Captured & “Expose for the fireball”
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
This week an extra midweek episode with Daniel Milnor of Shifter and Blurb. Long time listeners will remember by first conversation with him almost 100 episodes ago.
It was high time we got on the mic again and I particularly enjoyed hearing Dan wrestle with his feelings towards the Leica Q3 at the end of the episode.
Captured
Something that came up when I was speaking with Dan was software used to edit/ process images. I've been a Lightroom user for a long time. It does the job, it is familiar, and it’s good software backed by a big company.
Unfortunately, Adobe have retired the entry level 20GB photography tier I’ve been on for years. They’ve also raised prices significantly in the last 12 months and that has opened the door to other options. If I’m going to pay over £100 a year to edit my images, I should probably shop around a bit and make sure I’m supporting software I like.
Support the show
If you’re enjoying the show and newsletter, you can get a little more over on Patreon. Thanks to everyone who’s already supporting the show.
I'd heard good things about Capture One from previous guests and listeners. It has a reputation for being a serious photographer's choice, a bit more boutique maybe. Their 7 day trial was too good to ignore so on a recent trip I downloaded it to the laptop and figured I’d make it my main software for the weekend.
I’ve recently inherited a hand-me-down M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM, a 5 year old machine so not state of the art, and yet the thing that struck me as I started editing my 60MP RAW images was the speed of the software. Lightroom Classic has always been a wee bit laggy for me. The odd hesitation when switching tools, a stutter here and there when using non-core features like metadata tagging. Capture One doesn't appear to do that. It reminded me of how Affinity’s new software felt when they updated their offering last year.
There’s more for me to do to learn the software and I’m sure I’ll write more about it in the coming months but so far the way it works, integrated negative processing and a slightly warmer image by default are working for me. Time will tell whether the fact that I have to manually use EXIFTOOL to add lens data on my vintage lenses after I edit and manually upload/ move to backups becomes a deal breaker, but I’m really enjoying it so far.