Digital BW, The Print

Thanks - I am interested in how your thoughts progress.  I have used C1 in a
tethered environment only and to be honest we were doing very little RAW
image adjustment - really it was being used simply as a camera-computer
interface.


> From: Roger Howard <rogerhoward@...>
> Reply-To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:16:39 -0800
> To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Capture One vs Adobe Camera RAW
> 
> 
> 
> On Dec 9, 2004, at 8:46 AM, Steve Kale wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Hi John
>> 
>> I have asked this question before but since you are a fan of C1 I will
>> ask
>> again:  what are the advantages/disadvantages of C1 vs the free Adobe
>> Camera
>> RAW?
> 
> I just posted my first impressions on another list, after downloading
> the C1 3.6 demo last night, and having used Photoshop CS and ACR
> religiously (btw, ACR is definitely not free - you need Photoshop CS to
> use it!). Here it is... note this isn't a comprehensive review, just
> first impressions:
> 
> ----
> 
> Not trying to start a workflow war :) As I've said before, I'm an
> ardent Photoshop user, and really like the Camer RAW and XMP workflow
> in Photoshop... there are some weaknesses - batching in Photoshop is
> always a little dicey - but I'd always been happy enough with the
> output quality. I've used C1 several times of the years - in the past
> mostly with their PhaseOne MF backs, where it was basically a necessity
> and the app was used just with files from those cameras. For whatever
> reasons, I never liked the workflow, but lived with it where necessary.
> 
> I grabbed the demo of C1 3.6 last night to give it another try, this
> time for my DSLRs - 10D and 20D. I didn't get too deep with it, but did
> get a chance to try out most, if not all, of the major features over
> several hours. I consider myself very technical, and learning new apps
> is rarely a big challenge (if I already have background in the basic
> concepts, which I do here). So here are my first impressions, good and
> bad.
> 
> - Quality... all I can say is "wow!". Seriously. I didn't really expect
> this, and was pretty skeptical of major output quality differences.
> However, even just browsing RAWs "as shot", I noticed immediately the
> difference in rendering between Photoshop CS and C1. I'm going to have
> to explore this more, and plan to run some real comparative tests
> tonight, so I can be sure I wasn't just hopefully imagining things.
> What I tended to see with my 20D included: better color balance out of
> the box; less banding and noise in tricky areas of sky; much nicer
> sharpening (at defaults).
> - Workflow... ok, here I'm still pretty unimpressed. While I do like
> the background rendering, frankly I couldn't get it to work - it
> constantly reported it couldn't find my "Processing" folder, despite
> having set and reset it repeatedly to folders I knew existed. I also
> had problems with the Sessions concept - initially every time I quit it
> reported it couldn't save my Default Session. I finally fixed this by
> creating a new session and deleting the Default.
> - Editing... I like being able to edit RAW, JPEG, and TIFF all in one
> UI. I didn't like feeling like I was missing Undo control - it seemed
> most of the corrections I made did not register as Undoable steps, so
> my only recourse in general seemed to be to reset whatever property I
> just changed... I'd love a History-style undo system as in PS, or even
> just proper Undo support for every edit you can make. Am I missing
> something? I also felt the UI was cluttered and inelegant, again
> compared to PS - the toolbars, the tiny little icons in the edit
> panels, etc. And the UI itself took over far too much of the screen,
> and took a lot of rearranging to get comfortable with it - and of
> course, you can't really rearrange much (I'd again, love to see
> something like the Palettes from Adobe or Macromedia). Also, is it just
> me missing something, or do the histograms only show a histogram for
> the original RAW, and not for instance the effect of the edits you
> make? Also, lack of vignette correction and chromatic aberration
> correction was a bummer for me.
> - Speed... The interactive controls didn't feel fast enough to be
> really interactive - the Curves tool for instance was fairly slow,
> especially when compared to Photoshop.
> - Metadata... I'm a professional digital asset manager; one of my
> primary concerns with managing RAW files is also managing the
> conversion settings, so that I can store and retrieve an image that is
> ready to be processed. I really like Adobe's XMP sidecars for this
> reason; they are editable (XML - may not be for everyone, but it makes
> writing custom tools to deal RAW files extremely easy) and I have a
> pretty advanced workflow based around XMP (and would happily
> incorporate another vendors similar solution). So where are C1's
> processing settings stored?
> 
> Ok, that's about it for the off the top of my head review... just
> thought I'd share first impressions. I'm going to put it through more
> of its paces over the next 30 days while I have the demo; at this point
> I'm not sure whether the processing quality improvements over ACR are
> enough to woo me entirely given some of the workflow issues I'm seeing;
> I'm thinking if I do buy it for myself, it'll probably be used for that
> one-in-a-hundred image (almost for sure not for my panoramas), but
> right now I could be totally wrong.
> 
> roger howard
> email & im @ <rogerhoward@...>
> website @ <http://www.rogerroger.org>
> photos @ <http://www.rogerroger.org/gallery>
> 
> 
> 
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