Time to move on.....
I've been a fervent supported of C1 since around 3.4 or so, which I guess is about 3 years or so. In fact, it was a presentation of C1 in early 2005 that enticed me in to shooting raw exclusively. As a part-time pro, I could never justify the cost of C1 pro given the features it offered over and above the lite/LE version, so I never graduated to pro and was always an LE user. And to be honest, at the time, there really was no competition - nobody came close to even the LE version.
Since C1 v4 was released, I toiled through the crashes and the unstable versions. The new interface and changes to the workflow took some getting used to, but I thought "what the heck" and tried hard to learn the interface. It didn't take long to get to the point where I had an effective workflow, especially when I finally found a version of C1 that seemed to work without crashing every time I tried to use it. Through most of this year, I was quite happy with the product and was happy to be using C1 again. I began to enjoy using the interface and I found it to be very effective and the interface really did seem to lend itself to a pretty efficient workflow.
This all changed when C1 pro (4.5) was finally released, with updates to the standard version. The crashes, the weird things going on with files being duplicated, settings disappearing etc and I had had enough. I had gone through the teething troubles of the beta and early 4.x versions only to have to go through WORSE problems with the 4.5 versions!! And to make it worse, there was no longer a bug reporting mechanism - I guess things were so bad this was removed!!!!
I have been threatening for a while to try Lightroom and finally I did. Version 2.2 finally has a feature set that allows me to work with a library (C1 doesn't do this and relies on you buying another piece of software to handle it) and to do spot healing and local adjustments (no longer have to go out to Photoshop to touch up images) it can generate flash slideshows (unfortunately not all my customers value my copyright as much as I) and I can print final quality prints from the one application. One thing that stopped me up until now is the image quality out of Lightroom has not been up to scratch when compared with C1 but that gap seems to be closing. But with v2.2 this has been somewhat addressed with improved image quality.
So Lightroom's image quality is "good enough" and only getting better. It's feature set is increasing, becoming a better value overall. It's interface is reasonably intuitive and as a product it is well subscribed to with numerous websites and books available to support the user and is also extensible with 3rd parties developing presets and add-ons left and right. (Interestingly, to compare, the only addon I was aware of for C1 were Magne's profiles, which I purchased for 3.7 but are no longer supported in v4.x) From a 20,000 foot view, it is really seeming like C1 is on the downswing while Lightroom is the hot and upcoming product.
Now don't get me wrong; I (hope I) am not completely done with C1. A marketing person's dream is to be promoting a product that it's users become emotional about, and C1 is one of those products that, up until now, I most certainly have been emotional about. Which is probably why I am writing here today, hoping to stir something in Phase One which will get C1 back on top. I'm really disappointed with the lack of forward progress in C1 in the recent 4.x changes with regards to how feature set and reliability goes. (I believe you will always be the best image quality, but the difference between C1 and the nearest competitor is shrinking) I understand the UI changes had to be made and after a bit of getting used to, I really liked that aspect of the 4.x changes.
But overall, C1 just feels like an also-ran in the field of raw converters, having been passed four furlongs ago by a more modern competitor in a race that has changed venues.
Please, Phase One, prove me wrong. Give me a reason to come back.
Sincerely,
Ian
Since C1 v4 was released, I toiled through the crashes and the unstable versions. The new interface and changes to the workflow took some getting used to, but I thought "what the heck" and tried hard to learn the interface. It didn't take long to get to the point where I had an effective workflow, especially when I finally found a version of C1 that seemed to work without crashing every time I tried to use it. Through most of this year, I was quite happy with the product and was happy to be using C1 again. I began to enjoy using the interface and I found it to be very effective and the interface really did seem to lend itself to a pretty efficient workflow.
This all changed when C1 pro (4.5) was finally released, with updates to the standard version. The crashes, the weird things going on with files being duplicated, settings disappearing etc and I had had enough. I had gone through the teething troubles of the beta and early 4.x versions only to have to go through WORSE problems with the 4.5 versions!! And to make it worse, there was no longer a bug reporting mechanism - I guess things were so bad this was removed!!!!
