Today, Capture One is debuting a brand new set of tools in Beta as part of its latest update. Unfortunately, they’re still not addressing giving photographers better high ISO editing abilities — which has long been requested. However, what we’re getting in its place is a really welcome addition in the form of making retouching images much easier. At the same time, during a press demo, Capture One demonstrated what I’d call an overall ethical approach to retouching and even a fair balance between assistive AI and human edits.
The New Changes in Capture One
Here are the new changes that photographers can expect in Capture One’s upcoming changes, currently in beta.
- Easier file management for sessions, including nested folders. Photographers and editors will be able to work with automated tools for this as well if they’ve signed up for Capture One Studio, the company’s higher end version of the Pro software.
- Limited retouching in Capture One right now via the new Retouch tool tab. This is specifically designed to work with faces. In this tool there are various sliders that can detect and eliminate blemishes, smooth out the skin texture, etc.
- The new retouching tool uses AI to detect where the faces are in the scene by searching for eyes, nose, mouth, etc. When it comes to removing blemishes, some of it is AI and some of it involves traditional editing techniques. This now means that you don’t need to sit there and manually brush the masks on anymore.
- The new Retouch tool tab can detect up to 20 faces in a scene. David Grover, Global Manager of Product Training, told the press that after 20 faces, there are really diminishing returns on editing faces unless you’re printing really large images.
During the demo, we asked about eyes, as sometimes it’s possible to be working with subjects wearing contact lenses or who have dry eyes. The retouch tab can’t edit the eyes, and instead, the company tells you to do it manually.
The demo only showed off models with fairer complexions, and so I’m very curious to see how it performs with the melanated part of the human race. Realistically speaking, if you’re photographing people specifically for a shoot, they’re bound to try to make their faces look as great as possible. But if you’re shooting a photojournalistic style event, people don’t necessarily doll their faces up as much. With that said, our team is eager to see how it performs.
In addition, Capture One pledged not to use your images to train AI. In a chat with Capture One reps earlier last year, the company stated that they’ve got a slower, methodical, and what they say is more careful view on incorporating AI into editing software. More importantly, Capture One still only works with still images and not video.
Combined with knowing how to use the metadata sync abilities, this is enough to make me really want to stick with Capture One and not really work with Lightroom all that much. As it is, while I appreciate and like what Lightroom does, it doesn’t ever seem to help me get the results that I want the way that Capture One does. It’s so much easier to do it in Capture One, and I assume that’s partially because all the manufacturers purposely choose to work with the company. Panasonic LUMIX recently announced that they’re working with Capture One for tethering solutions — therefore joining a slew of other brands on this.
Members of the Phoblographer’s subscription plan get a discount on Capture One. Additionally, we have a bunch of presets available for the program.
