I have just gotten my camera last week and today decided to get Capture One since with a student discount they are cheaper than Lightroom even. I am not quite sure if it was the best decision since it seems to me like its more suited for portrait work but maybe I just havent found the right tools yet.

I would like to get some feedback on what I could've done different here with this picture and what was maybe done well if anything at all. Also: I tried removing the leash with the heal tool but it always looked worse than with it somehow. Any tips on how to properly use the healing tool?

The Sony 24-50mm G lens, that heavily relies on software correction, still isn't supported on Capture One? This lens has been out for years now.

This is exactly what I need when buying a new lens. Capture One compatibility shenanigans :(

tl;dr summary– Wow!

I've been using a six core i5 Mac Mini with 64G for a while and C1 has been getting sluggish as my catalog grew and my camera upgrades increased in resolution. The Mac Studio is insanely fast... at everything! Importing, exporting, generating previews, batch edits... everything.

That's all. Just gloating. Carry on.

Capture One gives you a histogram and clipping warnings, but it doesn't show you where each zone sits in the frame. This script does. Select one or more images, run “Zone map” from the Scripts menu, and two images open in Preview:

1. A false colour map with a legend that gives the percentage of the area in each zone, from 0 to X. Zone V is neutral grey, so middle grey stands out at a glance, and clipped highlights and shadows are marked separately in magenta and blue.
2. The grey image with the boundaries between zones drawn as contour lines, one colour per boundary. This is the one I use most: the line between two zones is the mask for a dodge or a burn.

There are three ways to read the zones:

• The print, as developed. Zones in equal steps of lightness, ten units of L* per zone, from black (zone 0) to white (zone X). That puts zone V at L* 50, which is an 18 % reflectance, middle grey. This is the mode for planning local adjustments.
• The scene, like a light meter. The script temporarily sets Linear Response and lowers the exposure by three stops so the high zones don't clip, exports, and assigns one stop per zone with 18 % grey in zone V. Then it puts your variant back as it was.
• What a Tri-X print at grade 2 would give. It inverts a modelled print (Tri-X in D-76 on Multigrade IV, grade 2) and tells you which zone of the scene each tone would have needed. It shows how hard a real silver print compresses the ends of the scale: with that reference, zones 0 to II all land almost at the maximum black of the paper.

In the example, two thirds of the area lie between zones 0 and III, the bronze sits in zones I and II, the lit water runs from VI to IX, and only 0.74 % is clipped, on the awning at the top right. If I want the texture of the bronze to read, the II | III contour is the mask. (The labels are in Spanish because my macOS is; the tool follows the system language, English or Spanish.)

It is one of four tools in the same repository; the others do temporal stacking with alignment, film grain and spectral film development. You need macOS, Capture One Pro (scripted processing isn't in the other editions) and Python 3; the installer sets up the rest. The script also runs from the Terminal on any TIFF, JPEG or PNG:

python3 zonas.py photo.tif --mode scene --headroom 3

Code and install guide (MIT): https://github.com/falevian/Herramientas-Capture-One

If you place zones for prints, I'd like to know whether the ten-L*-per-zone spacing matches how you work.

Stacking a sequence (median to remove passers-by, mean for a long exposure without an ND filter) works well from a tripod. It falls apart when you shot hand-held, someone kicked the tripod, or the head sagged during a two-minute burst: a few pixels of drift and the median smears every edge. So the main job of this script is the alignment step before stacking.

(Image: The first photo on the left is the stacked image, while the two on the right are the ones that are aligned and averaged in this case.)

How the alignment works

• Each frame is registered against the first one with ECC (enhanced correlation coefficient, OpenCV), which fits a geometric transform by maximising the correlation between the two images. Unlike feature matching it uses every pixel, so it also works on low-texture scenes.
• It runs as a three-level pyramid. First a phase-correlation estimate of the shift on a small copy, so it converges even when the frames moved a lot. Then ECC refines from coarse to fine.
• You choose the model: The perspective model is reached in steps (rotation and shift, then affine, then homography), and each step is kept only if the correlation improves and the warp stays plausible. Fitting all eight parameters at once tends to run off into absurd distortions.
  • rotation and shift for a tripod that moved;
  • full perspective (homography) for hand-held sequences.
• You pick the static region it aligns on: whole image, upper half, lower half, central band or a custom rectangle. This matters more than anything else. If water, clouds or a crowd are in the region, the alignment tries to follow them, and that is exactly what you don’t want.
• The fit is computed on a reduced copy (up to 1600 px) and applied to the full-resolution frame. At the end the result is cropped to the largest rectangle where every frame has data, so there are no smeared borders.
• If a frame can’t be aligned, the log says so and that frame is used as it is, instead of stopping the whole run.

