Thanks for taking the time to write that up. I had a family situation that suddenly needed my attention today, so I won’t have time to give it the careful reading it deservs today.
Dan
Jack Flesher wrote: gdanmitchell wroteJack Flesher wroteC1 is an excellent raw converter. It has functionality, deep independent control functionality on color, light, sharpening, sizing and all other basic conversion controls (except NR!) that aren’t in LR or ACR.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. ...Show more →
pete478888 wrote:
C1 should not grey out the sharpness falloff slider when they don't provide a lens profile.
Of course it’s greyed out if there’s no profile, the profile contains the information necessary to do it.
If you mean it should read Canon’s DLO lens information, DLO isn’t sharpening as generally understood by photographers.
Their lens profiles never had the quality of DXO's lens profiles anyway.
They are correct, as were DxO’s back when I used that, which is more than I can say for the Adobe profiles for some of my lenses. (There was, however, a Capture One bug a couple of years ago which caused incorrect profile application when a correction from one image was applied to others.) I’m not sure what you want more than correctness.
Recently they mostly rely on manufacturers profiles anyway.
Which is good if your lenses are now currently supported when they weren’t before and the results are correct, but not so great if the camera manufacturer decided not to completely correct vignetting, which is apparently sometimes a thing.
No support for Viltrox lenses.
Probably not many people buy the most expensive raw conversion software and the cheapest lenses!
Hardly any for Nikon Z lenses.
Nikon seem to be aiming at videographers and travel/wildlife/landscape/amateurs with this system, which leads us to...
I dislike C'1 soley focus on fashion, wedding and portrait photograpy industry, and neglecting other markets under their new management.
Bruce Marriner wrote: atnpro wroteThe fastest library management with a tiny footprint is NXView, which can be integrated with darktable and Affinity.Do you mean XnView by chance? I've used that a few times and agree, it's a great program, but I've not used or seen NXView.
Yes, that's it and I misspelled. It's much faster and better than anything from Adobe and Capture One. The downside is that it's only available for mac.
atnpro wrote:
Yes, that's it and I misspelled. It's much faster and better than anything from Adobe and Capture One.
It's got a lot of handy tools too for renaming/moving/tagging files.
I used it for culling files before I edited in C1 for awhile but eventually I got a copy of PhotoMechanic for that task, which is even a little bit faster and also has quite a lot of useful tools. I wouldn't be shocked if someday I was back using XnView again though.
Bruce Marriner wrote: atnpro wroteYes, that's it and I misspelled. It's much faster and better than anything from Adobe and Capture One.It's got a lot of handy tools too for renaming/moving/tagging files.
I used it for culling files before I edited in C1 for awhile but eventually I got a copy of PhotoMechanic for that task, which is even a little bit faster and also has quite a lot of useful tools. I wouldn't be shocked if someday I was back using XnView again though.
For me, it's even better than PhotoMechanic because it has catalog management tools. After having used C1 since 2008, I decided to ditch it a couple months ago because it lacks support for Ricoh GRIV Monochrome raw files. Now, I feel I should've done that last year. With XnView,darktable, Affinity Suite, and NX Studio, my workflow is so much lighter and faster.
atnpro wrote:
For me, it's even better than PhotoMechanic because it has catalog management tools. After having used C1 since 2008, I decided to ditch it a couple months ago because it lacks support for Ricoh GRIV Monochrome raw files. Now, I feel I should've done that last year. With XnView,darktable, Affinity Suite, and NX Studio, my workflow is so much lighter and faster.
For what it's worth, PM has added a catalog feature.
I'm glad you've found some good solutions though and double bonus for them being free!
Do you mean XnView by chance? I've used that a few times and agree, it's a great program, but I've not used or seen NXView.
Yes, that's it and I misspelled. It's much faster and better than anything from Adobe and Capture One. The downside is that it's only available for mac.
XnView MP works beautifully on Linux - Agreed, great program!