Capture One is a direct competitor to Lightroom Classic and similar to the Adobe product in many ways. Like Lightroom, it lets you work from a central image catalog and offers non-destructive editing tools that work seamlessly with raw, TIFF or JPEG images. Like Lightroom, it offers presets (‘Styles’, in Capture One) and both global and local adjustments. There’s very little you can do in one program that you can’t do in the other.
But there are some key differences. Capture One does not offer the creative ecosystem that Adobe does. There is a mobile app, but it’s designed for on-location shooting, editing and client collaboration, not as an entire cloud-based image library – and you’ll need a more expensive All in One subscription to use it. It also doesn’t come with Photoshop or any equivalent photo editor. If you need to do anything with layers, type or design, you’ll still need Photoshop, or Affinity Photo.
