For years Capture One has been Phase One’s secret weapon. For top-tier professional photography studios, there’s simply no other choice of software for processing their photos. The best RAW processing engine in the world combined with a feature set tailor-made for ease-of-use and workflow efficiency makes it easy to see why it’s become the industry standard.
For photographers that want to maintain a particular aesthetic across their work, Capture One’s ability to store settings and profiles makes this a piece of cake as well. If you’re shooting tethered to your computer, you can see the effects in real-time on your monitor, giving you invaluable feedback on the interactions between your lighting, subject, and post-processing effects.
But what about shooting untethered?
Shooting out in the field without the luxury of a computer and monitor means a certain level of guess work and approximation in order to anticipate the final product after processing. Gee, it sure would be nice to be able to see the impact of Capture One’s settings and superior RAW processing before trudging all the way back to the studio. Since you’ve already read the title to this article, you can see where this is going…
Yes, Phase One has actually integrated the cutting-edge RAW editing core of Capture One directly into their new IQ4 digital back. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons.
The most obvious benefit is being able to see your personal aesthetic applied at the time of capture. Imagine being out in the mountains with just you and your tech camera, and instantly seeing a moody black and white rendition of the mountain vista in front of you, allowing you to perfectly adjust your exposure and composition within this context on the spot. The freedom and number of applications this feature enables cannot be overstated. The possibilities are endless.
But there are other benefits that may not be as immediately apparent, and are arguably just as valuable. For instance, having the Capture one RAW processing engine incorporated into the back means that you can process JPG files in-camera. Combine that with the IQ4’s 2 card slot set-up and you could easily save RAW files to one card and finished JPGs to the other, allowing you to hand an SD Card over to a client at the end of your day’s shoot and walk away. You’re done. How cool is that?
And since the same math is being applied in both cases, these JPGs will exactly match the RAW in Capture One. Compare that to competing cameras where you apply “Picture Styles” to your in-camera JPGs, and then have to manually recreate that look on the RAWs later on, never quite getting an exact match since two separate engines are being used.
This same RAW engine is also what’s displaying your Live View to the LCD screen, which means that the image you’re looking at is cleaner, sharper, and more accurate than ever before.
With all of the new horsepower the IQ4 has, along with Phase One’s new Infinity Platform, this is just scratching the surface of what’s possible. We expect to see more features that utilize Capture One’s in-camera processing included in future firmware updates. Phase One has created a truly incredible piece of gear in the IQ4.
