Capture One (or C1 for short) offers all the image adjustment, importing, layer, and local editing tools we expect. But what makes the photo editing software stand out are its fantastic raw file conversion process and tethered shooting capabilities (including camera setting controls and a live monitor view). The latest version adds retouching tools and helpful session organization options. Capture One is worth a look if you're a professional or serious hobbyist, thanks to its deep arsenal of professional photo editing tools and flexible interface, but Adobe Lightroom Classic remains our Editors' Choice winner for photo workflow management, thanks to its superior organization features and top-notch image corrections.

Pricing: A One-Time Fee or a Subscription

You can buy the desktop-based Capture One Pro outright for $317 ($199 upgrade) or subscribe to it for $15.75 per month (billed annually). The subscription price is steep when you consider that you can get both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom for $9.99 per month (billed annually). With Capture One, you do get three activations for your money, which is more than Adobe's two-computer maximum. A fully functional 7-day trial of Capture One lets you test the software before you buy it.

For comparison, DxO PhotoLab goes for a one-time price of $229.99 and CyberLink PhotoDirector costs $99 as a one-time purchase or $64.99 for an annual subscription that includes a good helping of Getty stock images.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

To use Capture One's mobile apps (available only on Apple devices), you need an additional subscription ($4.99 per month). Alternatively, the All-in-One Bundle ($22.83 per month, billed annually) gets you both the desktop and mobile experiences, along with online collaboration tools and priority support. A Studio edition of Capture One, which targets professional studios with multiple employees, adds automated cropping, multiple viewer screens, offline collaboration, and more workflow features. It's subscription-only and costs $45.75 per month, billed annually.

System Requirements: Relatively Standard

Capture One Pro is available for macOS 13 or later and Windows 10 64-bit 22H2 or Windows 11 22H2 or later. Both versions require a machine with at least a dual-core processor, 8GB of RAM, and 10GB of free disk space. You also need a monitor with a 24-bit, 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution at 96dpi. It supports Apple silicon machines natively.

I tested the Windows version, which takes up 1.6GB of drive storage, significantly less than Lightroom Classic's 3GB. I had to upgrade my image catalog upon first running the update, but doing so was quick. You activate the software using a Capture One account and a serial number. Setup on Windows includes the installation of Microsoft Visual C++ libraries and a reboot (something I don't see often these days), but it's only a one-time inconvenience.

What's New in Capture One?

Capture One has unusual version numbering, having switched from numbers based on the year to the current format. The latest May 2025 update is technically Version 16.6, though you might see references to Version 23. In any case, here are the highlights of the latest release (in order of importance):

• Retouch Faces Tab. This new set of tools detects faces and facial features in your photo and lets you perform actions like Blemish Removal with a simple slider. You can even copy these edits to multiple shots with multiple faces.
• Even Skin. This tool smooths contrast without affecting highlights.
• Dark Circle Reduction. You can get rid of bags under the eyes automatically with this feature.
• Contouring. This adds subtle shadows to create depth.
• Session Builder. This helps you organize photo shoots by automatically creating nested folders in the new Session Folders section.

And here are some older (but still relevant) updates to the program (in order of importance):

• The ability to copy AI Masks between different photos
• AI-Assisted culling for grouping similar shots automatically; you can apply tags and ratings during import
• Auto sensor dust removal
• Live collaboration
• A Magic Eraser that gives you a way to select and remove areas you select with the Magic Brush tool
• Panorama Stitching and HDR Merge
• Smart Adjustments for a similar look across images
• Speed editing that lets you perform multiple edit actions using keyboard shortcuts

Interface and Ease of Use: Professional, With Helpful Shortcuts

When you first run Capture One, an attractive startup screen lets you choose a layout with the tools and browsers on the sides you want. The program then automatically sets up hardware acceleration based on your system. A six-step tutorial takes you through the main features of the interface. Clicking on the head icon at the top right of the interface shows a panel with tutorials on basic photo editing procedures in the app. The tutorials work with live sample images.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

The Resource Hub shows tabs (in order) for What's New, Tutorials, Webinars, Support, and Plug-In Shopping. If you dismiss a tab, you can restore it from the Help menu.

The dark gray (and adjustable) program window has large buttons along the top, with defaults of Import, Export, Cull, Share Online, Reset, Undo, and Auto Adjust. You can customize it with more than 20 additional buttons; if you are interested in tethering, you should add the Capture button. Tethered shooting continues to be a focus of Capture One. For example, you can save images both to the computer and a camera card simultaneously. Another related feature is ReTether; you can disconnect the camera for up to two hours, and Capture One will automatically import any photos you took in the interim once you reattach it.

