For a working Pro this is probably an insignificant amount of capital investment in their ‘tools of the trade’, but for a keen amateur on a budget this is possibly a factor to be taken into consideration. Capture One Pro is also available for subscription at a cost that is approximately 60% more expensive than Adobe’s creative Cloud. Each Capture One Pro update is equivalent to another year’s membership to the Creative Cloud Photography Plan. Note > The purchase price of Capture One Pro is still roughly equivalent to 32 months of the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan membership. The investment in time required to learn a second piece of software does, however, have to be taken into account. Lightroom is therefore the most cost-effective software as I don’t have to make an additional purchase. Some photographers may choose to own two pieces of software that both perform a similar task and don’t mind the additional outlay. If I am using Photoshop CC, I already have Lightroom CC bundled with my Creative Cloud subscription. This includes using the ‘Frequency Separation’ technique for skin retouching and creating composite images (texture overlays, adding flare or particle layers, replacing backgrounds or skies or even just adding text to an image). I need to use Photoshop CC in my editing workflows as some of my editing tasks are simply not possible in any Raw editing application.

If you have access to Photoshop CC from Adobe’s Creative Cloud then you already have access to Lightroom as part of your subscription 1. It does, however, highlight some of the workflow features that I find essential in my own imaging workflows. If you are already a Capture One user this article is NOT intended to convince you to switch to Lightroom as you may not need the features that I currently find valuable. Lightroom is, however, more suitable for my own personal imaging workflows for a variety of reasons. I believe they both do a fine job and I am NOT claiming that Lightroom is somehow better than Capture One. This post is not intended as a comparison test between the Raw processing engines of Lightroom and Capture one.

These are the reasons I choose to edit my Raw images using Adobe Lightroom and not Capture One Pro. Photographers usually choose their editing software to meet their individual editing needs – I am no exception.

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