The price is to High for version 23
I left lightroom to come to Capture One four years ago and I've upgraded every year. But I just can't justify £200 for a small handful of updates that should've already been in the software. Lightroom subscription is only £10 a month so how can they justify the charge. I'm going back to Lightroom as Capture One seems to be on a different planet now such a shame because I love the software
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Totally agree, I only use capture one a couple of time a month and its just to much, £100 upgrade fee would have kept me
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I started a new thread about this exact same concern.
(https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/7680275424413-Cost-is-getting-ridiculous)
Well, since my voice was not heard last time. It seems like things have gotten even worse with regards to pricing.
This time around v23 is $417 for a license! If you are on v22 and would like to upgrade, that's gonna be another $278 ($CDN + taxes don't forget)!!!
While the culling UI looks interesting and the style match tool too. Those are not worth that much of an upgrade cost. Being an Android user with zero iPads, the whole iPad feature is not useful to me at all.
It seems to me that back in the day, C1 use to be pretty humble in the pricing space. It was fair and the stability compared to LR was the decider for me to go the C1 route. But things have gone off the rails now. I detest Adobe's approach too but compared to the C1 pricing, the value provided by Adobe is trouncing C1 now.
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Totally agree
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I upgraded from Ci 21 to 22 and 23 with the pre upgrade offer of $159.00, think it is a reasonable price. The software is great, love the Sessions feature and the new culling tool is great!
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Wish I was offered a pre order this year but nothing came through. I only use it a couple times a month. Ha ho Lightroom looks very nice now with a much better subscription of only £10 a month
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Philip Holloway - Same case for me. Was never sent any offer at all. Although, I am on a perpetual license of 22.
I started using C1 about 9 years ago. Every year I updated until recently. Last year's price hike saw me move to the Nikon-only version since that's all I shoot with. Then, C1 decided to drop the dedicated versions and move to a single version. It looks like the standard upgrade path is 30% off the full price. That was answered in the FAQ I saw the other day. So there being no upgrade offer email doesn't surprise me. That's how they are going to go moving forward. The thing is, IMO, the full price is too high so 30% off doesn't make that much of a difference.
IMO, the current upgrade price of $297 should be the full price and previous users should get a break from there. As an example, I'm also a Blackmagic user. Davinci Resolve is a massive app that does way more than what C1 does (a different animal I know). But that is a buy-once for $395 and they've updated it multiple times a year with no upgrade cost at all.
But alas I think C1 doesn't really pay attention here so preaching on deaf ears.
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Ya it’s a real shame they don’t notice the people that backed them when their software was still a nursery school. Now they are at college they forget how to act until it’s to late
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Absolutely useless, I regret buying it. Unusable. Since their super ai doesn't know how to work with anything other than white balance and exposure, it doesn't save anything at all. I still have to edit one photo at a time. Too bad wasted money
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@pxfotoatelier
How about testing before you buy? And what do useless and unusuable mean? I would recommend to deal with the application a little bit before you make such senseless comments. There are things you can criticize about C1, but useless is this comment! Constructive criticism can be discussed, such comments are superfluous!0 -
Capture one is a great program and is just as useful as Lightroom once you learn how to use it. I only left Lightroom because I didn’t like their pricing plan but now I’ve got to leave capture one for the same reason. At least Lightroom is still an ok subscription with the iPad app and photoshop for on £10 a month. Im happy with that. But please don’t knock capture one as it’s a very good program just to expensive
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With any robust application, yearly updates offer incremental improvements. My strategy is to wait to upgrade until something I really want is offered (editing, speed, improved DAM, processing for export, etc). Usually, for me, this often means skipping a version. At minimum, it means waiting until the end of the year when the price is substantially cut and maybe (like this year) the next version is thrown in with it.
I suspect new Capture One features in upgrades are doled out to keep revenue flow sufficient to stay in business -- just enough for enough people to pay for upgrades. Expanding the customer base is apparently not enough unless the engineers were to come up with some feature that blows the competition out of the water.
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There is no requirement to upgrade to C1 v23. If the tools available in v22 meet your needs then just stay on it if you have a perpetual license for it. Every year people complain about the cost of upgrading to the new version, and it isn't inexpensive.