A three-dot overflow menu lets you add or remove buttons. Dragging the buttons reorders them. And you can move the whole menu to the right side. The app's panels are draggable and can float freely on the screen, ideal for dual-monitor setups. I appreciate having clear Undo, Redo, and Reset buttons, considering how error-prone photo editing can be. A split view shows a before-and-after comparison; the Split View button (top right) also offers full-screen before-and-after views. I also like how adjustment sliders snap back to the default position when you double click them, as well as the fact that clicking and holding the cursor on the adjustment's name temporarily shows the image with that adjustment set to default.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Unlike Lightroom Classic's interface, Capture One's is not modal. That means it doesn't present different workspaces for different functions, such as organizing, editing, or output. Instead, you do everything in one interface. You use buttons on top of the left-side control panel to switch between eight views based on what you're doing at the moment (in order): Library, Tether, Shape, Style, Adjust, Refine, Export, Quick, Color, and Metadata. I wish it were as easy to collapse the left and right panels as it is in Lightroom, which gives you simple arrowhead icons for that purpose.

Cursor Tools and Shortcut Keys

Along the top, a dozen always-present cursor tools let you switch among the following options (in order): Select, Pan, Loupe, Crop, Straighten/Rotate, Keystone, Mask, Healing Mask, Erase Mask, Dropper (for white balance and other adjustments), Apply Adjustments, and Draw Annotations. Just as in Photoshop, right-clicking (or click-and-holding) any of these buttons opens a drop-down of more cursor choices, including Zoom and Pan. The Apply Adjustments cursor lets you copy and paste adjustments between images. The paste functionality is smart enough not to include spot removal and cropping.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One offers good right-click menu options and keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can use C for a crop, Ctrl-T to hide or show the Tools menu, and Ctrl-D to export to disk. The Import interface has a shortcut cheat sheet informing you that Pick is the S key and Unpick is A. You can even create custom shortcuts for any of the program's menu options. Question mark icons in every tool take you to the appropriate help entry—very helpful indeed.

A simple roll of the mouse wheel quickly zooms your photo. Capture One can't zoom to a specific percentage. Instead, it stops at set amounts, such as 25%, 33%, 50%, and so on. It doesn't provide an indication of whether it has fully rendered the photo you're viewing (Lightroom gives you a Loading… message). In my testing, however, photos loaded faster in Capture One than in Lightroom Classic.

A full-screen view in Capture One shows both the side panel and your image, but it's less useful than Lightroom Classic's true full-screen view. I also find that the basic action of switching between gallery and image view is less intuitive than it should be. Sometimes I hit the multi-image button, and the program keeps me in a single-image view. In Lightroom, switching between these two views is a simple matter of double-clicking an image.

Import Process: Powerful Options

If you don't want to use the Import button, you can set Capture One as your default AutoPlay option for when you plug in camera media on Windows. The import dialog is powerful. It lets you add copyright metadata, choose the destination or source, and rename files. The program can perform a simultaneous backup during import and even apply adjustment styles and presets such as Landscape B&W, midtone boost curve, and sharpening. Autocorrect is another useful import option.

At import time, you can zoom the preview thumbnails, view single images, and choose which images to import. You can also rate or tag them before importing.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Automatic Groups

Another helpful option during import and in the Cull window is automatic Groups. Capture One analyzes images to put similar ones together. It takes a bit of processing, but can be useful. The groups are temporary, and you can set a percentage for how similar the images should be. It's handy for types of photography that involve taking many similar shots, like wedding shoots or wildlife photography.

In the Import or Cull window, you can switch between Grid and Viewer views. The latter lets you see the group members full-size so that you can choose the best ones.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

The program's duplicate detection (like that in Lightroom) saves you from having unnecessary copies on your drive. I had no trouble importing raw files from recent camera models such as the Canon EOS R1, Fujifilm X-T4, Nikon Z fc, and Sony a7 IV.

Like Lightroom Classic, Capture One stores information (including any edits) for your imported photos in a database called a catalog. You can store the actual image files in a different folder location from the catalog, or right inside it. Keeping them separate means you can have the large image files on a NAS drive, for example. Unlike Adobe's app, Capture One lets you have multiple catalogs open simultaneously. By default, it opens the catalog you're importing to as soon as the process starts.

