Goodbye Aperture; Hello Capture One Pro 8

Well, we finally got the confirmation recently that the Photo app from Apple would not be any kind of new Aperture; it’s aimed squarely at iPhoto users and a lot of them might be unsure if it’s even fit for purpose for some of their workflows.

Apple, it would seem, is no longer interested in real pro software and prefers to cater for a kind of ‘beige’ demographic.

Quite a few apologists/optimists argue that it is early days and maybe with upgrades more features will be added, all well and good, but I for one do not want to use more time than I have to learning new software and I don’t want to start using something, incorporating a bunch of temporary workarounds in the hope that I can ditch them later.

I have been trying Light Room but I just don’t want to go there; the interface seems wrong and perhaps a little out of date, further more I don’t want to aid Adobe in its monopolising of all things creative.

So I have started playing with Capture One Pro 8 and after an initial “whoah! That looks complicated!” I am starting to really like it, aesthetically (to a degree it follows Apple’s new ‘flat’ GUI, in terms of looks), but more importantly it just is so capable… It seems to surpass LR in so many ways, from my experimenting and also from reading what other people say and when I look at Aperture now, it looks like a relic, a sketched out beta…

The trouble is C1 is way over-priced, especially these days and they are certainly missing out on a lot of possible clients, because most will just blindly go to LR, once they compare prices.

Right now I will keep using Aperture because it is easy to have C1 use its library, so I can experiment and learn on the same images I have to process quickly for clients.