towards subscriptions and will no longer be offering mid-version updates for perpetual licences.
Key features
Capture One Pro 23 can view and edit raw files ‘live’ without any processing phase in the same way as Lightroom. All the editing adjustments are non-destructive and stored either in the catalogue file or as ‘sidecar’ files if it’s being used in ‘session’ mode. This is one key difference from
Lightroom in that, with sessions, Capture One Pro shows folder contents live without the need for any import process, with all the editing tools but only some organising tools intact. In this mode, it’s like a much more powerful version of Adobe Bridge.
Capture One Pro 23 catalogues work in the same way as Lightroom Classic, showing both folders and images on your