A double progress bar shows both the overall import and current file operation progress. Capture One imports faster than ACDSee Pro, Lightroom, and PhotoDirector. You can start working on photos before the whole import finishes, which is handy. A minor quibble is that I can't use the End key to quickly navigate to the bottom of an import set; I had to move the scrollbar all the way down. And when I resized the thumbnails, my place in the set changed.

Fast Import Speeds

I tested performance by importing 200 raw files from a Canon 80D to my Windows 11 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM, a 3.6GHz Intel Core i7-12700K CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti discrete graphics card. Capture One took 67 seconds to import the set, which leads the pack. Capture One's preview creation adds to the import time, however, for a total of 124 seconds. Both results are very close to Adobe Lightroom Classic's. With either, you can turn off preview creation if you're in a hurry. Note that some apps—such as DxO PhotoLab and Skylum Luminar—don't bother with an import process; they let you work with photos from any storage location.

Top-Notch Raw Camera File Conversion

Some raw camera files I tested in Capture One look better than those in Lightroom and the excellent DxO PhotoLab. Capture One even supports DNG images (Adobe's raw format), treating them as original raw files. Even with those, I see more detail in Capture One than in Lightroom in some cases. Capture One's documentation states that its raw conversion process "uses an extremely sophisticated and patented algorithm." But it's still not better in all my tests.

(Credit: Capture One/Adobe/PCMag)

Above, you see Capture One's unadjusted raw conversion on the left and Lightroom's on the right. The two are extremely close, with Capture One showing less noise. That's, of course, just one example, and you can find pictures that Lightroom renders better. Still, you don't lose anything by using Capture One. With both programs, you still need to make adjustments after the initial import.

Capture One uses magic wand icons for autocorrect adjustments in both the top toolbar and each adjustment section (exposure, white balance, and so on). You can undo the autocorrect changes of any given setting individually. The Curve presets in the Color section have Auto, Film Extra Shadow, Film High Contrast, Film Standard, and Linear Response options. The first few modes are more saturated, and the last two give the most detail.

Photo Organization: A Bit Behind the Pack

Capture One lets you add star ratings at the bottom of thumbnails and at the lower-right corner of the main photo view. It also lets you apply color tags for organization, but there's no simple Pick or Reject option at this stage of the workflow.

The Keyword tool (accessible from the Metadata tab) lets you add keywords to build a Library. The next time you start typing in the text box, the program suggests any matching entry. You can even import or export keyword libraries and add hierarchical keywords. The program doesn't, however, give you a prepopulated keyword library. I prefer the treatment of keywords in Lightroom Classic, which offers exhaustive help and presets for organizing your photos.

You can create custom albums (including smart albums based on color codes, ratings, or search criteria), projects, and groups (which can include any combination of the above). But forget about integrated geo-tagged maps or people tags, such as you get in Lightroom. Otherwise, Capture One offers good search options for finding files by date, keyword, name, and rating.

One helpful organizational tool in Capture One is called Variants. Similar to Lightroom Classic's Snapshots feature, Variants lets you create multiple copies of a photo with different adjustments and edits. If you're really into this aspect of the workflow, check out Photo Variants, an application that emphasizes it.

Sessions

The Sessions feature, which targets professional photographers, is a particular strength of Capture One. A Session is a project organization option (similar to a Catalog) that contains images and edit metadata, but just for a subset of photos rather than for your whole collection. Lightroom doesn't have an equivalent, and Lightroom Classic uses Sessions only for tethered shooting. Capture One doesn't have that same requirement as the latter, and its tools are deeper. With a Session, you can organize shots into Capture, Selects, Output, and Trash folders. Capture One creates these as OS folders, and you can simply drag images from a File Explorer window into a Session in the program's Library panel. If you subscribe to the Studio edition, Capture One can create incremental Session subfolders automatically based on Tokens, or variables that stand for a camera model, date, location, and so on.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Photo Adjustment: Advanced, Effective Tools

Capture One's selection of standard adjustment tools—contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, white balance, and so on—is up there with the best. The program lets you adjust the clarity, HDR levels, and histogram, too. Clarity offers a few distinct modes: Natural, Neutral, and Punch are more effective than the Classic mode, which just seems to sharpen images.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One's Smart Adjustments lets you set a reference photo after tweaking its color settings and exposure, after which you can apply the resulting look to multiple other images. You don't simply paste the exact settings; rather, you adapt them to the target image's lighting and colors. It worked as advertised in testing, but I wish more adjustments were available, such as noise reduction.

Impressive Face Retouching

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

The latest version of Capture One introduces a Retouch tab. It automatically detects faces and lets you adjust blemishes, dark circles, skin smoothness, and more with sliders, without the need for selecting or brushing.

