So here’s a weird one: After using darktable for years, I was “forced” into using Capture One for a few months. And learned a few things. That I now want to share.
First, and skip this paragraph if you’re not interested, why? I learned photography on Linux, on darktable. I had no prior exposure to any other tool whatsoever. Also, I have a PhD in signal processing. So, a prime candidate for darktable. And I absolutely love darktable. But then two things happened: One, my second child was born, and all that precious free time that I had used editing photos evaporated. And two, I was having issues with post processing that may or may not have been related to darktable. Anyway, long story short, I gave Capture One a serious try. Not a short stint during its trial period, like last time, but a real, honest investment of money and time.
And accounts like these are exceedingly rare: Most people use Lightroom, and if they write a comparative review it is thus from the viewpoint of a Lightroom user. And that is of course ignoring the fact that learning a new raw developer represents a serious time investment and are rarely done without external pressure; which results in very few accounts that are more than skin deep. The present text comes from a few months of more-or-less exclusive use of Capture One, a few thousand edited pictures (all new, not just re-edits of old ones, and implicitly the incentive to recreate another program’s rendering). And from the viewpoint of a darktable user. Anyway, let’s get started.
So, Capture One. It is faster than darktable. You move a slider, you see the results of that slider immediately. Even on my lowly Surface (7 Pro) tablet. That’s what got me hooked. But after a few months of this, I discovered that this focus on speed actually went deeper: I discovered that I started processing pictures much more quickly, and this was frankly a revelation in the time-starved months after my second baby’s birth. Let’s look at that in a bit more detail.
My usual editing workflow in Darktable goes something like this: I start with fixing up exposure, usually by dragging the histogram. Then I adjust shadow density with the black slider in filmic, and recover highlight color with the white slider in filmic, and adjust white balance to taste. Then I crop, then add additional adjustments such as color zones, color balance, tone equalizer, denoising, or contrast equalizer. Last come local adjustments if necessary. The thing is, more or less every image needs at least exposure, black and white filmic, and cropping. And these things are buried in two different modules (and the histogram) in darktable, each requiring multiple clicks to access.
In contrast, a similar workflow in Capture One happens entirely on one screen, just by going from one slider to the next:
And furthermore, common tools such as cropping, rotating, and the white balance picker are accessible at all times with highly memorable keyboard shortcuts (C, R, W, respectively). Taken as a whole, this allows me to positively blaze through images like never before. It took a while to appreciate this, and get to know this workflow, but at least in my usage, the difference is quite significant. I now sometimes do a few days’ edits in a spare half hour, which used to be an all-evening affair in my usual darktable workflow.
Of course, I am well aware that I could configure custom keyboard shortcuts in darktable, and that darktable’s module system is infinitely more powerful, and so on. But this example highlights a bit of a philosophical difference between darktable’s unflinching priority on user control, and C1’s compromise between power and speed. There are upsides and downsides to both, and at this moment in my life, I begrudgingly value speed over power, because there is so little of it available.
Speaking of which, there were numerous occasions where I missed darktable’s deep control. Most notably, Capture One’s High Dynamic Range sliders and Clarity controls feel restrictive and oversimplified compared to the splendor of darktable’s Tone Equalizer and Contrast Equalizer: Much too often, C1’s Shadows would adjust too large a portion of the image, Highlights not enough, and both producing halos if not managed very carefully. In darktable, the explicit Tone Equalizer mask would allow me to handily limit the affected area very precisely. Similarly, C1’s two Clarity sliders act somewhat similarly to raising/lowering the left/right half of the Tone Equalizer, but I often missed the ability to affect only in-between wavelet sizes, for example for specifically highlighting tree trunks or bird feathers. But even where I struggled with C1’s controls, I could not deny that acceptable results could be had very quickly, and I noticed myself moving on quickly to the next image instead of going the extra mile as I would have done in darktable.