Every year people complain about the number of new features introduced with the new version. But the people at C1 add new features through the year as they are developed and tested without charging for the new features. I've found that many of the new features are worth the price of the yearly upgrade.
I moved from Lightroom to C1 several years ago, partly due to Adobe's move to a subscription model, but also because I think C1 is better for my needs. Calling C1 useless and unusable is, in itself, pretty useless. It serves me and a great many of other photographers very well.
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Out of college I worked for a major blue chip company in sales and marketing and I was good at it and on the fast track for 5 years. Company politics eventually got a bit in the way and I followed my heart and became a photographer. That was 30 years ago.
I love Capture One. I hate weddings. So the last few years have not been that kind to me like a lot of other photographers.
Upgrades... I play them by ear. They are your new subscription when it comes to cash flow. They used to come out when you had something to shout about. Now they are just an annual event - "What have we got - What can we save for next year?"
Black Friday. As a loyal user for many years I would like to think my loyalty might be rewarded; just a little bit. Sadly not. How could you get your pricing structure so very badly wrong for Upgrade (supporting your loyal photographers and users?)
I can buy a brand new licence (and keep my old licence too) from Wex or Park for cheaper than your Black Friday upgrade price? That is so rubbish!
And adding 'Styles' makes it cheaper not more expensive than no styles?
Top and tail....That would have been like me giving the local pharmacy a better price than Boots the Chemist in my old hat.
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I really don't understand who approved this new pricing. It's just so massively out of touch with reality it boggles my mind. Capture One is ok compared to LR, but it's definitely not significantly better. Some would argue it's still catching up.
So can CO's product management help explain to us the value prop and why we should pay +125% premium for CO over LR? Not to mention that we can get Photoshop with the LR subscription.
Everyone I know using CO was doing it for the perpetual license becuase they preferred it over LR's subscription pricing. Now if CO's subscription was on par with LR's, I can still imagine most folks staying if they already moved over. But this? Why would anyone choose to stay?
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Well, I’ve fully moved over to Lightroom now, I won’t be going back to capture one as I can’t trust their pricing in the future. I will keep the program on my computer for the odd occasion. I might want to use it.
The other advantage that you get with the Lightroom subscription is that you get the iPad app included in the price, instead of the extra money that capture one want you to pay for their app. Such a shame they could go so tragically wrong with their pricing.0 -
Oh you're right, I thought iPad version is included in the subscription cost, but it sounds like it's not? That's even more mind boggling if that's the case.
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Please explain to me one thing, why do I have to buy a monthly application for the ipad when I have purchased a license for macos?!!! Absolutely unacceptable! Especially when the competition gives it for free, in addition to lightroom and photoshop, which I have to use anyway. Because the C1 still doesn't have enough portrait retouching features for me. So it looks like this was my last c1 purchase. And your promised super upgrade, so I got fooled and am very angry and disappointed. Nothing will speed it up, the classic procedure is still more advantageous. I am very disappointed.
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I wrote what I think was a carefully worded reply to pxfotoatelier but after I pressed submit it just disappeared. I can't be bothered to struggle with the crappy forum software to try to rewrite it all.
Short version: a free iPad version is not really free - it would of course be funded from what users of the desktop app pay, who could equally argue that it is unacceptable that they are subsiding a separate app for others which they themselves neither need nor want.
Ian
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Jan Dusek - presumably, then, you are not using the iPad version or you would know that it was separately paid for. If it were provided free, then you as a paying user of the desktop app would be helping to foot the bill for a separate app for other users that you yourself don't use. Arguably unfair to you!
Ian
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Ian Wilson That's certainly a valid point and one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is the overall value prop. With LR's subscription I get LR + PS + iPad version, for significantly less than just the CO desktop subscription.
You're right I currently don't use the iPad version, but if I had access to it "for free" as part of the subscription, I would give it a try.
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I think there's a brief tree trial, isn't there? Can't remember.