Lightroom doesn't have equivalent tools, though it offers good presets for portraits. Photoshop's Skin Smoothing neural filter does a great job, but that also lacks Capture One's Dark Circles and Contouring tools. You have to manually select areas with brushes in Photoshop to do those things. Below is a comparison of Capture One's Retouch tools (left) with Photoshop's Skin Smoothing tool (right).

(Credit: Capture One/Adobe/PCMag)

Photoshop does, however, go one better than Capture One with its face-reshaping tools; those let you enlarge eyes or plump up lips, for example.

Styles in Layers

Capture One includes a modest set of filters, which it calls Styles. Modest, that is, compared with what you get in programs like Skylum Luminar or Exposure X7. You can, however, buy more online from Capture One or from third-party sites or create custom Styles based on color, lighting, and other adjustments. You can add Styles to layers and restrict their operation on Luma range masks. You can combine multiple styles into an image and individually adjust the opacity of each style in its layer for a customized look. Right-click on the Style entry or in the Layers panel by choosing New Filled Adjustment Layer > Apply Adjustments From, and then pick the style you want.

Better Haze Removal

Capture One’s Dehaze tool lets you adjust the shadow tone with a dropper, which yielded a vastly superior result (left) compared with the horrific color cast created by Lightroom’s Dehaze (right).

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

In the example above, I set the correction to 100% to emphasize the difference. You probably don't need that amount of Dehaze in most scenarios, but you still see more color cast in Lightroom compared with Capture One (or DxO PhotoLab and CyberLink PhotoDirector, for that matter).

Lighting Tools and HDR

The Curves and Levels tools in Capture One's Exposure panel are far more useful for making vivid images than the basic sliders for Exposure, Contrast, and so on. Capture One is all about image fidelity, though there are styles that apply color and black-and-white effects, as well as a Film Grain tool.

The program's High Dynamic Range section includes sliders for Black, Highlights, Shadows, and White. These tools let you create an image with better contrast. Adjusting highlights and shadows alone often results in a washed-out-looking image. The tool's purpose is not to deliver special effects but rather to perfect an image; for that, it's useful. For comparison, PhotoDirector can create HDR images with artsy and extreme impact.

True HDR takes multiple images of the same scene shot at different exposures and combines them into one image. To use this tool, you select multiple images and choose Merge to HDR from the right-click context menu (you can also get to it from the Image menu), with Auto-Align and Auto-Adjust options. You get a DNG file that uses the dark areas in the overexposed shot and the bright areas in the underexposed one. You don't get much in the way of options like with ON1 Photo Raw and PhotoDirector. Note that True HDR and panorama stitching, which I discuss next, each took about 20 seconds to complete on my test PC.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

To use panorama stitching, you select multiple images and either right-click or choose the related feature from the Images menu. Options for the projection include Panini (which sounds adorable), Cylindrical (the most convincing option in my test shots), Perspective, and Spherical. Disappointingly, though, Capture One lacks Lightroom’s and Photoshop's ability to fill the incomplete parts of the rectangle with AI-generated content. A simple option to have the final image be rectangular instead of having a warped edge, for instance, would be welcome. Then again, you could just use the Crop tool to get straight sides.

In its Shape section, Capture One includes profile-based tools for correcting lens-geometry distortion. Most new lenses have profiles here, though the EF 70-300mm Canon lens for my Canon DSLR still isn't there. Chromatic aberration correction comes under this lens correction subset. A generic option did quite a good job in my testing. The Purple Fringing option is also effective. DxO PhotoLab remains my top pick for doing away with chromatic aberration, though Lightroom has also gotten very good at it.

The Focus Area section of the Refine tab can home in on a subject's eye, which is often where you look to check focus.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One's noise reduction tools are respectable. I found that some images had less noise in the initial raw conversation, to the point that I had to apply 50% noise reduction in Lightroom to get similar results. It turns out that's because Capture One applies that much noise reduction by default. DxO PhotoLab and Topaz DeNoise offer the ultimate in noise reduction, however.

Cropping and Color Management

Capture One handles cropping well. Select the rectangle you want, press Enter, and the crop takes effect even if you switched to another cursor. You can also simply start drawing the crop wherever you want, rather than starting at the selection box edges, as you must do in DxO PhotoLab. The crop tool helpfully shows you each side's dimensions in inches or pixels. The straighten tool has you draw a line that will become the horizon, or you can manually tilt your photo using the Composition panel's Rotation tool. The Auto Adjust magic wand button figures out the horizon in your shot and automatically straightens it.

