Bought CaptureOne yesterday - Want my money back
Yesterday I bought C1 after 4 weeks of testing it with ~500 of my images. There were some issues (see my previous posts) but overall I found the software promising.
Of course, the first thing I did was importing my Lightroom catalog containing ~26000 images. Still the import running I recognized that C1 imported DNG files, not the original RAWs!
OK, I may have expected this. When I installed LR for the first time years ago, I decided to convert the RAWs to DNG on import. Never changed that, merely forgot it - till yesterday. I may have expected this - but why was there no hint in C1's documentation? I decided to import the RAWs, not the DNGs in spite of now losing all of the adjustments I did in LR over the years. Just try it...
C1 says it needs ~10 hours to create the previews. OK - has to be done only once. I scrolled through the thumbnails already imported, while C1 got my hard drive working hard. Some nostalgic feeling 😉 I did not edit anything at this time. In the evening all previews were created. Checked the "Activities" list which was empty. Its normally a good idea to shut down a program after such lengthy tasks. I clicked on the close button. The browser closed immediately but C1 still stays on the screen. For minutes!
Had a short look on the catalog file: Some 140 MB. The LR catalog holding the same images was ~350 MB. Smaller is better in this case...
Re-opened C1. My harddrive was working like mad. I noticed that the image that happened to be selected when I closed the program was shown in the viewer but not in the browser. After some time it showed up there but the surrounding images where not from the same time - seemed to be in random order. I waited... Again: For minutes! Eventually the browser seemed to have things sorted out an showed the right order. (I had the ordering set to "Date", not "Name" in the browser before I closed C1 in the first place.)
I clicked and scrolled around just to watch some shots kind of more nostalgic feeling. After a while I noticed that my harddrive was still working like mad. Couldn't tell what was going on there. Tried some small adjustments. Response was not as fluid as during the test phase. Not good.
I decided to close the program and move the whole catalog folder to my SSD, just to see if there is any difference. Used the "Locate" (?) button to tell C1 where the catalog was. This time I measured how long C1 needed to show up the browser content correctly: 25 seconds - when loading from a SSD! Closing C1 (without having anything changed!) needed 90 seconds - on a SSD!
After having opened C1 and looking around a bit I noticed that all images made with my Olympus E-M1 had the "Generic" profile assigned - not the "Olympus E-M1 Generic" profile as it should be. I checked if this made a difference - it does. Not the first frustrated sigh on C1 this time...
I selected all E-M1 images (~11000 images), clicked the "Edit all selected variants" button in the tool bar and assigned the right profile. Clicked a few images and found that nothing had changed but the first selected variant. Another sigh, more frustrated. I removed the selectin and selected the one image having the right profile assigned. Clicked "Save as defaults for Olympus E-M1" in the "dot" menu. Selected all E-M1 images and clicked "Apply defaults" in the "dot" menu. Should be the right way to go...
C1 got blocked for minutes! No progess was shown, nothing. Clicking into the window grayed it out, which is Window's way to tell me that the program is busy and does not respond. Noticed I needed a smoke - urgently. C1 was still on its own when I was done but came back after a while. I clicked some images and found that the profile was not assigned! This time the images hat no profile at all!!! They looked flat and dull. This time no sighs but ... OK I won't explain this further.
Meanwhile it was 02:30 in the morning. I decided to have some whiskys (to calm me down) and go to sleep....
Late morning, staring at my screen, still frustrated. What am I supposed to do in order to have the correct profiles assigned to my images? I'm a software developer. Therefore it seems natural to write a little program assigning the profiles directly on the catalog. It's a SQLite database after all, and I've been working with SQLite databases for years. More work, more time wasted to get C1 running. I don't really want to do this! I want to work on my images (and enjoy this work) like I did in LR, enjoy the superior RAW processing abilities of C1 - which is why I have bought the software after all. Still not decided what to do...
Some more findings:
- In the "Folders" section of the "Libraries" tool all imported folders are shown in a flat list. This is not the structure I organized my files on my harddisk. Have to scoll a lot in order to find the folder I'm working in.
- Can use the "Filter" section on the same tab, where I found a "date" structure which happens to reflect my folder hierarchy. This makes sense if I collapse all branches of the tree not currently working in. But when I close C1 and re-open it, all branches I collapsed before are expanded again. C1 seems not to remember what I have done in the first place.
