Capture One has already been updated with native support for M1 Macs, so it's great news all round for Apple fans
(Image credit: Capture One)
Capture One has provided no details on the new Capture One for iPad edition, except to say that it will arrive in “early 2022”. It’s clearly a development announcement at this stage, but is nevertheless exciting news for iPad owning photographers.
Capture One for iPad will join several high-end mobile photography tools already available for the Apple iPad. These include Affinity Photo for iPad, Photoshop for iPad and Lightroom.
These programs all interface with the desktop version using cloud synchronisation tools. Photoshop and Lightroom use Adobe’s own Creative Cloud servers, while Affinity Photo uses Apple’s native iCloud storage. We have no information yet on how the iPad edition of Capture One might work, but if Capture One can leverage the tools in iCloud there may be not need for a separate subscription service.
The new 12.9-inch M1 iPad Pro has stunned us with its performance – will it soon be running a mobile version of Capture One? (Image credit: Apple)
Capture One and what it does
The existing desktop edition of Capture One is like a high-end Lightroom alternative, offering non-destructive editing and raw processing, seamless raw processing alongside regular JPEG and TIFF files, local image adjustments and preset Styles.
The differences between Capture One and Lightroom are mainly in their raw processing, Styles/presets and local adjustments. Capture One tends to produce finer detail with less noise, it has a smaller ecosystem of premium quality editing Styles (Presets, in Lightroom), and a more advanced system of local adjustments based around adjustment layers and both parametric (adjustable) masks and highly editable raster (bitmap) masks.
Unlike Lightroom, Capture One is available both on a subscription and as a single purchase. The ‘all cameras’ version is the most versatile, but there are also cheaper Nikon, Sony or Fujifilm editions for photographers who use those brands specifically.
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Rod is an independent photography journalist and editor, and a long-standing Digital Camera World contributor, having previously worked as DCW's Group Reviews editor. Before that he has been technique editor on N-Photo, Head of Testing for the photography division and Camera Channel editor on TechRadar, as well as contributing to many other publications. He has been writing about photography technique, photo editing and digital cameras since they first appeared, and before that began his career writing about film photography. He has used and reviewed practically every interchangeable lens camera launched in the past 20 years, from entry-level DSLRs to medium format cameras, together with lenses, tripods, gimbals, light meters, camera bags and more. Rod has his own camera gear blog at fotovolo.com but also writes about photo-editing applications and techniques at lifeafterphotoshop.com
