Decided on Capture One... still mourning Aperture

[Ledgem]

Some time around when Aperture was discontinued I made a comparison between Lightroom and Capture One Pro. I liked them both but Lightroom's cheaper price was more appealing... but I waited too long (luckily, perhaps), and then Lightroom went subscription-only. Capture One became the target to change to.

It's been years since then; I went on a hiatus from photography, and when I returned, I gave Photos a try and also wanted to wait for Skylum's DAM. Photos lacked the editing brushes that I had come to rely on, as well as an ability to copy and paste edits, or a way to quickly go through and compare photos when culling... and while I like Aurora, I just couldn't get on with Luminar. And so it was that during the holiday sales I finally bought Capture One.

I like the Capture One interface, and while I'm in the thick of learning how to utilize its editing functions, I think I'll come to enjoy it as a RAW processor. Yet it's more complicated than Aperture, and many of the keyboard shortcuts don't make as much "sense" as they did on Aperture (although to be fair, it's always easier to learn something than to unlearn old things and learn new ones; Aperture was my first DAM/RAW processor, Capture One is my third or fourth).

But Capture One won't replace Photos for me - at least, not entirely. Capture One can display geotag coordinates, but the program can't apply any, itself. Nor is there a map view. There's no facial recognition. Maybe it sounds silly, but for all of my keywording and sorting things into albums, the automated face-sorted albums and geotagged locations were my primary method of finding photos quickly both in Aperture and Photos. Lastly, in my time with Aperture I began to use shared albums... which can't be done from within Capture One, either.

Maybe some day Photos will become more sophisticated, to at least gain parity with the latest version of Aperture. Perhaps it will lack much of the fancy features in the software of today, but at that time I could probably go with using Photos alone. For now, my workflow will seemingly be divided into using Capture One for the first pass (culling and editing), and Photos for the second (occasional manual geotagging, facial recognition, sharing, and archiving).

I'm still missing Aperture.

 

[bladerunner88]

Some time around when Aperture was discontinued I made a comparison between Lightroom and Capture One Pro. I liked them both but Lightroom's cheaper price was more appealing... but I waited too long (luckily, perhaps), and then Lightroom went subscription-only. Capture One became the target to change to.

It's been years since then; I went on a hiatus from photography, and when I returned, I gave Photos a try and also wanted to wait for Skylum's DAM. Photos lacked the editing brushes that I had come to rely on, as well as an ability to copy and paste edits, or a way to quickly go through and compare photos when culling... and while I like Aurora, I just couldn't get on with Luminar. And so it was that during the holiday sales I finally bought Capture One.

I like the Capture One interface, and while I'm in the thick of learning how to utilize its editing functions, I think I'll come to enjoy it as a RAW processor. Yet it's more complicated than Aperture, and many of the keyboard shortcuts don't make as much "sense" as they did on Aperture (although to be fair, it's always easier to learn something than to unlearn old things and learn new ones; Aperture was my first DAM/RAW processor, Capture One is my third or fourth).

But Capture One won't replace Photos for me - at least, not entirely. Capture One can display geotag coordinates, but the program can't apply any, itself. Nor is there a map view. There's no facial recognition. Maybe it sounds silly, but for all of my keywording and sorting things into albums, the automated face-sorted albums and geotagged locations were my primary method of finding photos quickly both in Aperture and Photos. Lastly, in my time with Aperture I began to use shared albums... which can't be done from within Capture One, either.

Maybe some day Photos will become more sophisticated, to at least gain parity with the latest version of Aperture. Perhaps it will lack much of the fancy features in the software of today, but at that time I could probably go with using Photos alone. For now, my workflow will seemingly be divided into using Capture One for the first pass (culling and editing), and Photos for the second (occasional manual geotagging, facial recognition, sharing, and archiving).

I'm still missing Aperture.

Hi Ledem,

Am still hanging on to Aperture - running smoothly in High Sierra thankfully. i recently started using a Nikon Z7 which i love but obviously Aperture won't Read the RAW Files (but no issue with Jpgs) Still waiting for Capture One to support the Z7 and have tried a few other Applications with mixed results. One thing I did discover however was if I converted the RAW's to DNG's using DNG Converter I could then import the DNG Files into Aperture! with all the Exif and metadata intact! Also when it came time to export I was not getting the weird duplicating bug due to Aperture not understand the Z7 Raw File.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

Still using Aperture on Mojave. Got some crashes lately. Maybe next year I move to Luminar if it comes with usable libraries. So far what I see from the preview there are no albums and no import from Aperture.

 

[MCAsan]

As I remember the only company to do a migration tool for Aperture is Adobe for moving to Lr. We can ignore Apple porting Aperture to Photos.

If someone really likes a managed library, you migrate to C1P. It will let you do either a managed or referenced library.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

As I remember the only company to do a migration tool for Aperture is Adobe for moving to Lr. We can ignore Apple porting Aperture to Photos.

If someone really likes a managed library, you migrate to C1P. It will let you do either a managed or referenced library.

