In October 2024, Capture One announced their latest version of the software and stated that it offered Content Credentials. Nearly four months later, it doesn’t seem to properly work with the Content Credentials website. Capture One says that this feature is still in Beta mode, which means that it probably won’t work at times. But we tried it with several camera RAW files and couldn’t find a way to make it work. Capture One is mostly used by high end studios and photographers who really care about the colors in their images. While Capture One really focuses on the high end photographers, they’ve made strides in taking more marketshare of the rest of photographers. For all of us though, Content Credentials are really important.
There’s a fresh addition to your workflow—a tool called ‘Export Content Credentials.’ You’ll find it in the Export Window. You can integrate it directly into your workspace as well. You’ve got options here. Choose whether or not to include Content Credentials. You can also opt to show the Producer’s name (which, more often than not, is yours). And if you can decide if you want to reveal the edits and tweaks you made to the image. Content Credentials are only available when exporting jpeg and tiff files. The information is added to the exported file, increasing its size by about 10-100 kb.
Our Capture One Review, which can be read here.
Photographers, for years, have accepted that everything that we see in the world is edited and probably went through Photoshop of some sort to make it look completely different from the original photograph. It has become easier and easier to manipulate images with ease and with so many images out on the web, lots of folks can never tell if an image is real or no. And so, content credentials are insanely important to verify that what you’re seeing online isn’t made with AI.
When we used Capture One with the Content Credentials option, we first exported photos from the Leica SL3s. The Content Credentials website then told us that the information was tampered with and it couldn’t show ua the history of the photograph at all. So we tried it with other photos from different cameras, and we couldn’t get it to work still.
Hopefully, the band will fix this eventually to display the editing history and all.
Capture One caters to the photographers who end up doing compositing and, ultimately, advertising. Advertising is a very subversive means to communication. And to that end, I think that it needs to adapt. So with that said, advertisers will need to become even more transparent.
What’s more, advertising is often done on social media these days. However, all the big social media platforms except for BlueSky have gotten rid of fact checking and authenticity. Further, they tend to remove all EXIF and metadata from the images. If these platforms never change, then we should always expect that anything we see on social media is probably some level of fake.
Unfortunately, lots of folks aren’t that savvy. A photojournalist that I’ve known has been shooting for decades. She sent me a post that she saw on Instagram of a park where we were meeting up suffering from a big fire. The problem: when we went by later, there wasn’t any evidence of a big fire at all. So perhaps the video was made by generative AI and done really well to fool people. What’s worse is that it was shared by a major news source.
Content Credentials have a very big problem to fix in the world.
