Capture One - listening?

[amateurphotographer]

Wasn't sure whether to post this in the retouch or medium format forums, but going here as possibly more generic.

I just saw a pop up on my C1 subscription. The pop up was a survey asking what kind of photography do you do, then on a second page, it was asking your position as a photographer, e.g. professional, amateur, creative director, etc.

I am guessing this survey came about as, what i saw, there were negative feedback on social media of their latest upgrade, as the updates seem to focus mainly on facial retouching.

From my own standpoint, I wish they "refined/finished" what they currently have, such as erase quickly "blocks/sections" in masks, i.e. opposite to fill mask areas. Wish the AI masking was more accurate. Offset X and Y and scale like in LR in Transform. Improve the noise reduction, etc.

Curious what this survey will show.

 

[Abbott Schindler]

I doubt it will show anything. I got the same survey popups on my perpetual license, and it's exactly the same as several email surveys they've sent me over the years. With the past surveys, I've answered the first couple of questions and then came to one asking about my main subjects. I shoot birds/wildlife/nature and some museum work. Not portraits/studio or subjects they're obviously focused on. The surveys abruptly ended with a nice "thank you" screen. Now I don't bother with them.

As a side note, I've got C1 installed on 2 Macs. When launched on the first machine, I got a number of screens about 16.6 new features; the survey you mentioned came up only on the second machine. Having watched their intro webinar, I was really put off by the inescapable multi-screen ads. I've now used Little Snitch to block the site they served that stuff from.

My guess: they've decided to target portrait/event/studio photographers and have shown that they're not particularly interested in other genres. They've done a fine job of giving their target audience some really nice tools, but their fairly tight focus combined with their failure to fix some long-standing reported (and acknowledged) issues may be diminishing their user base. I really worry about C1's long-term viability...

 

[GonnaSnap]

Now that I subscribe to Adobe CS, there is no reason to pay for C1. C1's lens database for geometric distortion correction is severely lacking and incomplete. I do not have this issue in LR. I export all of my shots to TIFF using X Raw Studio, to retain all of the Fuji goodness I bought into the platform to get, and then make final adjustments to the TIFFs from LR.