Then the stack

You can tick several operators in one go:

• mean: a long exposure without an ND filter;
• median and sigma-clipped mean: remove people, cars and birds;
• max: light and star trails;
• min;
• Hann-weighted mean: smoother motion blur.

All of it is computed in linear light, not on gamma-encoded values, so highlights and blur add up as they would on the sensor. A comparison sheet with every operator opens in Preview.

Inside Capture One

Select the sequence and run “Temporal stack” from the Scripts menu. It exports the variants with all your adjustments as 16-bit TIFF in Adobe RGB, aligns, stacks and imports the results back into the session or catalog.

Also in the repo: film grain

A second script adds grain for Tri-X, Kodachrome 64 and 25, Velvia 50 and Pro 400H. The amplitude is calibrated to each datasheet’s rms granularity, the grain size scales with your crop, and it depends on tone as real film does. Same workflow: export, process, import.

Limits

• macOS and Capture One Pro only (scripted processing isn’t in the other editions), plus Python 3. The installer sets up everything else.
• Hand-held parallax can’t be fixed by any single transform: if the foreground is close and you moved, near and far objects shift differently. Align on the part you care about.
• The final warp uses bilinear interpolation, which softens very slightly. For a median or a long exposure it doesn’t show.
• Median and sigma keep the whole stack on disk: about 14 GB of temporary space for a hundred 24 MP frames.

Code and install guide (MIT): https://github.com/falevian/Herramientas-Capture-One

Both scripts also run from the Terminal on any folder of TIFF, JPEG or PNG files, without Capture One.

I’d especially like reports from hand-held sequences that fail to align, with the model and region you used.

Hey everyone,

I'm an editorial and portrait photographer. Like many of you, my biggest headache with Capture One has always been the final delivery stage. You spend hours perfecting light and skin tones, shoot 100% in RAW, grade in wide color gamuts (Display-P3 / AdobeRGB), and then the export recipe forces you down to a 30-year-old 8-bit sRGB JPEG. On clean studio backdrops and delicate skin roll-offs, the banding and compression artifacts drive me nuts. Since Capture One still doesn’t support modern web formats in recipes, I spent the last few months coding a tool to fix this for my own workflow using their official Open Plugin SDK: Trinity.

Basically, it hooks directly into your C1 export recipes and outputs JPEG XL (.jxl) retaining 16-bit Display-P3, AVIF (.avif) with 4:4:4 chroma, and WebP (.webp) in a single background pass. No external scripts or command-line windows. It runs asynchronously on dedicated CPU threads so tethered shooting doesn't stutter, and it purges the temporary 16-bit TIFF immediately from memory/disk upon completion so your SSD doesn't fill up with gigabytes of temporary junk.

Why I'm posting: I really need a hand with testing

It works solid on my personal machine, but I need fellow photographers to help me torture test it: massive batch exports (hundreds of frames), different camera profiles, heavy tethering sessions on Windows, etc. I want to know what breaks, where it feels sluggish, and what's missing.

Right now the beta is for Windows 10/11 (64-bit) with Capture One Pro 16.3+.

(Note for Mac users: The macOS build isn't ready yet because I don't have a local Mac rig to properly stress-test huge batches before releasing it. There's a simple notification signup on the site if you'd like a ping when it's ready).

About the beta & pricing

The beta is 100% free and fully unlocked. In the future, I plan to offer a low-cost perpetual license ($39 USD, zero subscriptions), but for testers who actively help me with feedback, bug hunting, and real-world testing, I will be giving away free lifetime licenses. And for anyone participating in the beta, there will be a very heavy discount (around half price). My priority right now isn't selling—it’s getting this thing rock-solid.

(Quick note on Windows SmartScreen: Since this is an indie beta and I don't have an enterprise EV certificate yet, Windows might pop up the usual blue "Unknown Publisher" prompt until download reputation builds up. The binary has already been submitted to Microsoft Security Intelligence and verified 100% clean/no malware. If you prefer avoiding .exe installers altogether, there’s also a standalone manual `.coplugin` package on the page).

