Capture One 21 released today

It's great software, when you want good control over color, and I like it a lot...
But I'll sit this update out :)
Not enough in there for me to make it worth their steep upgrade prices...

The addition of a "black-shadow-highlight-white" control in v20 was a crucial addition for me in order to ditch Lightroom...
But if I upgraded C1 every year, it would be more expensive than Adobes subscription - so I'm happy that they still offer perpetual licenses where you only update when needed...

(Frankly though, I'm getting a little annoyed with their new scheme of "we raise the upgrade prices and then only offer a discount, if you upgrade BEFORE you know whether it's actually going to be a useful upgrade to you...

On the other hand, previously they only ever offered discounts on new licenses and nothing for upgrades...
Not sure if one's better than the other for existing customers :) )
 
Just got it and I am stunned how great it is. The dehaze for instance is much better then in LR. So easy to open a proceced image in LR from capture one. I will give it a try.
 
(Frankly though, I'm getting a little annoyed with their new scheme of "we raise the upgrade prices and then only offer a discount, if you upgrade BEFORE you know whether it's actually going to be a useful upgrade to you...

On the other hand, previously they only ever offered discounts on new licenses and nothing for upgrades...
Not sure if one's better than the other for existing customers :) )
For those new to C1, they allow you to download a trial to see if it's for you. I haven't upgraded mine yet. I'm assuming by your post that you can't do that early enough to take advantage of the discount?
 
For those new to C1, they allow you to download a trial to see if it's for you. I haven't upgraded mine yet. I'm assuming by your post that you can't do that early enough to take advantage of the discount?
Exactly, the discounts this year and last year are specifically pre-release of the update (and end when the new version is released - so no way of doing a trial before you buy.)
They don't even tell you about any new features!

You CAN join their beta tester program and "trial" that way (which I did last year for C1v20... But this year I didn't feel like jumping through those hoops again)

I don't want to discourage new buyers (it's good software), I just find that their recent sales politics is something that people need to be aware of (especially if a main intent is to save money vs Adobe)
 
And just to put a number on my misgivings - they would charge me
309 Canadian Dollars (!!!)
for the upgrade from v20 to v21
I got into C1 very cheaply. A Sony-specific version came with my Sony A7III and an upgrade to the full version was only about $50-60 U.S. So, thank you Sony for the subsidization. But your experience gives me pause, Tillman.
 
They do a lot of discounts for new users - and the cheap camera-manufacturer-version upgrade paths...

But once you're IN, those saving opportunities go away...

With THOSE upgrade prices the discounts become a lot more important...
But now they started that "we won't tell you what's going to be new. You'll have to pay blindly if you want a discount...

And if you don't want to spend 200+CAD blindly, to see if the upgrade is actually worth your money - it's going to cost you 300+CAD..."
 
The price may indicate that they anticipate sluggish sales, don't they know how photography as a business has been in 2020? I dare to say there are more people in the Adobe ecosystem than ever, Adobe has not stopped innovating after charging all the sub fees.
 
Capture 21.1 is now out. The two new features are an enhanced import and brush on styles.

Enhanced import gives the option (press G or click the small viewer icon at top left) to get a full sized preview of the pictures before importing them. This is a great idea but isn't terribly useful for Fuji X series because the preview is based on the embedded JPEG preview in the Raw file and Fuji do not include a full size JPEG in their Raw files.

The brush on styles looks a lot more useful for my use. It is effectively a shortcut for adding an empty layer, setting various adjustments and then painting them on with a brush. You can create your own and save them - the brush settings can be included as well as the adjustments (you choose which adjustments etc. to include). Also, each layer added using a style brush is named in the interface which helps you keep track of what you have done.

I tried it out last night, and here is the example - the effect is subtle but definitely an improvement.

