122 DIGITAL CAMERA^ MARCH 2021 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com
Capture One 21 Pro is not cheap, but it is fast, efficient
and powerful. It offers a choice of workflows for studio
and regular photographers alike, and has a brilliant
layers-based approach to local adjustments. Most
impressive of all, though, is the sheer quality of its raw
processing. There are cheaper Sony, Fujifilm and Nikon
editions, restricted to cameras from those brands.Capture One 21’s new Smart Edit feature lets
you make rapid changes with just the keyboard.Capture One supports ‘round-tripping’ to external
editors for access to tools it lacks itself.expand and contract automatically
to fit the screen space, or you can
leave them open and scroll the
panel up and down.
The local adjustment tools are
really slick. The options are similar
to those in Lightroom, with a manual
brush tool, a linear gradient and a
radial gradient. There is also an auto
mask option plus luminance masking,
which applies a mask based on
colours and tones in the image.
You can apply any adjustment
to any image just in the browser
window – you don’t have to ‘open’
it or switch to a separate ‘develop’
mode. The Auto adjustments in
Capture One are a good start, and
you can choose one with a drop-down
menu on the Auto button.
With this release, the Capture One
company is clearly trying to reach a
broader audience beyond its core
constituency. Capture One 21 has
a new Learn button which displays
a curated set of tutorials.Quality of results
If you’ve only ever used Camera Raw
or Lightroom for your raw processing,“ Capture One’s
raw processing
is clearly on a
higher level”
you might be surprised to learn that
all raw image processors are not the
same. Lightroom is good at rendering
textures but rather noisy, even in
comparison with in-camera JPEGs.
Capture One is completely different.
Raw images are much smoother and
much less noisy, and fine detail is
rendered with biting clarity. Lightroom
is all right, but Capture One’s raw
processing is clearly on a higher level.
The new Dehaze tool is interesting,
and it’s not like the one in Lightroom.
It has a subtler contrast increasing
effect without the increased noise and
sometimes over-processed look of the
Lightroom Dehaze tool. It’s different,
though not necessarily better.
Capture One doesn’t support quite
the same number of cameras and
lenses as Lightroom, but it’s close,
and you can check the list of supported
cameras online before purchase to
make sure your makes and models
of camera and lens are included.
There will be some things you can’t
do in Capture One, that instead require
a conventional image editor like
Photoshop or Affinity Photo, or a
plug-in. Capture One does not support
integrated plug-ins in the same way
that Adobe software does, but it does
offer round-tripping to external editors,
which can amount to the same thing.
Because the Nik Collection plug-ins
also work as standalone programs, for
example, you can use them as external
editors in Capture One too, switching
between the two at will. Rod Lawton5.0 A best-in-class product
Features Design &
interfacePerformance Value5.0 5.0 5.0 3.5Capture One 21 has an entire tool tab dedicated to black and white, with a selection of very good toning presets, black-and-white Styles and film grain simulation.