Capture One now has built-in negative conversion.
Capture One now supports film scanning, with some very interesting new workflows
It feels like the rise of film photography is speeding up in many areas, with new stocks being released, new cameras too but one area is lagging and that is the digitising process. The Lightroom and Negative Lab Pro plugin pair rules the roost at the moment and don’t get me wrong. That’s what I’ve been using for quite some time and it servies its purpose. That said a little competition is never a bad thing and it’s good to see new tools become available, especially if they approach things differently, as not all tools will suit all users.
With that in mind I was really excited to see Capture One announce a new version, with a whole new set of features, aimed squarely at the film photographer. I’ve used Capture One a lot, for my digital work and I love the pipeline, the interface and the depth of control that it offers. I also prefer the file management over Lightroom’s but I stopped using it because I wanted to keep everything under one roof, which meant Lightoom/NLP.
Capture One takes an approach which I really appreciate. It’s not exactly a million miles away but has enough differences to make the switch well worth it. Firstly, shooting tethered. Scanning directly from within the editing software is fantastic and speeds up the process. Using my main monitor, without breaking the flow, while setting white balance, cropping etc is a real joy.
Scanning directly into your editing tools is a big deal.
Then there’s the way you can set a single frame, make a preset from it, or simple apply the rules you’ve set to the entire roll, as you scan, including crops, white balance etc. The worst part of film scanning, for me, is the repetitive nature of it and Capture One has solved this, making it massively rewarding. There are intricacies that I’ll go into in a full review but for now, I’m diving in and really enjoying scanning my film in a new way..
Keep an eye on the site, or join the newsletter, to be notified when the full review goes up. I need to spend more time and process more film before I make a definitive review.
Price and availability
Available now from Capture One, as part of each license type, from the various subscriptions to the perpetual license.