These days there are many good options available for RAW conversion software. Photoshop has Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe also has Lightroom and Apple’s offering of Aperture being a few popular choices. However the professional photographers software of choice for many years has been Capture One which is made by PhaseOne who you may recognise from also making top end digital backs for medium format cameras. So it would make sense for the same manufacturer to also make a top end piece of software to accompany it’s hardware.
I have been a Lightroom user for many years and was more than happy with the level of control I had over my imagery. There is one fundamental function missing though. Tethering. What is tethering? Rather than recording your imagery to your memory card in your camera, you connect your camera to your computer and the images record directly to your computer via a piece of software. The Pro version of Capture One combines the Raw processing work flow with the ability to tether.
Shooting Tethered
A majority of photographers will head out with their camera kit, armed with a bag full of memory cards and take their photos and when they get home download their images to their computer and view them from there. LCD screens are getting bigger, brighter and more accurate these days, but still for critical work, apart from looking at your histogram to make sure you aren’t blowing out the highlights or bogging in the shadows it’s not a fail-safe option. Some may say that digital photography and shooting in RAW has made photographers a little lazy as most imagery can be altered or fixed easily in RAW processing. We’ll leave that can of worms closed for now though.
(more…)
Some Older Comments