On 5/27/2010, Phase One made the announcement that they had acquired Microsoft Expression Media as one of their product offerings. That got me thinking about the fusion between Digital Asset Managers (DAM) and RAW Image Processing programs. Assuming in some future incarnation, Phase One merges Expression Media with Capture One, that would put their Capture One software on a par with Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture. So, having set the context and named the players, there is are a few other items to get out of the way:

What are RAW Image Processors?

Most Pro and Prosumer digital cameras record image data in a format called Camera RAW. Oversimplified, this means the image data recorded by the sensor is saved intact to the file, and any image interpretation like color temperature or saturation is kept separate. This is as distinctly opposed to cameras that save files in the JPEG format, where the image adjustments are applied in-camera and saved as a whole, tossing out a certain amount of the original image data. What this means to you, the photographer, is that you have opportunities after the image has been captured to revisit critical decisions like color balance, black point, white point, contrast, and so on. To a limited extent, you can even adjust exposure on an improperly exposed image, but that’s really not what RAW was intended for and you should never rely on being able to save a poorly exposed image just because you shot RAW.

Once RAW became popular, software that could interpret this format and turn it into something usable in Photoshop became a new category. Just sprang into existence as a new software category. Just like that! So the primary job of a RAW Image Processor is to do the magic to interpret the sensor data and allow you to perform some rudimentary adjustments on the original data. That’s the minimum and it’s probably about as far as anyone thought it through when the concept of postponing crucial image processing decisions to post-processing was originally formed.

The current crop of software is:

• Adobe Camera RAW (ACR), which ships with Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom, which uses the same ACR engine mentioned above
• Apple Aperture, a completely different beast by Apple Computer only for Macintosh computers
• Capture One, by Phase One, which has a medium-format Phase One Digital Back heritage
• DxO Optics

Other software exists, but these are the top ones in current use today.

What are Digital Asset Managers?

Digital Asset Managers, which have the unfortunate acronym “DAM”, have only a couple of requirements:

• They need to be able to catalog large numbers of images
• Their image catalog must encompass online (attached hard disk) and offline (removable hard disk, DVD, etc.) media
• The catalog must be sortable and searchable
• You should be able to do some level of metadata manipulation using your DAM, such as titling, keywording, and captioning

In this category of pure DAMs, you have:

• Canto Cumulus
• Expression Media
• Extensis Portfolio

Of these, Portfolio seems to have the most general acceptance.

DAMs are YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It — until you do) software. You may have different needs, but most relatively prolific shooters don’t need the capabilities in these software packages, but the do need other capabilities way more. What are those capabilities? Read on…

The Combined DAM/RAW Image Processor

This is my name for the category currently occupied by Lightroom and Aperture, and very possibly soon to be joined by Phase One. That last is just a crystal ball prediction on my part. Speculation. So I previously described the minimum a RAW image processor needs to do. The questions really become “what are the common things they do?” and “what are the evaluation points?”

For what I say below to make sense, I need to make my position clear: I post-process a lot of images and like to keep the time per image to a minimum. Heck, who doesn’t? But I’m really trying for 5 minutes per image in post processing. To a large degree I’m succeeding. So, with that in mind, here is a matrix of who does what in the DAM/RAW market:

Overall on the Comparison Matrix

The matrix is full of footnotes. Read those below for more detail on each noted entry. Now, for the sake of this remaining discussion, I’ll assume Capture One + Expression Media means Capture One 5 + Expression Media 2. They will probably want to blend the packages together in a future release to be more competitive with Lightroom and Aperture.

Without adjustment brushes, the overall usefulness of the tool is significantly decreased, as you can’t target specific areas for enhancement or exposure adjustments. Lightroom has the gradient adjustment, which allows you to create a sort of adjustable split neutral density filter. Aperture allows you to create multiple adjustments where you can apply them to the whole image, brush in specific areas, or apply them to the image and just brush out specific areas. Capture One is missing adjustment brushes.

The metadata entry in Aperture seems more natural than Lightroom. Lightroom tries to be too helpful and it seems very difficult to get the exact metadata I want in a Lightroom image. But it’s doable. In Capture One, you can enter metadata, but it only persists if you export the file as TIFF or JPEG. If you export as DNG, then the adjustments and metadata evaporate.

Tethered shooting can be a big deal for studio shooting, as it exposes lots of unseen problems in corners or with exposure before you pull the whole shoot and lighting arrangement down. Capture One would have gotten an Excellent, except that — at least for Canon — they can’t control the camera settings other than the shutter release. I haven’t tried Lightroom’s tethered shooting but it is rumored to be about the same. Aperture has tethered shooting, but they haven’t really put it together. The “approved” solution is a hackery of setting a “Hot Folder” by using an AppleScript that some guy wrote and then using the Canon EOS Utility software to fire off the shots. It’s slow, error-prone, and just not up to pro standards.

The summary is that there is no single perfect tool. There is a ton of overlap and from version to version, one tool will pull slightly ahead of another in ease of use or in terms of “killer feature you can’t do without”. It’s still a multi-tool environment.

[1] Aperture adjustments contain “Definition” which is “Clarity” in Lightroom or ACR. However, Lightroom allows for negative as well as positive values of Clarity, allowing for some skin softening or gauzy effects. As a make-up provision, Aperture has a skin-softening adjustment brush.

[2] Capture One has Vibrance, but not Clarity. Clarity is really just a midtone contrast enhancement, but it’s way easier to add with a simple slider than with curves.

[3] Spotting and patching in Lightroom are intuitive because you can create a target area, then drag the source area around until you have the look you want. Adobe owns the live preview feature in this respect.

[4] Aperture allows you to brush in spotting and patching, more as you would in Photoshop, but in a non-destructive manner. This is nice, especially for areas that aren’t circular — in other words, not spots. But… it’s slow and you have to wait for it to re-render to figure out whether the results are acceptable.

[5] The database feature is the one that sets Lightroom and Aperture apart from Capture One. You can catalog your images — up to a point, using Lightroom or Aperture, then do pretty good searching on the metadata, including when the image was made, what keywords were included, the camera, etc.

[6] Chromatic aberration is one of those “your mileage may vary” features. Capture One was made with the Phase One digital backs in mind. It has a catalog of back/lens combinations that ostensibly allow it to do some useful lens defect correction. They have no similar catalog for DSLRs. With that background, Lightroom and Aperture both take the same approach: They look for high contrast vertical lines and allow you to reduce the yellow/blue or red/cyan fringing. Sometimes, and to some extent. Capture One has an “analyze” feature where it looks at the image and tries to make a best guess from that. Additionally, it allows for some automated elimination of purple fringing.