Color editing is a special strength of Capture One. You can adjust color ranges or individual colors and fine-tune skin tones using a color picker. Other skin helpers are the Clone and Heal tools, which do a very good job of removing blemishes. They work just about the way Photoshop's similar tools have for years, but Adobe's content-aware tools are more effective. The Mask From Color option in Capture One lets you create adjustment layers based on color-selected areas for local adjustments.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One's Direct Color Editor tool lets you adjust the color by dragging up and down over the color you want to modify. When I did this, I couldn't see the effect until after I chose to view the background layer instead of the adjustment layer.

Masks and Layers: Satisfactory, But Not Magical

Capture One is well behind Adobe's software when it comes to masking. It doesn't have auto subject or object select options. That said, the program offers masking with a feathering tool and refinements for difficult selections like hair or trees. Another selection tool is called Magic Brush, which automatically selects objects of similar colors, and the Magic Eraser, which lets you easily remove areas the Magic Brush selects.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

You can mask by luminosity as well as by using linear and radial gradients. The luminosity mask option (called Luma Range) is accessible from a button on the Layers dialog and is good for isolating bright or dark areas. It's especially helpful for selective noise reduction. There's no blur tool for selective focus effects, but you can reduce sharpness and clarity using the mask. The gradient options are good for selective focus treatments. The Levels and Color Balance tools work in layers, and you can adjust the opacity of each edit layer.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

The Annotations feature is helpful for collaborative editing. It allows the original photographer or editor to send notes to a client or retouching professional about areas of the photo. It's basically a drawing tool that creates a layer, which you can toggle and include as a separate layer if you export to PSD. You can choose the pen size and color, and an eraser tool eases fixing mishaps. Unfortunately, the tool doesn't work with touch monitors for annotating with a stylus. Possibly even worse is that the annotations don't show up in images you share via the Capture One Live web collaboration feature (more on that feature below).

Capture One lets you copy specific layers to other images, even if the second image has different dimensions. It's not a simple matter of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, however. You need to choose Copy Adjustments from the Adjustments menu and then Apply Adjustments once you switch to the second image. This adds the copied layer on top of the second image's layers. I prefer Adobe's strategy of hiding layers from you in Lightroom because it leads to faster, simpler editing. If you need to work with layers, Photoshop is still your best option.

Collaboration: Costs Extra

Capture One Live lets you share albums, either from live sessions or in your catalog, via any browser. The cost for this service is $5 per month. Even if you don't pay, you still get a single collaboration session of 24 hours, compared with multiple sessions that can last up to a month. A paid subscription also allows for watermarking.

To use Capture One Live, tap the Share Online button and choose a Collection to share. You get a link, optionally password-protected (but only for paid subscriptions), that opens a web page showing your Collection. Collaborators can view large versions of the shots, color code them, and rate them from one to five stars.

(Credit: Capture One/PCMag)

Capture One's features in this area are otherwise limited. You don't get downloading or keyword tagging capabilities, let alone editing or markup. With the latest update, Capture One syncs web comments to the local program, and you can share whole folders of images rather than just one photo at a time.

Live photo thumbnails appeared in the web view quickly after I started sharing, as did edits to those photos. A neat option is to share a tethered shooting session live. The images show up automatically for the web-based collaborator. Lightroom has the related Discover community of photo editors you can follow; you can see before-and-after edit views of their work and collaboratively edit photos. Lightroom even offers web-based photo editing.

Export: Good Printing Options, Few Sharing Choices

Capture One includes capable printing features. It lets you select a color profile and offers standard layouts such as contact sheets and A3/A4 formats. You can customize layouts with your choice of column and row counts and spacing, while text and image watermarking options are also available. You can save custom layout templates, too. The View menu offers a good number of Proof Profiles to show how your image will look on a selection of displays and print output types, but it doesn't highlight nonprinting colors the way Lightroom Classic's Soft Proofing feature does.

One weakness in Capture One's utility as a workflow solution has been its lack of sharing to established online photo venues, but there's a ray of light on this count. The software can now share directly to the relatively new but promising Glass photo community.

The program also includes a Make Web Contact Sheet choice that creates HTML for a web server, but no integrated gallery creation like you get with Lightroom. The Capture One Live feature serves a similar purpose but in a more limited way. You don't get export options for more established online photo storage and sharing services like 500px, Flickr, Instagram, or SmugMug, nor access to integrated book layout and export tools. Each of the latter two is available in Lightroom Classic. The good news is that Capture One does support export plug-ins, including for SmugMug.