So I have been using Adobe Lightroom for roughly eight to nine years, and it was only recently that I looked at Capture One as a potential replacement.
The massive advantage of Adobe Lightroom was the speed of the catalogue, it far outpaced Capture One whose performance was like a snail that had been stepped on while trying to climb up a downward running escalator. Less Escargot as Escarg-no!
Lightroom offers a vast array of features for searching metadata and sorting images into Collections. I can search by a camera, iso, aperture etc very quickly, something that Capture One really struggles with. I don’t really need that feature anymore.
Capture One renders raw files much better than Adobe Lightroom, and there was a marked difference in noise quality in low-light images, which most of mine are when shooting Cabaret shows.
My needs have changed over the course of the years, I sold my Canon cameras and rarely go back to the images they took. I have always created my own catalogue system on my PC so in the event I swap to another raw file processor/catalogue system then I have all my images where I want them and will not be shoehorned into how a new application wants me to house them. This worked fine when I moved to Capture One, I opened a new catalogue file and imported the files. The catalogue folder expanded very quickly when searching through the folders. Changes to the images and a small thumbnail are saved when you access/change anything. Unlike Lightroom which holds them in one catalogue file.
This represented a problem for me as I like to edit on my laptop as well. I recently upgraded the laptop’s 2nd NVME to a two-terabyte model to hold a replica of the images on the main drive of my PC. Any images I update or introduce to one can easily be moved to the other. However, I would then have to update or copy the catalogue over. This isn’t too bad as on both units the images and catalogue are held on a drive labelled D:, the file structure is the same so the catalogue will find the updates.
Except Capture One has a feature called Sessions, I use this for studio shoots, one for each model I shoot with. This allows Capture One to easily open a folder and work on it immediately. A Capture One folder is created in the host folder and holds the settings and cache files.
This opens up an interesting opportunity. Could I use a Capture One session as a catalogue? All my files and folders are in the place I need them. For example, once I have finished a folder of show images, I can copy the folder to the main PC, this copies the images, settings and cached thumbnails in one hit. The folder then sits on the main PC drive. I can then open the Capture One session on the PC, navigate to the folder and everything is there, the images, the changes and the thumbnails already there.
I stumbled on another idea alongside the first. With my studio work, I ask the models to let me know which of the images they like and which they do not. Likes are given a green tag and dislikes are marked in red. So I would have to do this on the other units’ session file too? Nope, as long as the files, folders and cache are there, then all I need to do is copy the updated cache files, open the Capture One session file and it reads the updates.
If I wanted to rearrange the folder structure of my images on my hard drive I would have to make the changes in the catalogue itself, be it Capture One or Lightroom. Otherwise, after the changes are made I would have to import the new folders. Lightroom can do this fine but changes would be lost as well as in Capture One. Sessions don’t care where the files are… you just open the session file, navigate to the folder and it reads it fine.
When it comes to archiving the files I would of course want the changes to go with the folders so they are copied. It is not really necessary to copy the thumbnails to a backup medium they can always be recreated if needed.
And another thing!! When using Sessions in Capture One, the whole of the file system is shown in Windows via the System Folders. This can mean a lot of dialling down to the folders you want.
With my filing system that can mean a lot of clicking open folders, however, I made use of Windows Libraries that are situated higher up the System Folders list. These libraries can be used as shortcuts to folders deeper down the folder tree. If I find I have a folder I visit more often than others then I can create a new Library shortcut to quickly access it rather than multiple clicks
Using sessions is a far faster and more accessible workflow than being tied down to a catalogue. Greater flexibility when moving files and folders around too.
I wonder what other tricks I can come up with?