Capture One 4 is Phase One’s amateur photo management application. Capture One 4 doesn’t offer media management or cataloguing. It uses the file system to manage your images on disk. However, it’s strong at correcting and retouching Camera RAW photos. Capture One 4 supports most semi-professional and professional cameras that can output RAW images. I tested the RAW quality earlier, with good results.

Capture One 4 looks great, much more modern and slick than the previous version. But it has also learned a couple of new tricks, of course. One of the main attractions of Capture One 4 is that it will happily run on an old Power Mac G4 and G5. It runs fast on a Power Mac G5 with dual processors. Capture One 4 has a new interface working more intuitive than its predecessor --users of older versions will on the other hand perhaps be a little confused by the new looks.

Non-destructive Image Correction

Unique to Capture One is that it will read ICC profiles from the RAW files shot with cameras that support this capability. For other cameras, Capture One 4 uses a generic ICC profile. Capture One 4 is built around the notion that a photographer knows how to shoot at least a decent photograph, and that he doesn’t want to alter the image too much --and if he does, that he’ll be using Photoshop.

A result of this is that all tools in Capture One 4 apply to the whole image or to areas that have been defined by colours or edges. There are no brushes to choose from. All adjustments can be saved as “recipes”, the equivalent of presets in other applications. Images are also never edited themselves; rather all adjustments are really property lists holding descriptions of the adjustments --which can then be applied in the program when it’s necessary.

Capture One 4 exports into TIFF or JPEG. You can add photos to a queue in an elegant way: by dragging them in the queue panel --a number will appear when you do.

I discussed the results earlier, and Capture One came out as one of the better RAW converters. Especially exposure corrections and colours are well preserved by Capture One 4 conversions. Exposure corrections even include a High Dynamic Range adjustment which tries to recover up to a stop from photos that allow it.

Professional Program No-Frills Approach

Personally I found Capture One 4 to be a program that is incredibly easy to use, with an excellent mix of features and corrections, with good conversion quality but without management (catalogue) capabilities. You can, however, create different tastes (variants) of the same image --saved in property lists. Nevertheless, I always have the impression that Capture One 4 is only its true self when used in tandem with Phase One digital backs. That’s not even criticism --I wouldn’t expect anything different.

Some features aren’t even available when the image isn’t a Phase One created one. Despite this limitation, I think Capture One will appeal to many professional photographers because of its straightforward interface and full range of adjustments.