Compare this to working with LR on the same image base. LR's catalog is based on a SQLite database too (being nearly double in size), but the program opens fast and is ready to work with in a second. Not wait for the software to do its things at all. The folder structure in LR exactly reflects the structure on my harddrive which I deliberately set up right this way. Viewer and browser in LR are always in sync - not after waiting for minutes at it is in C1. And I still did not deal with keywords or star ratings which I fear being as slow and painful to handle as the general catalog features. And I still have no clue how to handle my "missing ICC" problem mentioned above.
Conclusion: Yes, C1 is the best RAW processor currently available (as far as I can tell), but working with its catalog features is a painful and frustrating experience - for me. C1 does not support me to have things done and organize my image collection the way I like to do. I guess I'm supposed to work with multiple catalogs (or sessions?) and keep the database, small such that C1 can handle it.
But I don't *want* to do so! I have projects I'm working on for years. In LR I simply tagged the images with a certain keyword and am able to find all of them in a rush. Am I supposed to hold my images project-wise in separate catalogs just because C1 can't handle the data? I don't want to. What about "themes" I have in my images not being specific for a certain project (something like "Macro" or "Flowers")? In LR I used to organize this with keywords too, but this won't work if I have to split my work into different catalogs in C1. After all I have the feeling that I can't trust C1 when it comes to big catalogs - see the ICC issue above - and that C1 is not the right tool for organizing a whole image set. And I fear that I will find more things going wrong when I start really work with C1... It's a very, very bad thing (for me) if you have the feeling that you can't trust your software.
What a frustrating experience!
Stefan.
Equipment: Windows 7, Intel i7 processor, 32GByte RAM, Standard harddrive plus SSD (which I don't really want to use for my image work!).
Of course, the first thing I did was importing my Lightroom catalog containing ~26000 images. Still the import running I recognized that C1 imported DNG files, not the original RAWs!
OK, I may have expected this. When I installed LR for the first time years ago, I decided to convert the RAWs to DNG on import. Never changed that, merely forgot it - till yesterday. I may have expected this - but why was there no hint in C1's documentation? I decided to import the RAWs, not the DNGs in spite of now losing all of the adjustments I did in LR over the years. Just try it...
C1 says it needs ~10 hours to create the previews. OK - has to be done only once. I scrolled through the thumbnails already imported, while C1 got my hard drive working hard. Some nostalgic feeling 😉 I did not edit anything at this time. In the evening all previews were created. Checked the "Activities" list which was empty. Its normally a good idea to shut down a program after such lengthy tasks. I clicked on the close button. The browser closed immediately but C1 still stays on the screen. For minutes!
Had a short look on the catalog file: Some 140 MB. The LR catalog holding the same images was ~350 MB. Smaller is better in this case...
Re-opened C1. My harddrive was working like mad. I noticed that the image that happened to be selected when I closed the program was shown in the viewer but not in the browser. After some time it showed up there but the surrounding images where not from the same time - seemed to be in random order. I waited... Again: For minutes! Eventually the browser seemed to have things sorted out an showed the right order. (I had the ordering set to "Date", not "Name" in the browser before I closed C1 in the first place.)
I clicked and scrolled around just to watch some shots kind of more nostalgic feeling. After a while I noticed that my harddrive was still working like mad. Couldn't tell what was going on there. Tried some small adjustments. Response was not as fluid as during the test phase. Not good.
I decided to close the program and move the whole catalog folder to my SSD, just to see if there is any difference. Used the "Locate" (?) button to tell C1 where the catalog was. This time I measured how long C1 needed to show up the browser content correctly: 25 seconds - when loading from a SSD! Closing C1 (without having anything changed!) needed 90 seconds - on a SSD!
After having opened C1 and looking around a bit I noticed that all images made with my Olympus E-M1 had the "Generic" profile assigned - not the "Olympus E-M1 Generic" profile as it should be. I checked if this made a difference - it does. Not the first frustrated sigh on C1 this time...
I selected all E-M1 images (~11000 images), clicked the "Edit all selected variants" button in the tool bar and assigned the right profile. Clicked a few images and found that nothing had changed but the first selected variant. Another sigh, more frustrated. I removed the selectin and selected the one image having the right profile assigned. Clicked "Save as defaults for Olympus E-M1" in the "dot" menu. Selected all E-M1 images and clicked "Apply defaults" in the "dot" menu. Should be the right way to go...
