Jack Flesher
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 p.3 #17 · Is PS/LR still your default workflow? | |
gdanmitchell wrote:
Jack, I don’t use and have not used C1. Can you enlighten me? Specifically, What does it do in these areas (“color, light, sharpening, sizing and all other basic conversion controls”) that ACR and LR can’t do?
Thanks.
Dan, @ruthenium has shared much of what I would say. I will elaborate on a few items that I assume are more relevant to your uses, but first let me address NR. When I cancelled C1 January of this year, its AI NR was significantly behind ACR's, though I cannot speak to right now as I no longer have access. For me, non EDU I believe the subscription was $240/yr and why I decided to see if I could "live without it." So far I'm living, but definitely preferred having my older C1 to PS workflow.
Some specific things C1 did better than ACR/PS IMO. Sharpening, C1 still allows you to select radius and amount so you can more critically control the frequency and amount in specific areas you want sharpened, plus C1's engine just simply does a better job overall and ACR's global slider can't come close IMO -- but we'd need to compare side-by-side at 200% to really see it, so perhaps not as significant as I make it sound. Color, C1's base color profiles used to be dramatically better than Adobe's. I think Adobe has improved theirs significantly as of recent, but still I give a slight nod overall to C1 -- just to my eyes, better blues and greens in skies and foliage, but this is subtle and subjective so YMMV. C1 also has a tool called "Advanced Color Editor." This tool allows you to dropper a select color, adjust its width and feather or bleed, then adjust its specific H, S and L to desired effect. Not only that, you could photograph a McBeth CC chart under a specific lighting, and could save a dedicated ICC profile for your camera in that light. This tool was especially useful for images like fall foliage, where you could more carefully control saturation adjustments between individual colors. While ACR allows this to a certain degree, it isn't anywhere near as refined control as C1. Next, in this tool is also a "Skintone" option. That was hugely beneficial when shooting sheets for a given model under various lighting conditions; indoor, outdoor, studio, time of day, etc., making it one-button easy to keep their skin uniform under all lighting conditions without unduly altering the surrounding colors. Light, the main thing here I miss from C1 is its clarity adjustability. C1 gives you 4 different base clarity styles, from which you can adjust amounts and texture for each. This allows a much finer gradation control than I get with ACR. Curves and levels are basically identical to ACR, just no parametric capability in C1, but I didn't ever feel like I needed that, preferring more direct control. HDR adjustments in C1 are also virtually identical to ACR. Finally, C1 has a tool called "Match Look." This was hugely powerful for bulk image sets. In your case take the example of a series of images you take on landscape location one morning. You process out the first image to your taste, load it into the reference pane for Match-Look, and now just click each subsequent image and presto, they all "match" the look you processed the first one to, including color-balance, saturation, brightness, contrast and even vignette if you added one. In this the images in your set you wanted all looking similar, do match remarkably from a one-button edit step. (You can also pull an image off the web to use as your base -- so grab a film emulation example you like, and now you have it built in for future use.) C1 also allows a built-in watermark and/or overlay tool, so it's there in every image you process without any extra steps. You can also add tokens for exposure, camera, lens, date and time info if desired.
That's just a quick summary, there is more, but you get the idea. I will add as ruthenium indicated, learning C1 is non-trivial. It is a complex program with sometimes seemingly illogical implementation of tool use. Oh, one more thing. You can arrange and adjust C1's menus, look and layout so completely, my desktop probably wouldn't even resemble another users unless they copied my settings.
Oh, one more thing. C1 does not utilize your GPU nearly as effectively as ACR and relies more heavily on RAM, so why sometimes masks and adjustment layers lag a bit comparatively. Here, I find ACR/PS superior, so left things like dodging, burning, cloning and healing to PS.
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Alas, the untimely death of my previous PC coincided with the death of Windows 10 and some of the software I like to use, so my data recovery was very much compromised despite lots of data backups being available.