Skylum, the Luminar company is saying they will work on a migration tool in one of their blog posts.

 

[MCAsan]

Skylum, the Luminar company is saying they will work on a migration tool in one of their blog posts.

Macphun/Skylum has said a lot of things over the past 3 years. Their DAM is at least 2 years late. And from the demos I have seen, the first release is basically a browser. They try to spin a low number of features as a streamlined new way of working. DAM updates promised in 2019. So maybe by the end of 2019 they might have a DAM with similar capabilities as Lr, Bridge, C1P, or PhotoMechanic. But I would not hold my breath. A migration tool from Lr, maybe. A migration tool from Aperture, I doubt that very much. But stranger things have happened.

 

[BJMRamage]

I too doubt there will be a Migration tool from Aperture. I think one person from the company already said no...but maybe they said "maybe" I bought into Luminar but not thrilled with it so far or the "DAM" or browser that they are trying to rebuild the way people think about using one.

 

[MCAsan]

I too doubt there will be a Migration tool from Aperture. I think one person from the company already said no...but maybe they said "maybe" I bought into Luminar but not thrilled with it so far or the "DAM" or browser that they are trying to rebuild the way people think about using one.

I can not imagine the business case for a migration tool from a product that has been left on the shelf for 5 years. Unless that migration tool takes a very small amount of design, test, and support time.....it is hard to believe that enough incremental sales of a <$99 app would make that a positive business case. Lets see them make one for Lr first. That is the competition they keep trying to steal from.....not Apple's dead Aperture.

 

[smirking]

As I remember the only company to do a migration tool for Aperture is Adobe for moving to Lr. We can ignore Apple porting Aperture to Photos.

Capture One has a migration utility too. I think there's also one other lesser known photo editor/DAM program that has a migration tool, but I can't recall which one it was.

I moved onto Capture One Pro from Aperture two years ago. If you want the latest features, it's basically a subscription service and it costs considerably more than Lightroom, but I love it. I don't miss Aperture a bit. I love the color editing tools in Capture One Pro. This program has helped me completely see photography in a new and better way... but it is expensive.

 

[BJMRamage]

I can not imagine the business case for a migration tool from a product that has been left on the shelf for 5 years. Unless that migration tool takes a very small amount of design, test, and support time.....it is hard to believe that enough incremental sales of a <$99 app would make that a positive business case. Lets see them make one for Lr first. That is the competition they keep trying to steal from.....not Apple's dead Aperture.

oh yes. I fully expect that any program will ONLY migrate from a current competitor.
I kinda wish the On1 Photo RAW would use its AI to "magically" import and adjust a RAW file based on a JPG edited version. Since they already have something going for Lightroom imports.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

I cannot afford Capture One Pro. That’s for my private usage way out of my price range. I guess I migrate one day to Apple Photos. I assume that should work.

 

[smirking]

I cannot afford Capture One Pro. That’s for my private usage way out of my price range. I guess I migrate one day to Apple Photos. I assume that should work.

Capture One is a pro tool. If you're serious about your photography or you make money off of it, it's a good buy if you like it. Otherwise, there are plenty of cheaper options. Just makes ure you avoid Corel AfterShot Pro.

Anyone try Corel AfterShot Pro before? From the viewpoint of a former Aperture user, it's an epic letdown after you get your hopes up in seeing how similar it is to Aperture. It's unstable and even when it doesn't crash on you, the RAW processing is flat out abysmal. Exporting your photos through Corel AfterShot Pro is like applying an Ecce Homo filter on your images.

 

[r.harris1]

I cannot afford Capture One Pro. That’s for my private usage way out of my price range. I guess I migrate one day to Apple Photos. I assume that should work.

That's actually not a bad route to take. There are a few of us here who don't sniff at Photos . It's quite powerful for certain things and very, very fast for global raw adjustments. For local adjustments, if you already have Pixelmator (not the pro version), Luminar, Affinity Photo, the extensions from those companies are great too. If you don't have these tools, I'd recommend taking a look at getting one or more of them as they're not terribly expensive. The DxO standalone extension is also useful too. There are certainly tradeoffs with this approach, but taken together, these make a cost effective solution to a workflow.

 

[smirking]

That's actually not a bad route to take. There are a few of us here who don't sniff at Photos . It's quite powerful for certain things and very, very fast for global raw adjustments. For local adjustments, if you already have Pixelmator (not the pro version), Luminar, Affinity Photo, the extensions from those companies are great too.

Yes, this is great advice. Apple Photos with some plugins to extend its editing abilities turns it into quite an advanced photo editor. If you like the way Photos manages your photos then this is a very appealing path to take.

My only issue is that Photos doesn't have any way to allow you to rank your images so it makes the culling process very tiresome. Just being allowed to favorite photos won't cut it for me.

 

[r.harris1]

Yes, this is great advice. Apple Photos with some plugins to extend its editing abilities turns it into quite an advanced photo editor. If you like the way Photos manages your photos then this is a very appealing path to take.

