Capture One fail

I've just been doing some testing with the new release of Capture One and I'm not impressed. Disappointed actually, as I was really hoping the output would be excellent.

While there are scenarios where it has a clear edge over Adobe — emphasis on 'edge' because the difference is far from big — there are also scenarios where it falls short of both SOOC JPEGs and Lightroom. Specifically: noise.

I've just done a lot of experimenting with Capture One's myriad of noise reduction and sharpness settings. No matter what I tried, I found that my low-light/high ISO photos were compromised much more than with Lightroom or SOOC JPEGs.

Lowering the sharpness helped, however my photos were still plagued by noise issues. For example, details were actually handled less elegantly and smeared more than in Lightroom. Even worse, particularly dark areas shot at a high ISO had a horrible blue tinge that is a real pain to get rid of. I think this is a result of bad chroma noise handling.

So we have another adequate but flawed processor, and I can honestly say that for my needs Lightroom is the better tool. If you don't shoot in low light or at high ISO like I (often unavoidably) do, I bet you'll be happy with Capture One. Not me, sadly.