My Current Digital Workflow

I have stayed on the upgrade carousel with the three software manufacturers I mentioned. I stopped upgrading DxO to full licensed versions because it just wasn’t fitting my needs. For the purposes of this post, I won’t discuss Aperture, except to say that if you are bought into the iLife thing, Aperture dovetails into this completely. It has the greatest UI, but there is virtually no muscle-memory shared between Aperture and Photoshop. That can be a big deal if you rely on you keyboard to change tools and need your pointing device to stay a moveable brush.

Lightroom

I have moved away from Lightroom because, although I understand and agree with some of the decisions Adobe has made, I find myself “fighting the system” way too often. This may change with Lightroom 4, which has more functionality in the adjustment brushes, but it doesn’t look that way just now.

Real Strengths for Lightroom:

• Responsive UI. I can’t say enough for this. When you move an adjustment brush in Lightroom, there is no lag in the UI feedback. When you spot something, the results are visible immediately.
• Great integration with Photoshop and many plugins. This is “automatic,” so when you do an “Edit in Photoshop” or “Edit in Nik Color Efex,” that’s just what happens and the result is a TIFF file in the same catalog (assuming you have things set up right).
• Good export module. Getting your “developed” files into JPEG form for delivery is simple, and you can use cookbook recipes to tailor the size, format, and quality of the image. Even better, you can tell Lightroom to prompt you for an output folder.
• Good filename parsing when renaming. Adobe does just a bit more to help preserve the original filename when you rename files on import or later. So, for example, if my original file is _T009867.CRW, I can rename it using custom options to get la_model_shoot_009867.CRW. Some other programs fail on leading underscores.
• Improved adjustment brush. The adjustment brush and gradient tools are great. In fact, I think they are the best in the industry. I don’t find that their smart mask works very well, despite the cool demos you can find on the Web. That said, slapping a graduated ND on an image with the gradient is easy-peasy. It’s hard to resist using these tools, but you can become too absorbed and worse, you can start wasting time doing things in Lightroom that are better accomplished in Photoshop. Still, I feel adjustments on RAW data beats performing these adjustments on pixel (raster) data. If you need fine masking, they you will absolutely need Photoshop. Otherwise, it’s worth giving these tools a whirl.
• Workflow: It’s one-stop-shopping. You have to switch “modes” to get from your Library to your Develop module. Modal applications are not the very best UI design, but you’re not changing applications — just modes.

Weaknesses for Lightroom

There aren’t a lot of holes in the Lightroom story. There are things I simply don’t care about as a still photographer, yet I pay for them and they take up screen real estate. In short, features that make me say, “meh.” Some things are just missing. For example:

• I’m not crazy about the Publish feature. Sure, there are some people who want to share everything they do from the moment they get up in the morning until they are fast asleep on Facebook and twitter. I’m not one of those. I pick and choose what I want to share, and it doesn’t belong in my working image catalog. This is, to me, UI fluff.
• Print module. There have been reviews — often from NAPP (not the most unbiased source) — that claim that the print module is phenomenal. I don’t print anymore because I deliver everything I do in digital form. I don’t even print proofs. In this regard, I may be in the minority, but I regard the print module as uninteresting.
• Web module. Really? Do we want one-off Web sites for every group of images we do? Well I don’t. I have a Web site and put what images I want on it. The purpose of my Web site is not cookie-cutter and I suspect the same holds true for many serious photographers. Again, a whole module that is uninteresting to me.
• Video-oriented features. I just don’t care. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that I’m not a videographer. There are some very talented videographers out there and then there are a bunch of people with DSLRs who want to use video as another service they provide. If you are a wedding photographer, you may find this a great extra revenue stream. It’s not something I use.
• Layers. This is a glaring Adobe-you-know-how-to-do-this omission. It’s not like they didn’t have experience with how the market reacted to layers when they introduced them into Photoshop. Relying on a third-party plugin to patch this hole is, to me, shipping an incomplete product.

Capture One / Phase One Media Pro

I’ve changed to this setup because I am getting better image quality more consistently using these tools than I was with Lightroom. Images seem more resilient to rescue in Capture One and metadata is easier to enter once you get the hang of it in Media Pro. Over the years, I’ve dipped in and out of Capture One and Media Pro, but it hasn’t really stuck. Now that Phase One owns Media Pro, it’s a heck of a lot easier to use in conjunction with Capture One.

Let me digress just a moment to talk about image quality. This is a catch phrase that is used without a strict definition all over the Web and in a great deal of marketing material. At this point, I don’t think there is a true definition of image quality. Let me talk about what image quality is not. It is not how good an image looks on your computer. You can sex up any image to look great on the screen by increasing the contrast, saturation, and by sharpening it. That doesn’t have a thing to do with the quality of the full size image and it’s crucial to grasp that. If your brother-in-law says “oh, wow!” it doesn’t mean your image quality is good. Image quality can’t be defined as how great an image looks when you print it in a certain size, as you will have (again) made certain decisions with respect to what to mess with for a pleasing print in that size on that printer. For me, image quality is about resilience — i.e., can the image be repurposed with few ill effects. My definition may not fit with everyone’s, but my starting point is to get an image to what I imagined when I pressed the shutter release. No pixel out of place, no lens distortion that was unintentional, just a great rendering of the original image data.

Strengths for Capture One / Media Pro

Again, not a lot of holes in the story. Most, if not all, of the features you expect are there.

