Capture One Pro 11 Fujifilm version. A first look.

Posted on Tue, 25th Sep.
Update on Wed, 26th Sep.

Today with the begin of the 2018 Photokina edition we got some great news for the Fujifilm fans and user, as you should know I am one of those! 🙂

First of all the new medium format camera, the Fujifilm GFX 50R, then the announcement of the future GFX 100 Mp and more than ever, a new special version of the Capture One dedicated to Fujifilm users. 

This a very nice and welcome addition, since Phase One got already something similar for the Sony camera. Now is time for us, Fujifilm users!

Someone of you may say that we had already support for Fujifilm camera on the regular version of Capture One Pro 11. It’s true, but there was not a direct support on the tethering shooting and especially, there was no support for the GFX camera series. 

All these issues seem to be addressed with the new specific Capture One Pro 11 Fujifilm edition.

So I’ve just downloaded the Demo that is fully working for 30 days. I’ve to say that the demo doesn’t have any export watermark limitations, so seems to be 100% functional.  

First impressions on Capture One Pro 11 Fujifilm 

Looking at the photos just imported in Capture One Pro 11 Fujifilm, the quality of the conversion and colors are very good and natural when you have a correct white balance from your raw shots.
So when you open these files in Capture One, without any edit it seems already they have a nice color balance. Although I couldn’t find anywhere the advertised “film simulation support”. Maybe that will be a demo limitation, but I was expecting to find the beloved “Classic Chrome”, “Astia” and so on Fujifilm color profiles.*

* Read the update below

The workflow in Capture One is a bit different than in Lightroom: if you have past experience in raw develop with different software as Lightroom and Photoshop, you will not find any difficulties to master the sliders. The point is that Capture One from the initial install is a bit more “confusional” than Lightroom. But one of the advantages of Capture One over Lightroom is the possibility to re-organize your working space, moving the palettes and creating your own personal workflow.

My personal advantage of Lightroom over Capture One Pro

• Direct Fujifilm Color simulation that mimics almost perfectly the JPG shots in camera as the “Classic Chrome”, “Astia”, “Velvia” and so on. *
  * Read the update below
• I prefer the cleaner interface of Lightroom.
• Can’t find the before / after editing button like in Lightroom. Yes in Capture One you can do pressing the ALT button and press on the “back arrow” but it isn’t the same as the one button way to go. 
• I’ve found the filtering of Capture One a bit more difficult to master.
• I prefer the Copy / Past of the photo editing of the Lightroom easier to use than the one in Capture One.
• Lightroom has the strong advantage of the Cloud system that allows you to sync your photos with the mobile app on any Android and iOS devices. It’s not existing (at the moment) a Capture One mobile App.
• The spot and correction tool of Lightroom is far away faster and easier to use. 
• I’ve found the general responsiveness of the brushes to be a bit faster in Lightroom than in Capture One.

I want to point that these are just my personal opinions: I’m a Lightroom user and teacher since the Beta 1 released in 2007 so it’s normal that is difficult to jump directly on a different software and workflow and be fast in the operations.

My personal advantage of Capture One Pro over Lightroom

• I think the biggest advantage I can say at the moment of Capture One Pro over Lightroom in the workflow, is the possibility to edit/tweak the photos even when you’ve more pictures on the screen. In this way, you can balance them looking in the group of similar shots in the session.
• I Love the Loupe function to see some part of the photo.
• The skin advanced editor is an impressive useful feature.
• I really appreciate the export simulator, that shows you the final exported file with the resolution and sharpening you’ve set with the export options.
• Curve for Luminosity (change the luminosity of the image but not the saturation) and a separate curve for the RGB values.
• You can personalize all the keyboard shortcut for any setting. For example, you can set your combination of preferred buttons to raise/lower the exposure, saturation and so on. 
• The highlight and shadow recover are much more precise than the one in Lightroom.
• We’ve you have full layer support. In this way, you can plan your edits using different layers as in Photoshop. There’s some limitations since you’ve to use specific layers for the kind of editing you want to do (like the specific layer for the spot removal).
• Love the grain simulation of Capture One. Seams to be more “organic” and convincing than the one in Lightroom. 

Version of Lightroom used: Lightroom CC 7.5
Version of Capture One used: Capture One Pro Fujifilm 11.3
Camera used: Fujifilm X-Pro 2 with 35mm f/1.4
 

Update 25/9/18:

I’ve been informed that the official film simulation support is coming with a future update. In my opinion, this decision sounds a bit strange since this was the first reason that I was downloading the Demo version of Capture One 11 Fujifilm to test the quality of the film simulation compared to the one in Lightroom. 

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