C1 got blocked for minutes! No progess was shown, nothing. Clicking into the window grayed it out, which is Window's way to tell me that the program is busy and does not respond. Noticed I needed a smoke - urgently. C1 was still on its own when I was done but came back after a while. I clicked some images and found that the profile was not assigned! This time the images hat no profile at all!!! They looked flat and dull. This time no sighs but ... OK I won't explain this further.
Meanwhile it was 02:30 in the morning. I decided to have some whiskys (to calm me down) and go to sleep....
Late morning, staring at my screen, still frustrated. What am I supposed to do in order to have the correct profiles assigned to my images? I'm a software developer. Therefore it seems natural to write a little program assigning the profiles directly on the catalog. It's a SQLite database after all, and I've been working with SQLite databases for years. More work, more time wasted to get C1 running. I don't really want to do this! I want to work on my images (and enjoy this work) like I did in LR, enjoy the superior RAW processing abilities of C1 - which is why I have bought the software after all. Still not decided what to do...
Some more findings:
- In the "Folders" section of the "Libraries" tool all imported folders are shown in a flat list. This is not the structure I organized my files on my harddisk. Have to scoll a lot in order to find the folder I'm working in.
- Can use the "Filter" section on the same tab, where I found a "date" structure which happens to reflect my folder hierarchy. This makes sense if I collapse all branches of the tree not currently working in. But when I close C1 and re-open it, all branches I collapsed before are expanded again. C1 seems not to remember what I have done in the first place.
Compare this to working with LR on the same image base. LR's catalog is based on a SQLite database too (being nearly double in size), but the program opens fast and is ready to work with in a second. Not wait for the software to do its things at all. The folder structure in LR exactly reflects the structure on my harddrive which I deliberately set up right this way. Viewer and browser in LR are always in sync - not after waiting for minutes at it is in C1. And I still did not deal with keywords or star ratings which I fear being as slow and painful to handle as the general catalog features. And I still have no clue how to handle my "missing ICC" problem mentioned above.
Conclusion: Yes, C1 is the best RAW processor currently available (as far as I can tell), but working with its catalog features is a painful and frustrating experience - for me. C1 does not support me to have things done and organize my image collection the way I like to do. I guess I'm supposed to work with multiple catalogs (or sessions?) and keep the database, small such that C1 can handle it.
But I don't *want* to do so! I have projects I'm working on for years. In LR I simply tagged the images with a certain keyword and am able to find all of them in a rush. Am I supposed to hold my images project-wise in separate catalogs just because C1 can't handle the data? I don't want to. What about "themes" I have in my images not being specific for a certain project (something like "Macro" or "Flowers")? In LR I used to organize this with keywords too, but this won't work if I have to split my work into different catalogs in C1. After all I have the feeling that I can't trust C1 when it comes to big catalogs - see the ICC issue above - and that C1 is not the right tool for organizing a whole image set. And I fear that I will find more things going wrong when I start really work with C1... It's a very, very bad thing (for me) if you have the feeling that you can't trust your software.
What a frustrating experience!
Stefan.
Equipment: Windows 7, Intel i7 processor, 32GByte RAM, Standard harddrive plus SSD (which I don't really want to use for my image work!).
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I have around 100,000 photos in 1,600 folders, all filed in a way that makes sense regarding their content. I've never used cataloguing with Lightroom, as I didn't want to become in any way dependent on its organisation system. The same applies with Capture One, and it's not needed.
When I went from Lightroom to Capture One, I had no interest in retaining Lightroom adjustments etc, as I wanted to start afresh with Capture One and, on comparing results side by side with Lightroom, I would have had to toss out the Lightroom adjustments anyway. The clean start also made me look at older photos in a new light and every one has come out better for doing so.
I also didn't feel the need to load all 100,000 photos into Capture One so that it could assign it's links to each photo, as I knew that would take a very, very, long time. It also wasn't necessary, for whenever I needed to work on files from an existing folder, that was the time when Capture One would do its thing. In some ways Lightroom is faster, but I'll accept that and enjoy Capture One's better processing capabilities.
That said, I would have thought that from using Capture One for four weeks, the penny would have dropped regarding the issue that you've experienced. It was one of the first things that I noticed when I started my trial.0 -
Stefan,
It seems that some of your "problems" are down to operator error. Copy and pasting adjustments (even the profile) is done in a different way. Check the documentation and phase one videos.