• Great control of color balance of the entire image, and of individual color ranges. This last part is contained in the Capture One Color Editor under the Advanced tab. It took me a long time to learn to love this — it’s analogous to the Lightroom HSL / Color / B&W panel where you can target individual color ranges in the image and change things like hue rotation, saturation, etc. You can control the range very precisely and the controls work to make very subtle, and natural adjustments. This is in keeping with my philosophy of not changing up the whole image (purple trees, green skies, etc.). Less is often more. More on this later.
• Superior tethered capture. If you aren’t doing tethered capture, this won’t matter to you, but Phase One has made a specialty of it, and where a camera feature can be accessed, they do. The manufacturers are notoriously tight-lipped about the interfaces to their cameras for who knows what reasons, but you can perform most functions you need on the computer — importantly, white balance and exposure. These are key in setting up a shoot so you can run through a set of test exposures, not saving them to disk until you are ready, then get out of the “composition mode” and start the shoot.
• Cool “focus mask” tool that helps you see whether you really nailed the focus. If you’re shooting at wider apertures, this can make an edit go much more quickly.
• Layers. You’ve already read that I like layers. I see them as a key part of image adjustment, and the fact that you can mask the layers makes them much more flexible. Capture One is not Photoshop and there is no sense pretending it is. Cutting intricate masks still has to be done in Photoshop, but you can do a great number of adjustments that deserve to be done on the RAW bits inside Capture One using layers. Note that not every control available in the software is available on a layer. For example, you can do sharpening on a layer, but can’t set the radius and threshold. Noise reduction cannot be applied on a layer; Lightroom 4 Beta allows you to do noise reduction with an adjustment brush. I won’t catalog everything, except to say that both Capture One and Lightroom place some restrictions on what can be done in a local adjustment.
• Chromatic aberration elimination. This is something I would expect Lightroom to have better than Capture One. But I would be wrong. Capture One handles both CA and purple fringing better than Lightroom. I like to shoot with wide angle lenses and fisheyes in contrasty situations. I get chromatic aberration — it’s the nature of the beast. Images that Lightroom (and thus, Adobe Camera RAW) could not fix were a snap in Capture one. This alone might have made my decision.
• Keystone correction. Architectural photographers and those of us who can’t always line the sensor plane up exactly with the plane of the subject will like this. It allows straightening converging lines that are the result of shooting from below or the side of an object that should obviously be rectilinear. For example, a window or door. Keystone correction can be vertical, horizontal, or both.
• Noise reduction is very detailed.
• Filtering images can be much easier in Media Pro. It’s an acquired taste, but often I get more relevant results with Media Pro than Lightroom’s Library module.
• Entering metadata feels more natural in Media Pro. This is a very subjective thing, but I find myself liking Media Pro for metadata entry, which is kind of the grunt work in the process. Anything that can reduce the pain of metadata entry is something I like. I can’t quantify it, but Media Pro just feels more right as a tool for this.

Weaknesses for Capture One / Media Pro

• So-so integration. Capture One and Media Pro came from two different places and changes made in one place are not immediately shown in the other. For example, if I flag something as 5 stars in Capture One, then switch to Media Pro, I won’t see that reflected in the catalog. It’s easy to export that change to Media Pro, but it’s an extra step that can be forgotten. Similarly, metadata I change in Media Pro is not reflected in Capture One unless I sync the metadata from inside Media Pro. Again, not seamless.
• UI responsiveness/feel. While reasonable, neither Capture One nor Media Pro are as snappy as Lightroom. Particularly noticeable as slow are spotting and drawing masks on layers. Rendering large images (as opposed to thumbnails) in Media Pro is pokey to the point where I seldom do it.
• Lack of baked-in set of camera/lens profiles for DSLRs. If you have one of the Phase One products, you’re in business — Capture One knows all about you. If you have a DSLR, there aren’t a set of prebuilt camera/lens profiles to adjust for distortion, light falloff, sharpness falloff or other lens issues.

Wrap-Up

As you can see, the situation is much the same as when I wrote my last blog post about these tools. There is no perfect tool. In some ways, it depends on which features matter most to you and how natural you find them to use. As I said, I am now using Capture One and Media Pro. I had to spend the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts (which are similar in some cases to Adobe) and the workflow. It seemed hopelessly broken at first, but now is second nature. Had I judged the quality of Capture One based on the 10-minute test drive, I would have rejected it and moved on.

Lightroom, by contrast, leverages a good deal of your Photoshop muscle memory, so even though the UI is very different from Photoshop’s, the keyboard won’t completely baffle you. That said, Adobe made a number of really odd decisions in keyboard mapping (how does “Q” map to clone/spot?) and you can wind up in an unexpected mode pretty quickly just by pressing one wrong button.

I am, by no means, an expert in Lightroom or Capture One. I am a heavy user. My observation is that the difference between the two is that the expert has a catalog of all the features in his or her head, whereas the heavy user knows how to access the features most commonly used. That means there may be some features I’ve overlooked or that weren’t important to me but would be important to someone else.

On the whole, I find the end product from Capture One is, for me, more quickly achieved and is of higher quality than had I used Lightroom for the same task.

A note on use of third-party filters: I used to regard the availability of filters such as the Nik filters or Portrait Pro as crucial “plus” features for Lightroom. At this point, I’ve revised that opinion because each time I want to reach for one of these filters, no matter which tool I’m using, I simply open the file in Photoshop, apply the effect on a layer, and more often than not paint it in only in the places I want to affect. Even with the precision of the NIK U-Point technology, I just can’t be sure beforehand that I’ll be able to isolate the areas sufficiently. So in either case, a round trip to Photoshop is required.