My Annual Dilemma
More accurately my multitude of annual dilemmas...
It’s October. I have a matter of a few days to make a renew or don’t renew decision on one of my seemingly infinite annual software subscriptions. I hope most of you are not plagued with multiple photography related subscriptions, I am one of the unfortunate people that has a slew of them. If you don’t absolutely need the software I’d highly recommend sticking to one and just be happy.
Could I do that? I’ve been thinking I could. I really don’t want to shell out the cash on a lot of overlapping functionality. How did I get here? What subscription am I thinking about cancelling? I was dead set on cancelling about $300 worth of subscription fees this October, what has me questioning that? The answer to all that and more as simply as I can explain is this week’s topic.
Remember way back when we used to buy software? Then, every year. or two, or three or, even longer we’d make a rational (hopefully) decision to fork out an upgrade fee that depended on what we actually needed. Fast forward a decade and now we rent just about everything. I absolutely need Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. I could live without Lightroom Classic given that I am a very, very long-term user of Capture One (since version 4 (I think???). I have needed Photoshop for many, many reasons that have varied over the years but I need it. If I didn’t host a variety of photographic workshops I wouldn’t need Lightroom Classic, but I do, so I need that.
Now that we have that relatively cheap photographers bundle I have both. Not really a bad deal but for a very long time I liked many things about Capture One more. I especially liked I wasn’t forced into a rental model and rarely needed to upgrade since they supported new cameras for a long time on previous versions and I didn’t buy a ton of new cameras. That all changed, they technically held to their word, they still sell Capture One but the way that pricing is structured Capture One practically force you to the rental model. They changed everything, sometimes for the worse. They broke many things. Their support is about the same as Adobe now, not much help, maybe edge issues will get fixed someday???? The worst thing is that they focus on things I personally don’t care much about to make Capture One more like Lightroom…
There are two things I still like about C1. Even with the so-called improvements to Lightroom, C1 tethered capture is still way better, way faster, and generally less flakey. The other thing that was unique to the desktop software is the session work-flow, which has, and still does work great for me. They added iPad and iPhone versions of C1 and a bunch of “cloud” features that I didn’t care for. I bought (rented) the all-you-can-eat everything version just to see. At least the iPad version had decent tethered capture, that’s better than Adobe as iPad Lightroom doesn’t even pretend to do tethered capture. Too bad the iPad C1 work-flow has similar “cloud” dependencies. I do not want to be forced into yet another cloud storage solution. I have enough and it’s either ever-increasing in cost or a pain to manage and does me no favors on needing local storage anyway. It’s just not my thing given what work I do day-to-day.
Good-bye Capture One, it has been nice knowing you. The tethered capture and sessions on the desktop software are just not worth $300/year to me and beyond that you’re hell-bent on copying Adobe Lightroom anyway while breaking things I used to like. I’m done… or so I thought until the last update. What changed? What’s causing me to part with $300 this month and deal with the mental clutter of yet-another-software package? Simple, Capture One added sessions to iPad and iPhone versions of the software.
I’ll explain. You might remember a month ago when I published a rant about how much I hate my iPad. The recent arrival of sessions combined with C1’s tethered capture functionality on the iPad is the very first piece of software that makes my iPad Pro 13” more useful than a glorified typewriter (which I have used it for, too bad I need to make photos when I type most of the time). Yes folks, the iPad Pro is now a super productive, good looking, compact, light, portable, mountable tethered capture workstation that handles all of my RAW files and gives me everything I need to be very productive.
What is this “sessions” thing all about? How is it way different than “the cloud”. Here’s the deal in a nutshell. C1 sessions on the iPad gives me…
The ability to store my RAW files anywhere I choose.
I can store them “on the iPad” in the iPad local storage.
I can store them on iCloud Drive or any other cloud storage I already pay for.
I can store them on an external drive of any type and any size, even an SD card.
I can copy them willy-nilly without a care in the world from one place to another simply and easily over the network, over the cloud, or directly connected.
I can plug any drive into my iPad with Capture One “sessions” on it and work on those files.
Sessions have lots of other features geared toward very efficient work-flow you can read about but the super-nice thing is catalog free, self-contained RAW files + metadata that does not give a hoot where it lives. It is a folder, no magic, no multi-step relocating, no exporting/importing. It just works.
The bottom line is that in photographic capture and processing terms my iPad Pro finally acts exactly like a laptop, just smaller. So, I guess I am going to part with another $300 this year. Is it worth it? In one word yes. It’s more than worth it. I don’t need to buy a laptop and the tethered capture speed, stability, and functionality is gravy on top. The funny part is I opened my first iPad Capture One specific ticket already. It’s related to tethered capture… Hmmmm, even so it’s still better than Lightroom Classic tethered capture for the desktop and obviously better to the non-existent iPad Lightroom.
I’ve been using C1 since I purchased a Fujifilm GFX100 S several years ago. Like you, I have maintained my subscriptions to PS/LRC for various reasons, mostly to have a pixel based editor. I moved to C1 because I felt it did a better job with color, particularly the Fujifilm film curves (like the color profiles in LRC’s Develop) than either LRC or DxO. That remains the case at least for my eyes. I’ll admit that with some extra work, I can achieve the same color in the competing RAW processing software, but I prefer to spend my time in other ways.
FWIW, I also like the use of layers in C1, and I think it does a better job with masks. DxO has vastly better lens calibrations than either C1 or Adobe.
I DO NOT appreciate the arrogance of C1’s customer support staff. I’ve made suggestions for several enhancements to C1 that received widespread support from other users only to be told that the developers have other priorities. That’s not an uncommon response to user suggestions. I’ve stopped making suggestions. The company is almost exclusively focused on portrait and studio photography. It’s still the best product for my approach to RAW editing, but I wouldn’t be a good source for a glowing product recommendation.
😆I never had Capture1, so I don’t miss it, and I’m sure I don’t need all of it, but can’t give up, my much loved all access Adobe subscription. But you just completely talked me into a new iPad. Here I was thinking my iPhone and Mac desktop were enough! Silly me.