DISCLAIMER. Yes you can use LR to make great looking image but as a person who has been doing color at a high level since graduation from college LR is irritating to me as are most still photography color tools)
I have had LR since it birth but its color tools are and continue to be not as precise or as easy to use to obtain a quality result as Capture one. Don't get me going on that either. I wouldn't call any of the current still photo tools GOOD, but its what people keep making. I want the same kind of tools I have when I am color grading a movie. Even just printer lights as a start.
Anyway basically if you do the the same things in LR that you do in Capture one the resulting LR image looks like crap. I don't mean the same numbers. I mean using the same slider to try and achieve the same result. In LR I have to work so much harder at it. I would never want to manage in Capture one beyond loading individual jobs and maybe its has to do with I'm using a Phase one camera (well its a leaf but they are owned by phase one) and they just know their file better. I don't think so though because I know other people who do the same as I do with Canon and Nikon. LR has way more things to slide like primary controls which sounds great. But it doesn't actually adjust the primaries in the way I would expect that to work. Again it seems more like a kind of gamma change. I can't tell because the histogram in LR lays the lumanence histogram in solid grey over the top of the color channels. :-( Thats not very helpful.
But here is a good example of a LR massive fail. in their histogram editor they label gamma changes as exposure. Which is wrong. Not just a little wrong. Exposure changes can also be called Offset once in digital form because exposure in a camera adjust both the dmax and dmin (white and black points) In LR is just a gamma slider. A gamma change only affects the curve or histogram between dmax and dmin. It doesn't affect "exposure". If you drag the exposure slider in LR all they way to +5 the blacks don't move an twitch. So you can blow out the whole shot and your blacks just sit there. ODD. I don't think thats how it would happen if you over exposed in camera +5.
A lot of the tools are like that in LR. They have Adobeized them to mean what adobe wants them to mean.
Next LR has no Brightness slider. HUH? Brightness is what happens when you in simple terms when you move the levels white slider towards black. On a Brightness slider in Cap 1 its has what we call a roll off. I can't change that which would be nice but its a roll off. That roll off makes the adjustment softer at the very edges of the adjustment which makes them blend better by being slightly less agressive at the ends of the corrections range of influence.
A lot of tools in Cap 1 seem to have that built in. In a real color tool roll off would be adjustable in both programs. LR doesn't have a Brightness setting so they can't add roll off to it. :-) You just get a nice hard while point slider in histogram.
The other thing is that Capture one sliders are just so much more nuanced. So if you take the same 2 tools in each program and set the numbers the same adobe's change is like 2x. Which is good and bad. I can't make as extreme a correction in Cap 1 but to get a nuanced control in LR is frustrating. All the siders work with the mouse wheel in Cap 1. The last thing would be that Capture one has like 10,000,000 more tools for making the gentile changes. Ok its like 5-10 more but it feels like 10 million when you want them in LR. The best example of this is the tool in both that works like the selective color filter in Photoshop. In LR its missing the Smoothness slider that is that roll off I was speaking of before. The other one is what is in Cap 1 called Color balance. Its a color ball(wheel) or in technical terms it multiplies the image by what ever hue one moves the selector over. This is FAST as you don't have to keep switching to a different slider to try and find the color you are trying to mult by (tint). Its a standard tool in the Film and Video world but alas non in LR or Photoshop :-/.
All the other tools in LR are pretty nice and you can do quite a bit of actual editing and add plug ins, but the main function of color its not very nice to use.
On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Emily L. Ferguson <elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Details?
I don't use LR since I have worked out the details of my asset management long ago, but most of the shooters I know have adopted it and find it quite attractive.
what exactly made you unhappy with it?
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
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