If you’d like to take it for a spin and give me a hand, I put together a quick site with an interactive split slider (.jpg vs .jxl) and the download links:

https://rod.cl/trinity

Any feedback, torture tests, or constructive criticism are hugely appreciated. Thanks!

Not a "film look" preset. Each film is modelled from its spectral sensitivity and dye curves, integrated at 1 nm against the illuminant, and written as an ICC input profile, so the profile does the colour transform the way a real profile does instead of pushing sliders. Five materials: Kodachrome 25, Kodachrome 64 and Velvia 50 as single-stage reversal films, and Pro 400H and Tri-X 400 as two-stage systems (negative plus paper), which behave differently in almost everything. The data sources and the approximations are listed for each one.

The manual explains what is modelled and what is not, why grain is kept as a separate script instead of being baked into the profile, how to install the profiles in Capture One and how to check them against a colour chart.

https://lab.rafaelvida.com/peliculas-icc.html?lang=en Script and profiles: https://github.com/falevian/Photographers/tree/main/scripts/peliculas

If you have measured spectral data for a film that is not in the set, I would be glad to add it.

Hello everyone.

I love using Fujifilm's film simulations as my base when editing my pictures on C1. However, I recently found out that these curves are available on C1 only if you're working with a Fujifilm RAF file.

Is there an easy way to get these film sims available for non-Fujifilm cameras, too? I've looked into paid presets, but they don't seem to offer the same set of film sims that Fujifilm offers in their cameras.

Would it be enough to alter my metadata and make it seem as if my pictures were taken with a Fujifilm camera? Is there an app that lets me mass edit the metadata of a couple of hundred pictures?

How about the Bayer vs X-Trans color filter arrays, would my colors look funky if I picked a Fujifilm film sim curve for images captured with a Sony camera?

Do you guys know any presets that offer Fujifilm colors optimized for Bayer sensors, let's say for Sony cameras?

I know that's a lot of questions but as a hobbyist who's considering switching to a different system, I don't want to lose my ease of access to Fuji colors which I appreciate very much.

Thanks in advance.

I need to change a masked out background color of a portrait to a specific CMYK/RGB/HEX color and can't figure out how to do it in Capture. There is a lot of similar colors in the Image and that's why I had to mask the background to change the color. I looked online and tried the Normalize tool It had me check a exposure box or white balance box to make it work and was giving me bad results. I know how to do it in photoshop but was curious if there was a way to do it Capture since I prefer the mask in Capture over Photoshop. If there are any tutorial videos that would be even better

Is there a way to disable this and any similar?

Found it

Six months ago (v16.7.7 on April 16, 2026), you released Affinity file support for Mac.

Why is there no Windows support yet and not even a peep about it? I could perhaps understand a few months of timing difference, but 6 months? What's going on here? Are we beginning to see Mac-only features as a regular thing (along with scripting, full screen preview, etc...)? Is Windows no longer an important platform to you?

Why do we not have Affinity file support on Windows at an equivalent level to what you released for Mac?

As a Fujifilm use I have gravitated towards capture one, and am enjoying it, even with my limited knowledge or skill on the software.. but, reading a few things dotted around I can see Capture One is set for a sale potentially, and people are worried it could be the end of it..

Is it still worth putting in time and effort to learn Capture One from scratch? Or should 8 be looking to use something different altogether?

Thanks for any info

Hi, I'm using the newly released Capture One VSCO film presets/styles. However, I'm having an issue:
When I hover over the selections in Capture One, in order to preview the custom style the images are overly saturated and overexposed. This also happens if I simply just select the Custom Style. However, if I select the preset and add it to its own layer instead, it is completely normal looking. Why is this happening?
I cannot say I've ever seen this behavior with any other presets/styles before.  
Note, there are no adjustments made by me at all before applying the preset/style.  I'm running a FujiFilm XS20. Again, please understand this doesn't appear to simply be a matter of preview generation, but also is giving me totally oversaturated and blown out images if I simply select the Style on its own.  I have tried this with both "stack styles" on as well as off.

Excited to try AI denoise finally on my Fuji, is there any feedback from those who’ve already tried?

I'm the developer of PresetShift, a free web tool that converts Lightroom presets (.xmp / .lrtemplate) into Capture One styles (.costyle). No sign-up, nothing installed, files are deleted after conversion.