2021031219-14-26.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

Now the enhanced version (with some burn, saturation and detail painted on)...
2021031219-14-26 1.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)
 
For anyonyone interested in upgrading - there's currently a 40% discount on upgrade prices... APRIL40 (and since that brought my upgrade cost down to 154 canadian dollars I went for it... Still not a cheap update - but much more reasonable than the 309 CAD they were charging at release )

Haven't done much work in it yet - but my first impressions are positive:
the new ProStandard profiles do a nice job with colors (luckily they're available for my E-M1 mk2) - and the style brushes are more useful than I thought...

It seems to be that all the little updates add up to more than it would appear :)

the first photos I developed in 21:

51128624322_06a2a29308_k.jpg
Untitled
by tilman paulin, on Flickr

51136671874_0d915f2edf_c.jpg
garden macros
by tilman paulin, on Flickr

51135894071_e75ddd6997_b.jpg
garden macros
by tilman paulin, on Flickr
 
Thanks Tillman,

The reality of these mid year upgrades is you are getting less than half a year of support after you purchase. Once the next version of C1 is released, which is typically in the fall, v21 is done. Finito support wise. To me that's not worth 40% off.

I bought my version about this time of the year not realizing this, and was most displeased when a request for support was met with the answer "upgrade to the new version, many things have been improved", without acknowledging if the issue at had had been rectified or not. As it turns out, it had not.

I absolutely love what C1 does for my images. Many other things, like catalogs, well not so much.

Nice images!
 
Thanks Tillman,

The reality of these mid year upgrades is you are getting less than half a year of support after you purchase. Once the next version of C1 is released, which is typically in the fall, v21 is done. Finito support wise. To me that's not worth 40% off.

I bought my version about this time of the year not realizing this, and was most displeased when a request for support was met with the answer "upgrade to the new version, many things have been improved", without acknowledging if the issue at had had been rectified or not. As it turns out, it had not.

I absolutely love what C1 does for my images. Many other things, like catalogs, well not so much.

Nice images!
Ah, interesting point about support… Yeah, I luckily never ran a into an issue that needed their customer support - but I can see how their yearly release schedule (combined with their current policies on pushing costly updates) can create unhappiness…

(Not sure that any other commercial software developer is different these days though :-/ Open source software might be the only way to avoid that…)
 
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Your point is well taken, but unfortunately the Windows version of C1 has some serious issues relating to catalogs. I was hoping for some rectification from support and got the response quoted above. The issue was not rectified in the next version and still exists. Doing some spelunking in the catalog database with an sqlite reader is most enlightening. I know less then nothing about databases but the C1 database takes a long time to open, has a large number of tables and is very lethargic navigating around in the reader. Conversely, opening a LightRoom database, of virtually the same image set, indicates a relatively small number of tables with a far faster access and read speed. The C1 session and catalog databases are almost identical with minor differences.

My wish is that they would take a break from adding functions and fix the cataloging issues. I doubt this will happen as they are now owned by a vulture capital group, and I'm certain the only thing they are interested in is maximizing the return on their investment. My thoughts are that this would be a major change to the organization of the software, and I can't help but think that the architecture has been around since the iView days. (Phase One bought Expression Media from Microsoft, who bought iView from the original developers).

As a result of the manifold issues, I have migrated away from catalogs, so any DAM has to be done elsewhere, in my case LR v6.14 which supports all my cameras. I set C1 up with a session, but I don't import any files. I just navigate to the folder with the images. C1 will read the folder and read the xmp file if there is any and then create the thumbnail images and place in a subfolder. Any development settings are saved as sidecar files in a folder and are xmp like ascii text. The beauty of all this is all the files can be backed up for archival purposes.

Good luck with your efforts.

In all likelihood, I will upgrade my C1 v122 to v21.1 in November before v22 is released to be with the 30 day free upgrade window.
 
Ah, yeah, I’m not using their catalogs at all.
(I’m just navigating via file system)

I keep returning to C1 since it keeps improving what I can get out of my m43 cameras (where the sensor hasn’t seen any improvement in a while) and C1 gives the nicest colours for my preferences…

But everything you mention is valid and I hesitate to recommend the software to anyone without reservations…:)
 
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