On Capture One. I have not used Capture One much, being so familiar with Lightroom. I decided to give it a whirl this week again. The program is much more complex than Lightroom but eminently more capable. It wraps up the features of Photoshop and Lightroom into one place. I have never mastered the use of layers in Photoshop despite having dabbled many times. I get lost in Photoshop’s complexity and the busy clutter of the editing screen. Using layers in Capture One is way easier.
Anyway, below are two images. The top image first step in Capture One involved hitting the “magic” auto processing button. While Lightroom’s “auto” button corrects only the colors and shadows and highlights, Capture One’s features also corrects automatically for lens distortion and horizon level. That was a wow factor for me, saving a ton of fiddling and giving a base from which to work.
Using the Capture One auto feature, I achieved an image to my taste by applying slight warming to the color temperature and a minor adjustment of the tint to green, with a minor reduction in sharpness, described below. The rendering after the auto feature was pleasant and not over the top.
As a qualifier, I was feeling adventurous and pre-processed both images using DXO Camera Raw 4 before moving to Capture One. The DXO program changes were very subtle. Somewhere in the continuum I think a sharpening change was applied, but another test will have to be made to confirm this. In the finished image, I dialed back the sharpening some. One of my mottos is: Sharpness is not necessarily goodness!
