Capture One 16.5 features or lack thereof
Version 16.5.0 appeared today. It does not seem to have new features that would benefit landscape, animal, or landscape photographers. It is more aimed at wedding and studio settings. Are there reasons for non-studio/wedding photographers to upgrade, such as improvements in stability or speed?
The release notes (https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/22162074930589-Capture-One-16-5-0-Release-Notes) do not yet list compatible recent MacOS versions, Sonoma and Sequoia or much in the way of new equipment support.
If this version cannot be officially used with the latest MacOS and does not have benefits for photographers who do not shoot weddings or in a studio, it is not likely to fly off the shelves. I apologize if I have missed information that would make me want to upgrade. I am happily using version 16.3.8 with Sonoma 14.7, but have no assurance that upgrading to Sequoia will not break Capture One 16.3.8.
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The release notes at your link do specify the MacOS versions supported, from Ventura 13.7 to Sequoia 15.0.
I'm using it successfully on Sequoia 15.0.1.
Whether the new features appeal to you does of course depend on what kinds of work you do. I take a lot of animal and bird images, and the AI masking in the previous update has been brilliant. So far I have had limited opportunity to try out the Match Look feature so I can't comment yet. I don't take a lot of people photos, but I can imagine some instances in the past where the People Masking feature might have been useful, but I haven't yet had the time to go back and rework some of those images using it.
Whether the new features will be useful to you on this occasion, only you can decide. If you are on a perpetual licence, rather than a subscription, you could always download the free trial and test them for yourself.
Ian
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Thanks. Not sure how I missed the OS requirements. Capture One remains silent on version 13.8.3 and Sequoia compatibility. Good to know if I must ugrade, the upgrade to 16.5 will be compatible with Sequoia. I would prefer to stay with version 13.8.3 until the bugs are worked out for version 15 and I see a use for it. As upgrade costs remain the same as the number of features added are less needed by me, I would like to avoid the pain of the bugs that accompany new versions.
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I am only starting to explore "Match look" and it can be surprising. On landscapes it can work well to give consistency to a series of pictures, with varying lights.
It seems to work almost better with .jpg found on the net (low-res old film photos from famous artists) as references than with my own pictures.Finally, I have tried using not photos, but paintings as references - it can give really nice results, depending on the topic. Edward Hopper gives really nice presets for city landscape...
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The issue I have with this release is that it does not have any significant new features I can use and at the same time it drops support for macOS 12.x.
I use a desktop to do most of the heavy processing. It cannot be officially upgraded beyond macOS 12.X, and to date I have not experienced any performance issues that merit investing a significant amount of money on a Mac Studio when a camera upgrade is the next logical step forward.
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I've been using the beta for a few weeks, I take a lot of animal photos and use Match Look and AI Crop quite often. Just edited sequences of 8,5 and 8 macro shots of a butterfly. Spent time on the first image in the first sequence then Match Look for the rest. Then I do my culling/selecting on the processed images. Yesterday I came home with a sequence of 20 images of one bird, and sequences of length 10, 4, 5,2,3 of another that was moving around more. (I often shoot at 5 or 10 fps). Same deal. Probably end up keeping too many images now. Imagine at some stage I'll refine my workflow.
I could live without it, but I do like it.
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Indeed, Match Look is the only feature of 16.5 that caught my attention during the beta and may be useful because, if it works as advertised/demoed it very easily allows to replicate the look across multiple photos. Whether that feature alone merits an immediate investment on new hardware capable of running the latest version of macOS is a different matter. I switched to C1 over a decade ago because no subscription was needed, C1 even reluctantly convinced me to get a subscription, the very reason to switch from Lr. But upgrading hardware each time C1 drops support for a version of macOS is a different matter, specially now that Apple is doing a yearly release, which means Sequoia will be obsolete by 2027.
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Tom de Meadows Apple have been doing yearly releases for years, haven't they?
Ian
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Apple was doing 18 to 24 month release cycles up to macOS Mavericks, released October 2013. Apple started doing 12 month release cycles with Yosemite, released October 2014. With Apple doing yearly releases and software companies only officially supporting the 3 last macOS versions, I think the speed at which hardware is made artificially obsolete is going to increase. Just imagine a Mac Studio becoming obsolete in less than 15 years.
I am not going to stop using C1 but the subscription model is not economically viable if all my hardware equipment - desktop, laptop, and iPad - needs to be on the last 3 versions of the macOS. Match Look is something I would love to use but C1 needs to add more features to make more frequent hardware upgrades palatable. After all, photographs are taken with cameras.
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Incompatibilities of recent but not the latest version Capture One with MacOS would be less frustrating if Capture One continued support the last major version of Capture One. Not doing so might drive sales of Capture One in the short run, but in the long run it makes Capture One less attractive as a reliable platform in general. It also drives users to the subscription model whose latest version may or may not be fully compatible with the latest version of MacOS.
The only way to avoid the incompatibilities inherent in constant upgrading of operating systems and Capture One is to keep the latest supported version of the operating system that works with a compatible version of Capture One.
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The latest version of an OS is not a stable platform. Having to always have a version of Capture One available for the latest version of any OS immediately after release is, in my opinion and after 30 years in the technology sector, a constant race to the bleeding edge, something a large company may afford but not something that a medium size company like Capture One may find sustainable. The constant race to always be on the latest version of any OS is going to end up inhibiting innovation.
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Tom referred to software companies officially supporting the last 3 MacOS releases. Capture One may do this for its latest paid upgrade version, but when it issues the next paid upgrade, it does not update the version immediately before the latest paid upgrade for compatibility with the latest version of MacOS.
One reason some of us like the perpetual license is so that we can time when we have to deal with the bugs that a new Capture One version may present. Mac updates its previous 3 versions and unless it includes blockbuster new features you must have, the best strategy is to upgrade MacOS when you upgrade Capture One.
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Match Look, based on the videos I have seen, is definitely a significant new feature. Furthermore, it shatters my preference for perpetual licenses and it could be about to prove that I made the right decision when I switched to a subscription (and I am not a professional photographer, photography is not my main source of income).
Keeping software on the current version minus 1 is a widely used practice. In the context of this thread, it can be done using a cautious or over cautious approach. The cautious approach involves waiting to upgrade to C1 16.5 until at least the next service release - e.g., 16.5.1 - with the same applying to macOS - e.g., wait until 15.1 or above is released. The over cautious approach involves waiting for the next major releases - e.g. C1 17 and macOS 16 - before upgrading to C1 16 and macOS 15. My preference is somewhere in between, waiting to upgrade to a C1 16.5.X service release but on macOS 14.
The reservation I have with how C1 is now approaching releases, is that they have introduced major (C1 16), intermediate (C1 16.5), and service releases (C1 16.5.x). At the same time, they seem to have adopted the policy of officially supporting only the last 3 major OS versions, most likely due to constraints around technical resources. In my opinion, they are dropping support of previous OS versions too fast, if they stick to that policy, realistically they can only have a maximum of 2 to 3 intermediate releases a year before Apple forces C1 to drop support for the oldest of the 3 macOS versions, and 1 before they need to start worrying about what problems the next major OS release may bring.
My unsolicited advice to:
- C1 is support either the last 4 versions of macOS or wait 6 months to support the next macOS version.
- C1 users is that, if you value C1, don’t press the company too hard to support the latest version of macOS.0
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