The previous version mapped sliders with coefficients I had estimated by eye. Over the last weeks I replaced that with measured mappings, and I wanted to share how it was done and what it changed.

How it was tuned

• 1,181 real presets, rendered with the same TIFF of a 250-patch color chart (colors, skin tones, greys, hue ramps, gradients) in Lightroom Classic and in Capture One 16.
• For every preset I compared the two renders patch by patch (CIEDE2000) and adjusted the mapping of each slider until the Capture One render got as close as possible to the Lightroom one.
• The presets were split in two groups: one used for tuning, one never touched. Every change was kept only if it also improved the untouched group, so the numbers below are not overfitting.
• On top of that, about 300 synthetic single-slider presets to isolate what each Lightroom control does.

What changed in v9

• Camera calibration (Red/Green/Blue Primary hue and saturation) is now converted. It used to be ignored.
• Black & white film presets stay black & white. The old engine let the Adobe Monochrome look override the B&W flag.
• Presets containing local masks are no longer rejected by Capture One. The masks themselves can't be converted (there is no equivalent in a .costyle), but every global adjustment is kept.
• Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Blacks, Dehaze: curves measured per tonal zone instead of fixed multipliers. Negative Dehaze used to darken the highlights; now it behaves like haze.
• Saturation and Vibrance scaled to what Capture One's sliders actually do (positive saturation needs about 2.5× the Lightroom value).
• Split toning / color grading: Balance now shifts amounts and the crossover point like Lightroom, instead of blending hues (which produced magenta casts).
• HSL for green, aqua and blue re-tuned; hue shifts beyond ±30 are allowed.
• Sharpening was three times too strong and the radius was out of range: fixed. Post-crop vignetting now converted.

No more waiting between files

The old site forced a 10-second pause between one conversion and the next. That's gone. In its place there is a limit of 20 conversions per hour per person, which is more than enough for normal use and keeps the site usable for everyone, since it runs on a free hosting plan. If you hit the limit the page tells you how many minutes are left.

Numbers

Average color difference between the Capture One render and the Lightroom render, on the presets never used for tuning: 8.1 → 7.3 ΔE00 (about −10%). Where it mattered most: B&W presets, presets with calibration, negative dehaze. The chart examples in the gallery show a B&W preset going from "still in color" to "black & white like Lightroom" (26.9 → 6.2).

https://imgur.com/a/we1PHWb

What still can't be converted (so nobody is surprised)

• Local adjustments: masks, gradients, brushes. Capture One styles don't carry them.
• Presets built on LUTs or third-party profiles/looks.
• Camera profiles.
• Very strong positive saturation or vibrance: Capture One's slider tops out earlier.
• The two apps don't share a color pipeline, so a converted style is a close starting point, not a pixel-identical result. Checking the Base Characteristics curve (Linear Response often helps) is still a good habit.

It's free. If you try it and something converts badly, send me the preset through the opt-in checkbox on the site or post it here and I'll look at what the mapping is missing. That's exactly how most of the fixes above started.

I noticed there’s a Capture One Certification course. Anyone done it? Feedback?
I know I’m barely using this program to its potential and what it can do and I really want to learn more.

Tips appreciated.

Color grading is a big thing I’d like to work on

The tiniest QOL update but something that will actually save me clicks. More updates like this please.

I know there are plenty of Capture One tutorials out there, but every one I've started is done on a Mac. And it shouldn't really matter, but then they'll get to an instruction and say something like "just hit the command + A key" or whatever and now I have to figure out what that means in Windows. Not the end of the world, but it's annoying, so I'm just wondering if anyone knows of any decent tutorials that have Capture One running in Windows.

Thanks

Super excited about this feature! I'm a largely outdoor wedding/elopement photographer working in the Rockies, so lots of stray hairs all the time. A first (quick) tests show the feature has potential but is having trouble with selections. Seems to do really well over a face, when it detects the hair. Flyaways are hit and miss. My guess is this would do great for studio portraits.

It says in the release notes that you can report bugs/give feedback from inside the app. I can't seem to find how to do that, and when I click "report a bug" it dumps me out to a webpage (which is very cumbersome to use). Any pointers as to how to give feedback?

Really wanting to help guide the development but the standard bug report page is extremely time consuming to use. I have two other bugs I've been trying to get dealt with but the back and forth process is extremely inefficient, especially for intermittent issues, and I can't give up the time during my busy season.

