Pricing Strategy and Black Friday
Fellow Capture One Users
As an amateur photographer of landscapes/cityscapes, I have long struggled to justify the expense of the software. Capture One is becoming less attractive for a number of reasons:
- development seems to focus on studio use and wedding photography/portraits
- the responsiveness of the application is still not great on a new Mac with M4 chip
- the price is too high for my use and I detest the marketing emails urging me to upgrade to a more expensive package, and then the company reduces the price for these on a Black Friday deal to less than the Capture One Pro subscription price
I see that this is quite a common complaint and do not understand the strategy Capture One is following.
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First, are you aware that this is a user forum that may or may not be read by Capture One employees? That said...
IMO, you pretty much nailed their [apparent] strategy with your first bullet. The most recent three releases seem focused on portrait/studio photography and, more specifically, on photographers who do large shoots and shoot large numbers of images at a time. AI Masking, Match Look, and the new skin/mouth/eyes masking features provide those photographers with large efficiency gains. The various studio-focused additions are also great for that audience; not so much for people like you and me (birds/wildlife/nature, museum work). Pricing for their target audience and more affluent users is what they consider fair. The fortunate thing is that we still have perpetual license options, which many software companies have abandoned.
The other part is that they're clearly trying to have as many users as possible convert to subscriptions. This assures them of a predictable revenue stream and gives users smaller "pay as you go" pricing.
I haven't noticed huge performance issues with my M2 Macs, but "responsiveness" is relative to expectations and I'm pretty easy as my processing batches are usually 10-400 images and I'm generally not in a rush to finish (my clients and I agree on delivery dates and I meet them).
The unfortunate thing for me is that long standing shortcomings aren't addressed. Things like being able to assign metadata to video clips, adding GPS coordinates, reorganizing the metadata tool items to something more logical (like grouping the "Vendor specific" lens info with the "EXIF - Camera" data—that I know have been requested (feature requests, not comments in the forums) for a number of years.
As for the emails, well, I get them as well. When I read mine carefully, they invariably start with "great deals" on subscriptions and then are perpetual license offers. You might take a breath and reread the offers to see if yours aren't that way as well.
I can only suggest that you take advantage of the 30-day trials, exercise the new version thoroughly (on a copy of your catalog, not the "real" one!), and decide whether the new features and bug fixes are worth the price to you. If not, pass on the version. If you want them and the perpetual license cost is higher than you want, then consider moving to a subscription. They have a nice offer of a free perpetual license after you've subscribed for 5 years, or a 20%/year discount for each year less than 5 that you've subscribed. The other option, of course, is to leave Capture One...but then you effectively lose all the work you've put into learning and working with Capture One and you'll need to start the learning over again and, likely, reprocess a lot of images in the new application.
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I also hobbyist and got baited by Sony Express then buy Pro.
I don't mind features that much but ONE bad side of CP1 is their lens profiles cannot update manually.
After this BF if there is no decent discount then I am looking for elsewhere now. I won't go subscription for sure and if I want to go subscription, there are better alternative.
Softwares nowadays are so hungry, update less charge more.
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I'm also a hobbyist who came by the C1 Express for Sony route. I take several hundred images per week and I print and find Pro worthwhile.
Main problem for me is the abysmal panorama stitching.
Suspect us hobbyists aren't a big part of their market. Some competitors have realised we make good beta testers.
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Panorama stitching works well for me, but I don't do it very often. Admittedly you have less control over the process than in some apps.
Ian
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I've been using a mirrorless camera as a back on a large format camera and need to stitch 6+ images. C1 makes a mess of that many. Seems to process the images inconsistently. Affinity Photo is OK. Don't really want to buy the specialist software.
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