Back in 2017, I stopped using Adobe Lightroom for various reasons. It starts with how I perceived Adobe’s ethics and treatment of photographers, how the software performed, manufacturer recommendations, etc. Instead, I switched to Capture One and made it the standard for the Phoblographer’s testing of cameras and lenses. Real photographers who read the Phoblographer caught on too. These days, Capture One is taught to students before they go into the studios of real photographers these days because of the demand by higher end houses. It’s been pretty universally proven that you can get much better colors out of Capture One with more ease than you can with Adobe Lightroom. There’s good reasons for that. But with the way that the modern web works, it makes so much more sense to return to Adobe.
Let me start with the biggest and most important reason why: data management. If you’re not aware, web standards are becoming so much more strict due to the needs of the inclusive web. I think that this is wonderful. But online image theft is also bound to happen. So The Phoblographer’s staff now includes Alt Text that describes our images to low vision people, captions, credits, and descriptions. Capture One makes controlling all of that stuff difficult — along with syncing up edits to metadata really tough.
Before I go on here, know that I’m not talking about the proliferation of our images on social media. I’ve made a personal pledge to take the next four years off of social media as I’m quite annoyed at the heads of all the companies and how they’ve all pretty universally pledged allegiance to the American President.
So instead, I’m talking about all the other places that images go on the web. In my case, it’s with publications, to clients, client websites, Behance, VSCO, Flickr, etc. Managing the data, naming conventions, file sizes, etc. is all so much easier with Lightroom.
On top of all that, I feel like Adobe’s ethics have changed over the years. They created the CAI, otherwise known as the Content Authenticity Initiative. We’re members of it — in fact, we’re the only photography publication that are members. If that doesn’t alarm you about the authenticity of the images you look at the reporting you read, then it should. Adobe has also done quite a bit to enhance how AI can assist photographers over the years.
That’s not to say that Capture One hasn’t done that as well. They’ve also put Content Authenticity into their software in the same way that Adobe has. But by and large, I think that the best approach is to have it embedded in the file on creation from the camera. At the moment, Leica is the only brand to do this. It’s one of the big reasons why I’m such a huge supporter of Leica.
I’m going to admit it: Capture One is still the better photo editor. But the truth is that our society is so bombarded with photos that we’ve forgotten how good real photography can be. Edits from Lightroom sometimes look like AI imagery where as Capture One looks like an actual photograph. The fact of the matter though is that it seems like folks don’t really totally care. So instead, I’ve taken a very minimalist approach to editing my RAW files in Lightroom and instead opted to do even more of that sort of work in-camera. I’ve always been a “get it right in-camera guy” and I’ve never been about editing a RAW file for hours and hours just for content creation views.
With the right work and presets, however, images edited in Lightroom can look very similar to what Capture One can produce. But they’re very different approaches to editing.
So why is this worth an article? Because I think that Lightroom could do a better job with not pushing assistive AI on photographers and making us instead work organically to get better images. At the same time, Capture One could do a much better job with data management, high ISO editing, and so much more.
None of these pieces of software are perfect. And truly, I think that the best thing that a photographer can do is the real work to get it right in-camera and make a beautiful JPEG on the spot.