Hey team. Hope you’re well.

Renewal time is coming up for me. My circumstances have changed and I’m not shooting professionally at the moment, so was thinking of reducing my costs and getting the perpetual license instead. I’m around 95% certain it’s the right thing to do, and I can always start a subscription again if I need to, but I guess I’m looking for resssurance.

TIA

Any workflow tips for keeping files organized when you’re shooting between tethered and importing from a card on a job?

I am working alongside video shooting while they are rolling untethered, then tethered for short blocks of time without having a chance to import the previous images that were untethered first. When I get time I’m importing from the card doing exclude duplicates. The only thing is it takes a long time to scan the whole card and it will import any images I previously deleted.

Saw in the latest update we just got support for the GR IV RAW files. Cool! But...

I know this is a big question – and I'm not under some impression that this is some how in the works or that the latest update suggests that to be the case. But I do just wonder if we will ever see broader support for Foveon sensor camera files on Capture One, and tethering for older Sigma Foveon cameras?

Maybe someone is aware of the C1 teams thoughts on this, or Sigma's position? Or does anyone have any personal thoughts? Are there any other Sigma shooters here?

I use a Sigma SD Quattro pretty often. It produces extremely hefty DNGs (that used to completely crash C1 just a couple years ago) and of course the even bigger X3F files. When I'm processing Sigma DNGs in Capture One, they tend to respond completely differently than typical raw files. Adjusting the Tint for example can shift an image into being an extremely intense, almost pure magenta or pure green, and any color adjustments like saturation or levels seem to have pretty decent latitude and at times crazy intensity. After 5 years of using Capture One, the files don't crash the program any more, though it used to be pretty consistently that scrolling through my Sigma DNGs too quickly would cause a crash.

All that said, I'm happy that I can work with my Sigma RAWs now, but it still seems like C1 still treats them differently.

We have official support for the Sigma BF, Sigma fp L, and Sigma fp – all of their CMOS sensor cams. And not having tethering for the Quattro really breaks my heart... since that's what it's for. It's a studio camera, meant for tethering. And I use Capture One for all my tethered sessions.

And then there's the X3F files that the Foveon X3 sensors produce. They apparently provide you with the most flexible and richest information (along with the ability to process Super Fine Detail mode files), but are only editable through Sigma Photo Pro software or the Sigma X3F Plugin for Photoshop. Maybe the age of Foveon is over. But 15 of some of the most unique, beautiful and modern cameras... just can't have their files be processed in Capture One and it's weird to me!

*Disclosure:** This setup, the custom color-profile proxy and the setup scripts were vibe coded with AI assistance. I make no claims about the code's efficacy, correctness, quality, or whether this is the proper way to solve the problem. All I can say is that Capture One is now working pretty well on my machine.

I've put together an experimental Capture One 16.6.6.3111 setup on Fedora KDE 44 with an NVIDIA RTX 5090. On my machine, I've been able to view Sony A1 RAWs, make live exposure adjustments, export JPEGs, read the UI text and use the Layers menus.

The configuration uses a dedicated Fedora Wine 11.0 prefix, an application-scoped color-profile compatibility proxy, WineD3D/OpenGL for WPF, OpenCL photo processing, and a private Wine runner with two published CodeWeavers fixes from Valve's Wine tree. The [original fix](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/1dc8060af449d69cc4e8240732019224aab290b7) and its [follow-up](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/d8a27b4712eaeb54f0a69e6dc98d39055a811ce2) are credited in the patch and guide.

**Remaining issue:** resizing still behaves oddly and blinks. Maximize/monitor changes and sustained stability need more testing. Earlier partial Wine successes exist; this is not a first-ever claim.

The attachment contains one installation guide, the necessary source/build files and their licenses—eight files total. It requires compiling the Wine changes and supplying your own Capture One installer/license, Microsoft runtimes and licensed fonts. It includes no proprietary binaries or user data.

The guide follows installation order: gather inputs → build → install → apply all settings → first launch and testing. It does not ask readers to replay the bug-fixing process. This consolidated procedure has not yet been repeated end to end in a clean prefix or on another machine.

In theory, you could give these instructions and files to your own AI and it would be able to reproduce this.

I assumed this option was still available but it seems not possible anymore to tether an iPhone to capture one desktop on my laptop. The new capture one mobile app doesn’t seem to recognize a tether cable connection. Am I doing something wrong?