I think that some of the problem is that Adobe (I assume) has a massively bigger user base, and hugely more revenue to fund things. Presumably producing, developing, and maintaining an app like Lightroom or Capture One costs about the same, so with a larger user base, Adobe can fund it for less per user. It doesn't help that the more LR is assumed to be the default, the more it becomes the default. (Photo magazines assume all the time that their readers are using LR, and explain how to achieve some effect or other using it, but only rarely show how to do things with other apps.)
Ian
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On the other hand, C1 is already substantially more expensive than Lightroom which includes the iPad version and an iPhone version in your subscription for no additional fee.
Partly because Adobe has a massively larger user base to fund that approach from!
Ian
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After all, C1 has a serial number system for the purchased product. The iPad application should also be activated on this number. Nothing complicated and no one would pay anyone else.
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Yes, but just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, it has to be paid for somehow. Either it is paid for by those who want to use it, or it is being paid for by all of us.
Ian
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Ian Wilson I'm not sure I understand your point here. Yes, I'm sure Adobe has a larger user base and therefore more revenue coming in. But that fact doesn't justify CO attempting to charge more for less. Doing so is a certain way to reduce your smaller user base even further.
I'd love to see CO's numbers, but I'd be very surprised if their user base doesn't drop by mid-double digits after this pricing revamp. They're killing their prosumer market.
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I'm just speculating that if Lightroom and Capture One both cost about the same to develop and maintain, then the one with the larger user base is able to charge less for its product to cover those costs, while the one with the smaller user base has to cover the same costs from fewer users so inevitably that is more each.
Ian
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Yes, compared to the Lightroom+Photoshop package Capture One is expensive, and as Ian has pointed out above there's a likely reason for that. Still, I too would like to hear the company's justification for this comparatively high price. The fact that they have a smaller user base isn't in itself worth much to the users who are paying for the application.
In itself I don't find the price to be a problem; the problem is that the price isn't matched by the product: the application, bug fixes, customer support, the company's communication with and treatment of users, etc.
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John wrote:
And, of by the way, we all already paid for the iPad app in a different way because C23 had very few meaningful features in it (none that interested me), presumably because a good portion of the developer team was working on the iPad version, not on the main version.
That's a fair point. I am also speculating that they won a lot new users in recent years, increasing their revenue, and know for sure their prices have risen a lot, so their current pricing and license changes feels unbalanced, definitely not llike being loyal to their customer base. They added panorama and HDR functionality but aside from that not many great additions or breathtaking improvements in my book.
There are features on my wish list which would somehow justify their current pricing, if they existed, I'm sure many of you have their own wish list too.
- Rock stable and fast catalog database for 100k+ images
- Super reliable application with less bugs overall
- First class metadata implementation (have there been any improvements at all since 2015?), e.g. why can I not see the person from xmp metadata tags
- Optionally write metadata to jpg (originals) and other file formats which support embedded metadata
- AI powered noise reduction
- A real luma curve in LAB color space, not the Luma curve with color shifts they have today
- Synchronize adjustments from catalog from/to sidecar folder "CaptureOne"
- Parameterized color masking (Color Range similar to the Luma Range, using the Advanced Color Editor)
- Real full screen view for Windows version
- Highlight tools which have adjustments different from the default
- LUT support
- Camera profiling, color checker support etc.
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BeO:
• Rock stable and fast catalog database for 100k+ images
• Super reliable application with less bugs overall
• First class metadata implementation (have there been any improvements at all since 2015?), e.g. why can I not see the person from xmp metadata tagsYes. Capture One's handling of catalogues and metadata needs a complete and fundamental overhaul.
And:
• An improved keystone tool with independent vertical and horizontal adjustment points.
Also needed is:
• Better support.
• Capture One support representatives actively answering questions and communicating with users in the forum.
• More transparency, better communication from the company.
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@...
Much, much better auto mask selection (people, sky, faces, etc...). This is where I spend most of my total editing time trying to manually create a painstakingly good mask for a couple images (often dealing with tough lighting).
^ This! I just looked at the masking options LR added in last couple months and instantly got LR subscription just for that. And I regret switching to CO, I feel cheated. It was a significant time investment and this sudden change of heart on pricing is just such a bad customer experience.
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