My only issue is that Photos doesn't have any way to allow you to rank your images so it makes the culling process very tiresome. Just being allowed to favorite photos won't cut it for me.

Agreed on that tiresome aspect. I do my ranking, key-wording, backups and culling in Photo Mechanic and then Photos smart albums to break them out into whatever ranking group seems appropriate. All of the "5 star" ranked images from the Photo Mechanic import, for example, may then go into their own smart album.

 

[Ledgem]

My only issue is that Photos doesn't have any way to allow you to rank your images so it makes the culling process very tiresome. Just being allowed to favorite photos won't cut it for me.

This is the part that was killing me with Photos. I'm away from home for a few months and I'm using a MacBook as my primary computer, so Photos seemed extremely sluggish. I don't remember it being this bad before, but my home iMac was a lot faster and perhaps powered through it. By comparison, Aperture generated previews that made it very fast to sort through photos. Another thing that makes it difficult with Photos is that you can't put two photos side by side as you could in Aperture.

I did the trial of Photo Mechanic and was really impressed with its speed. It made going through photos very fast. I figured that if I didn't go with Capture One, Photo Mechanic + Photos would be a nice combination. Capture One is slower to load images than Photo Mechanic but faster than Photos (and if I tweak some of the preview generation options, I'd guess it could be even faster... which may not be an issue once I get back to my iMac). I do like that I can put up multiple photos (more than just two) side by side with Capture One, which has been nice.

 

[smirking]

I did the trial of Photo Mechanic and was really impressed with its speed. It made going through photos very fast. I figured that if I didn't go with Capture One, Photo Mechanic + Photos would be a nice combination.

I was pondering a combo of Photo Mechanic plus Capture One Pro, but improvements to the rendering engine of Capture One Pro saved me from having to make the decision. What version of Capture One Pro are you using? I'm not sure which version I started on. It was 9 or 10. it was so slow that I almost wrote off Capture One Pro entirely.

Starting at 10 or 11, I found Capture One pro quite snappy on a standard resolution monitor. It was faster than Aperture. I was very impressed. When I upgraded to an LG 5K monitor, it went back to being impossibly slow for some months until they released an update. It still struggles a bit with a 5K monitor on my loaded 15" 2016 MBP, but it's quite usable. There are just some occasional stalls.

Capture One is slower to load images than Photo Mechanic but faster than Photos (and if I tweak some of the preview generation options, I'd guess it could be even faster... which may not be an issue once I get back to my iMac). I do like that I can put up multiple photos (more than just two) side by side with Capture One, which has been nice.

The more I use the editing features of Capture One Pro, the more I like it. I'm doing things with my photos that I never did when I used Aperture. The way I used Aperture, its editing features were only good enough to enable me to enhance photos that were already pretty good straight out of camera, but if I messed up the exposure, Aperture wasn't able to help me out too much.

BTW, in case anyone is wondering, the BlackMagic eGPU as of July of this year was not at all useful for editing and photo management in Capture One Pro. It helped with exporting, but for UI acceleration, it actually made the program significantly slower if you had a loaded MBP! I ended up returning the eGPU, but I'm open to trying it again if they get it to work right with Capture One Pro.

From what I've read, if you have a 13" MBP and thus no dedicated graphics card, the BM eGPU was a more impressive performer.

 

[Ledgem]

I was pondering a combo of Photo Mechanic plus Capture One Pro, but improvements to the rendering engine of Capture One Pro saved me from having to make the decision. What version of Capture One Pro are you using? I'm not sure which version I started on. It was 9 or 10. it was so slow that I almost wrote off Capture One Pro entirely.

I started on 11 and was on it for all of a few days before version 12 came out, so that's what I'm on now. I'm using a MacBook with a 4K monitor as a secondary display, which is a pretty darn anemic setup, so maybe that's where some of the slowdown is... but I was hoping for a situation like Aperture, where it would take some resources up front to process previews of photos, and then you could quickly go through photos at relatively large size very quickly once the previews had been generated. If you wanted to pixel peep or make changes, the preview would toggle off and it would load the full image then. It seems for me like Capture One generates the preview when I first click on a photo, and then still processes it further if I zoom in... as far as I can tell the preview options are all set, so I'm not sure if it's just default behavior or something else.

The more I use the editing features of Capture One Pro, the more I like it. I'm doing things with my photos that I never did when I used Aperture. The way I used Aperture, its editing features were only good enough to enable me to enhance photos that were already pretty good straight out of camera, but if I messed up the exposure, Aperture wasn't able to help me out too much.

I similarly used Aperture for general tweaks, and at my "peak" with Aperture I was heavily using brushes to adjust exposure in localized areas of the photo. Capture One is capable of a lot more, but right now I'm up against the learning curve... still getting used to the idea of layers in a photo editor that isn't Photoshop, and using those layers for things that would be standard brush work. The biggest one I'm wrangling with now is the "heal" tool, which is pretty straight forward in Aperture and Photos, but is perhaps a bit less automated in Capture One (which makes it more powerful, to be sure, but I'm struggling to get a good result right now).