I have been threatening for a while to try Lightroom and finally I did. Version 2.2 finally has a feature set that allows me to work with a library (C1 doesn't do this and relies on you buying another piece of software to handle it) and to do spot healing and local adjustments (no longer have to go out to Photoshop to touch up images) it can generate flash slideshows (unfortunately not all my customers value my copyright as much as I) and I can print final quality prints from the one application. One thing that stopped me up until now is the image quality out of Lightroom has not been up to scratch when compared with C1 but that gap seems to be closing. But with v2.2 this has been somewhat addressed with improved image quality.
So Lightroom's image quality is "good enough" and only getting better. It's feature set is increasing, becoming a better value overall. It's interface is reasonably intuitive and as a product it is well subscribed to with numerous websites and books available to support the user and is also extensible with 3rd parties developing presets and add-ons left and right. (Interestingly, to compare, the only addon I was aware of for C1 were Magne's profiles, which I purchased for 3.7 but are no longer supported in v4.x) From a 20,000 foot view, it is really seeming like C1 is on the downswing while Lightroom is the hot and upcoming product.
Now don't get me wrong; I (hope I) am not completely done with C1. A marketing person's dream is to be promoting a product that it's users become emotional about, and C1 is one of those products that, up until now, I most certainly have been emotional about. Which is probably why I am writing here today, hoping to stir something in Phase One which will get C1 back on top. I'm really disappointed with the lack of forward progress in C1 in the recent 4.x changes with regards to how feature set and reliability goes. (I believe you will always be the best image quality, but the difference between C1 and the nearest competitor is shrinking) I understand the UI changes had to be made and after a bit of getting used to, I really liked that aspect of the 4.x changes.
But overall, C1 just feels like an also-ran in the field of raw converters, having been passed four furlongs ago by a more modern competitor in a race that has changed venues.
Please, Phase One, prove me wrong. Give me a reason to come back.
Sincerely,
Ian
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Ian
I would love to prove you wrong and there might be reasons why you are experiencing things you where but to be honest you have never given us the chance to help you out.
I took the liberty and looking up it you had ever been in contact with Phase One Technical Support and you have not.
I hope you will reconsider and contact technical support at http://support.phaseone.com and allow you to help you.
It has been a interesting transition time to Capture One 4 where we learn something new all the time. Capture One 3.7.x was a very good application but that is after years of work. Capture One 4 has clearly since it launch been proven to stabilize and has gotten features implemented faster then ever seen before.
If there is something specific in your system that is causing instability the let us help you. Maybe there is something on your computer causing this or there might something in the application that has to be corrected. Either way there is everything to win and nothing to loose except a few minutes of your time which you might win back by us providing you with a better application.0 -
Ulf-
Thank you very much for taking the time to reply to my ramblings. 😊
While you are correct that I had not opened any support cases for any crash problems I had seen, I had in fact used the Crash Reporting mechanism that used to be built in to Capture One to report every crash that I encountered. In the early days of 4.0, this was a daily occurrence, sometimes multiple times per day. And the particular crash I used to experience (which now looks like it may have returned in the last version of 4.5 that I downloaded) was dismissed by Ole Wahlgreen, who replied to my comments on Feb 25th, as a problem only I was seeing and could not be recreated by the developers. (He was very thorough in his questions and appeared to do a pretty good job of collecting the information he needed) Needless to say I was more than a little surprised to see that the next release informed in the release notes that the problem I (alone!) had been experiencing, was now fixed!!!
And sure enough, it remained fixed until 4.5.2, when the problem reappeared. Unfortunately, the crash reporting mechanism had been removed (too many reports, perhaps?) and I no longer had a way to send anything meaningful (i.e. machine state, core dumps or whatever useful info you guys generated through the crash reporter) to you.
I guess that felt like the last straw. With my confidence in the product now ebbing, this has spurred me to try out Lightroom. I'm sure I will be keeping an eye on updates to C1 and keep trying them until I feel it has its old stability back. But until then I will move forward with Lightroom, enjoying the increased feature set and better image management than is provided with C1.
However, should I encounter problems any time I switch back over to C1 then rest assured I will follow your directions and open up support cases to cover those events.
Sincerely,
Ian0
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