Hey Everyone!  This blog I'm going over my first thoughts on Capture One 12 as an alternative to Adobe Lightroom. First a disclaimer.  I am no Capture One expert nor am I thinking of changing to Capture One, but I wanted to research the program to see what all the fuss was about.  A lot of YouTube-famous people have switched from Lightroom to Capture One, and I am curious about it.  So I downloaded the free one-month trial, which was painless.  No credit card needed.  I loaded it onto an older MacBook Pro, a 2011 model, to see what it could do.  This machine has been upgraded to a SSD hard drive and 16 gig of memory.  This is an okay machine but by no means top of the line.  So that's where I've started.  In bullet form, I'll list what I've found so far.

-Download and install was easy.  I logged into Capture One and got the free 30-day trial. Thumbs up!

-After doing a lot of tutorial watching online, I imported my Lightroom Catalog from my DC trip into Capture One, over 2,000 photos, and it took about 40 minutes.  This was the Lightroom catalog, and it had all of my edits that I had made in Lightroom.  This catalog I had on an external drive with all of the photos that I had taken on the trip.  It then made smart previews of all the images.  This is a default in Capture One and makes the program snappy!  You can edit your photos without having the photos present.  Thumbs Up!

-The interface was all in one page.  I didn't have to go to a different module to edit my photos.  The interface is totally customizable. You can even arrange things so it almost looks like Lightroom.  And, like I said before, everything is snappy!  You can make it anything you like and then save the settings.  So if you had more than one person working on the same computer, they could have their settings and you could have yours.

-Capture One 12 creates catalogs similar to Lightroom.  You can have the catalog on one computer and copy and paste it onto another computer that has Capture One, and you can edit your photos there even without your photos because of the smart previews it created on import.  Moving of folders and photos to and fro must be done within the Capture One catalog just as you do with Lightroom.  Capture One also has Sessions.  These are smaller shoots that have everything contained in the session.  They are smaller than the Catalogs and can be copied and pasted onto another computer and worked on separately without bothering the Catalog database.  When you're all through, you can import the session into the Capture One Catalog database.

- Tethering is where this program really shines.  Tethering is simple.  Just hook up your camera to your computer, open a session, and start shooting.  The photos come in very quickly, and you can edit on the fly and apply all the edits to incoming photographs.  For example, if you wanted to crop a certain way and make the photos black and white, you would just edit the first photo and tell the program that you wanted to make those edits to all incoming photos the same way and it will.  You could lay layout templates on top of the photos coming in, like if you were shooting for a magazine and you could have the magazine cover layout put on top of the photos coming in to see how it will look as a final shot.  We probably will never need this, but it's cool.  You can also shoot live view and see the setup that you are making live before you take a photo, say for example a food shot.   You could take your time and get it right before you ever take a shot and know what the composition will look like.  Tethering is what this program was made for with Phase One Cameras, which are mainly studio cameras, and it shows.

These are just a few of my first thoughts.  I think this would be a great program if you were only doing studio work.  I'm not quite sold yet on all of the other things that it offers.  But if you're only doing studio work, this would be the program for you. Luminar 3 is another program that I think is a good replacement for Lightroom.  Formerly, Luminar 2018 had added a DAM (digital asset manager) to its program, and I will go through it in another blog soon.