There are two more features I alluded to earlier that I want to highlight particularly: darktable’s filmic black and white point. Because to the best of my knowledge and ability, Capture One does not have any analogue to these two functions. These two magic sliders are able to recover deep shadow detail without brightening all other shadows (much), and recover burnt highlight color without darkening all other highlights (much). They are proper magic. In Capture One, ostensibly similar functionality lies in the High Dynamic Range Black/White sliders, but they tend to bleed too far into the midtones, and can even introduce lightness reversals around highlights and halos around high-contrast edges. Having explicit control over the image dynamic range compression in filmic is truly genius.
Images such as the following are where I still definitely go back to darktable, because I find their larger dynamic range too hard to handle in Capture One:
_DSF1853.RAF (18.7 MB) (CC-BY-SA)
Although I have to add a caveat: Actual highlight recovery of partly-burnt highlights just plainly works better in Capture One than in darktable. More colors are recovered deeper into the corruption, and with much less effort. This is an application that I do prefer Capture One for. Denoising is similarly much faster/easier in Capture One.
In terms of Capture One’s much lauded color controls, I found them largely equivalent to Color Balance and Color Zones. Nothing to report here.
Being a commercial application, however, Capture One has certain benefits: for example built-in support for Fuji’s film simulations. For newer cameras at least. Sadly. Something somewhat similar can be done with darktable’s LUTs, but then that becomes a guessing game about whether the specific LUT “wants” to come before or after or instead of filmic, and whether deep shadows and highlights are recoverable afterwards, and a myriad other opaque parameters. Essentially, I rarely found LUTs worth the effort in darktable, but use Capture One’s film simulation simulations frequently. It is a neat feature.
Lastly, a few words about the library module and file organization. At first glance, I hated Capture One’s library. Absolutely hated it. You have to import every single directory manually (no multiple selections!), all the edits go into a central library and nowhere else, and sidecar support is laughable. But then someone told me a much better way: Instead of using Capture One’s catalogue, create a session, but ignore all those pre-built import and output directories, as well as the import button, and instead simply navigate to any old directory on your computer with the sidebar file browser. This is clearly not how sessions are meant to be used. But it actually works reasonably well, even with photos on a network share. I actually kind of prefer it to darktable’s workflow of importing film rolls. But the saving grace for darktable is that the import window allows multiple selections (I sort my pictures into daily directories), and that its import file picker displays the modification date of directories (so I can see which daily directories changed in the latest import). And might I add that these two features are exceedingly rare in raw developers, yet I absolute rely on them. So on balance, I mostly prefer darktable’s way of doing things, if only by a small margin. But I do like the explicit file system browser in my weird way of abusing Capture One sessions.
As a corollary to file management, I have come to enjoy Capture One’s handling of sidecar metadata: They are readily picked up by darktable, but the opposite is not true. Which is a bit of a shame. Perhaps it would be a good idea to save image metadata (ratings, color tags, tags) into filename.xmp files in addition to the editing data in filename.extension.xmp. This pains me a bit to admit, as I had said the opposite on a recent thread on metadata. But I have since learned the upsides of this.
So, on the whole, I grew to quite like Capture One, mostly for its streamlined user interface and speed of operation. In terms of image quality, I honestly didn’t see much difference between darktable and Capture One. But perhaps I am not the most discerning of users, either, as my focus is not on crazy detail recovery or the more technical arts of macro or astro. When it comes to control, I find darktable in a league of its own, and frequently felt restricted and, dare I say, patronized by Capture One. And that is probably what a geek like me would say, especially on this particular forum, so take it with a massive grain of salt.
Anyway, I hope this is of interest to someone…
He bought a nice camera to take down there, and I tried in the time we had to set him up with rawproc, RawTherapee, darktable, and ART so he had options. Now that he’s there with limited internet, I can’t show him things with rawproc that I know would make his post-processing either. He’s still in the “SOOC JPEG” phase; when he decides to start shooting raw, I’m going to have to handle the “Why are my pictures so dark?” angst over a discord chat… 