Many photographers, including our team at PL, have been frustrated with Adobe’s latest move to discontinue the standalone version of Lightroom, something Adobe said it would not do in the past. As a result, a number of us (including myself) have been looking for alternative post-processing tools that can replace Lightroom completely. For the past few years, I have owned Phase One’s Capture One Pro software, which I found to be very capable when it comes to post-processing images. Some of Capture One Pro’s capabilities (such as color adjustments, adjustment layers, etc) are light years ahead of Lightroom, and performance-wise, Lightroom has only been getting worse year after year, with things like adjustment brush slowing down even some of the most powerful desktop computers, whereas you can stack layers and layers of adjustments on images in Capture One without slowing anything down. Because of this, I have been running Capture One for some time now, hoping that I can fully transition to it at some point in the future. However, the biggest reason why I have not been able to fully transition, is the lack of Fuji GFX 50S camera support, something I was hoping I would see in the new version of Capture One 11 that was just announced today. After looking at the release notes of Capture One Pro 11, I came to conclusion that Phase One has no plans to support the GFX 50S or any other medium format camera on the market to protect its own medium format system. For this reason alone, Capture One could never replace Lightroom as post-processing software for many photographers out there.