But, a question, why did you purchase Capture One if Lr is giving you what you need? Not trying to upset you, just an honest question.
If you like C1's processing better, you can still stay with Lr's catalog and use C1 as the raw engine. That way, you'd have the best of both worlds (if i understand you correctly). As far as i'm concerned, the catalog should not be married to the raw processing tool, it just messes things up. While Aperture and Lr seem to do OK as far as photos go, they are not really (or not at all) strong in other digital formats.
Anyway, i'm using C1 as the raw processor with a different DAM. C1 is then in Session mode, in which it is a much stronger performer since that is how it started out. Also, you wouldn't need to do any catalogueing work in C1 in that case.
Another note, C1 is highly sophisticated, the raw engine much more than the catalog, but it needs time and effort to learn its ways. Those ways are distinctly different from Lr and Aperture (and for me: better). YMMV0 -
Not sure why you wouldn't have done an import while in trial mode. I'm currently doing Lightroom catalog import while trying out CaptureOne. I crashed C1 once, and I think this was due to some files missing but in Lightroom Catalog. So do a find missing files in Lightroom first and remove those from the catalog.
One major annoyance I've found is if the catalog import fails and you try again, I get multiples of everything. So I have to delete the generated previews and start over. I was 400 left of a 37,000 image catalog, so this is frustrating. I see no duplicate handling at all. I read threads about it detecting duplicates if you don't have images in catalog and does if you don't. I'm not moving my files, so I have no idea why it doesn't detect. Must only check during normal Import.
Overall, I'm liking the development process better in C1. I hate the vertical scrolling to get at all the tools. With some time, I can customize my toolbars for the steps I normally take.
My HDR DNG files from Lightroom are pink noise. Not a big loss. Seems like I get better results from one image with pushed highlights or shadows in C1.
PhaseOne would be smart to improve DAM on CaptureOne. I'm sure I'm not the only one that Adobe scared with their latest CC bug fest and feature removal.0 -
Just converted my 100 or so PSD files to TIFF and did an import of my 37000 Lightroom pictures. (This was after Lightroom Catalog conversion to CaptureOne Catalog.) It is correctly finding the majority of files that were in the Catalog already and loading up the TIFFs.
I have to say the Levels UI is the most intuitive way of conveying that adjustment. I've always had to tweak the typical levels slope and this just makes sense. Mapping it to the histogram is a great idea.
Edit: Well Shoot. Just after I posted that, I cleared the log of duplicate messages. Don't clear the log, while it is logging duplicates as it crashes CaptureOne. Now I set log to not show on new messages and shut it. Hopefully it will get through everything.
Lightroom is terrible slow. But I've crashed CaptureOne now 9 times. Kinda has me worried.0 -
sacherjj wrote:
Just converted my 100 or so PSD files to TIFF and did an import of my 37000 Lightroom pictures. (This was after Lightroom Catalog conversion to CaptureOne Catalog.) It is correctly finding the majority of files that were in the Catalog already and loading up the TIFFs.
I have to say the Levels UI is the most intuitive way of conveying that adjustment. I've always had to tweak the typical levels slope and this just makes sense. Mapping it to the histogram is a great idea.
Edit: Well Shoot. Just after I posted that, I cleared the log of duplicate messages. Don't clear the log, while it is logging duplicates as it crashes CaptureOne. Now I set log to not show on new messages and shut it. Hopefully it will get through everything.
Lightroom is terrible slow. But I've crashed CaptureOne now 9 times. Kinda has me worried.
What platform and CO version are you running ?0 -
Running on Win 8.1.
CO version 8.3.3.30 (c1bef4a)
Finally finished the import, but now I've lost my folders for images. I realize that the DAM isn't anywhere near Lightroom, but I'm having trouble even creating Projects to categorize when I have to find images with a date filter. If the RAW processing wasn't so much more intuitive and customizable, I'd be done trying.0 -
sacherjj wrote:
Running on Win 8.1.
CO version 8.3.3.30 (c1bef4a)
Finally finished the import, but now I've lost my folders for images. I realize that the DAM isn't anywhere near Lightroom, but I'm having trouble even creating Projects to categorize when I have to find images with a date filter. If the RAW processing wasn't so much more intuitive and customizable, I'd be done trying.
I will suggest you create a support-case, so they can take a deeper look.0
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