Software Capture One 21 Pro

£299/$299

A professional alternative to Lightroom for cataloguing and editing images

www.captureone.com

Windows

Requires: Intel or AMD CPU with two cores (four cores recommended); 8GB of RAM (16GB recommended); Windows 8.1 64-bit, Windows 10 64-bit

macOS

Requires: Intel Core i3 or higher (four cores recommended); 8GB of RAM (16GB recommended); macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or later, macOS 11 (Big Sur)

Capture One 21 Pro is an image cataloguing and editing program that offers a broadly similar set of features to Lightroom Classic. It is roughly twice the price of Lightroom, but it’s designed for professional workflows, either with tethered studio shooting in ‘sessions’ or for large-scale image cataloguing, organising and editing.

Capture One also has a more powerful layers-based approach to local adjustments, advanced colour controls and a raw processing engine which produces crisper output than Camera Raw and Lightroom. Capture One is a desktop application that uses desktop storage, so it’s much closer to Lightroom Classic than the cloudbased Lightroom CC. It was originally developed and sold by mediumformat camera maker Phase One, but it has now been split off into its own company.

Capture One (the company) also makes a range of Style Packs, which are the equivalent of Lightroom presets and can be bought separately or as bundles with the software.