Lightroom Vs Capture One in 2025

The only LR vs C1 pro review you need - Can Capture One finally beat Lightroom in 2025? Wew Ai crop, Match Look and more VS LR Ai tools and noise. What is the best photo editing app in 2025?

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Chapters...
0:00 Introduction
0:39 Conclusion first
04:12 Compare pricing
07:35 LR vs C1 Masking and more
16:12 New Match Look Tool
23:06 New Ai Crop Tool
25:48 Who has the best color
27:26 LR VS C1 Noise Reduction
29:52 Lightroom Generative Ai
30:57 Capture One Studio
31:48 Final Thoughts - The Best
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My gear and gadgets....

35MM Film Scanning

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[hanscastorpx]

I use both. LR for fast editing of reportage. C1 for precision art works digitisation. But slowly I want to flip the whole workflow to C1

[alnwill]

I used Lightroom for years (along with a Loupdeck keyboard), and when they decided to implement subscription -only, I looked around for an alternative and chose Capture One. It took a little time to get used to the layout, architecture, and features, but once I was proficient with C1 I much preferred it, and it feels much more professional than Lightroom. I kept both subscriptions until mid 2024, when I decided to make a choice between the two. After a couple of years not using Lightroom, I wanted to do a comparison, and found Lightroom to be extremely unintuitive, and C1's layout and architecture to be far easier to understand. The keyboard mapping for C1 functions I found much easier to use than Lightroom /Loupdeck, and I can use the same keyboard shortcuts on my laptop when I'm travelling and don't need to pack the Loupdeck. Even if the two were close, the deal -breaker is the subscription -only use. I also use Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop.

[dandonovan]

I highly recommend creating a custom tool tab in Capture One. This lets you put all of the tools you use frequently together in a single tab so you have them all together. You can still leave all of the other tabs alone, just create a new one for your tools.

[charlesputnam]

My biggest issue with Lightroom is that it's always been a resource pig. I've found that Capture One does a better job at managing system resources (RAM) and uses less RAM than lLr/LrC to do things like HDR and Pano's. You pointed out the strengths and weaknsses of each. exactly.

[ecka]

How do you get used to C1 trashing images without confirmation when trying to delete a simple healing mask, intuitively, via delete button, instead of Ctrl+Z? That's so annoying.

[davidlandrum]

My favorite thing about Lightroom is the mobile app. Instead of doomscrolling, I’ll just work on my photos. Everything syncs across.

[swanseamale]

I've been a LR user for years, but I'm looking for something better.
Thank you for the video.

[TimvanderLeeuw]

I'm very comfortable with CaptureOne, I love the colours I get and the ease of tethering. However one thing that I cannot do in CaptureOne is subtract one mask from another by intersection.

[CroickEstate]

Gav, thanks for this video and all you do. Like in the previous comment I find I use C1, Photoshop and Lightroom. I also use Qimage for print management.I actually like the Session structure in C1 as a way of working but that's just a personal choice. But the two things I wanted to comment on are:

1. It would be really useful to get your perspective on the overall process of selection, editing, cataloguing and printing. I have a process which I have arrived at by trial and error but I have would love to understand whether there are better ways of doing it. It would be great to understand some preferred processes including things like distributing images on hard drives and backup strategies.

2. I find both C1 and Lightroom let me down completely when it comes to keeping a record of the prints I've made (sizes, numbers, distribution etc). Once I have an image I am pleased with I'd really like to know where the prints are and how many. The photo software products seem to ignore this requirement and you have to turn to art inventory software but that cannot integrate with your catalogue.

[kevinweinert]

Thanks for your always interesting and thoughtful reviews of these tools Gavin. For me, I switched to C1 about 10 years ago so I'm very used to the tools and techniques for that app, so going back to LR would be some work to learn the current LR tools and workflow, but would consider it if the performance was worthwhile. But one feature with C1 that I find critically important is the ability to put my photoshoots into sessions, rather than adding them to a large catalog. Where this becomes so worthwhile me me is that I put all my shoots on an external drive (with a backup on a duplicate drive). When that drive gets nearly full I get a new drive and start to add shoots to the new drive. If I need to go back to an older shoot, I put the older drive in. So with each shoot on it's own session it makes it easy to use different drives. There is probably a way to make the LR catalog work for this, but I find the sessions architecture in C1 very simple and logical for this reason. One of the other factors for me to move to C1 was with a huge LR catalog it seemed to run agonizingly slowly. That's no doubt improved by now but using sessions seems to keep the computer processing overhead down in my mind.

I own both and use both for different reasons however one thing you are not talking about and I would love to have your comment on is demosaic which I have found is faaar better on c1 which is maybe the only reason I am not giving up on c1. Please comment thank you

[vorkot]

Do you by any chance have an interest in making a video on Darktable (Free and open source)? I have been thinking about picking it up and am really curious on how it stacks up in terms of their raw processing compared to LR/Capture one. Would love to hear your take on it.

[peterivarsson]

I agree LR is slightly better with ai editing etc, but there are details. Capture One can preview CMYK profiles. And LR catalog management is quite confusing at times, especially when you use cloud and large libraries. In LR bundle you also get PS which is a must have for most. Maybe you can settle for affinity. I still use LrC, LR and an older version of Capture One. Great video!

[annharrison]

Thank you, great comparison. I am a Capture One user through and through. I just prefer the colours so much better. One question, when I create a style and use any of the Ai masks eg. background or subject, I don't get a preview of the style when I run my mouse over the style before applying it. Your styles that contain these masks do show a preview. Can you tell me what I am doing wrong? Thank you.

[Javier.Elias.]

Use both for different jobs. Lightroom for events and weddings. C1 for portraits and fashion. They are better in different areas. Prefer C1

[caltristan]

Head up Capture One’s Perpetual Licence Has an Expiry Date

Support confirmed they stop maintaining OS compatibility after ~2 years. Your licence still technically works, but becomes unusable as systems evolve. They could patch older versions but they just don’t. So unless you freeze your OS, you’re stuck upgrading or switching.

Not what most people think they’re buying.

[staplesphoto]

So don't use C1 match color to get closer to a final image to do final adjustments, instead use a preset that will get you close to a point and then do your final adjustments?

[leskarapancsik]

I do use Capture one.
I tried to apply Match Look for different photos.
I was not happy with the results.
However, Match Look is useful when you have a photo shoot in the same environment, it will make the result uniform.

[themmeferal]

I shoot analog and scan with an Epson v850 and Silverfast. This combination can produce a 64 bit color image of the negative. I use Lr at the moment, but I thought about getting a different software which can handle the 4 channels (I suspect that Lr can't use the IR channel) . I am relatively unversed in scanning and processing my images myself, but if you guys have any tips on how to work with the RAW files of Silverfast, please let me know :)

[automotivephoto]

i just need a good color rendering from C1 pro. Who need this fancy ai shit? are you photographer or digital artist?