Back in 2010 I posted a few articles about how to handle Lightroom techniques as they’d be done in Aperture. At the time, Aperture 3 had just come out, but many had already migrated to Lightroom having run out of patience waiting for a long overdue Aperture update. Sound familiar?

Now I’d like to write up a few posts as I get to know Capture One Pro better (I’ll call it C1, for brevity). So a good place to start that learning is to go back and show how those Lightroom techniques could be replicated in C1.

Before getting into that, this post is an overview, concentrating mostly on C1’s interface. Don’t look at this as a Lightroom vs. C1 thing – it’s not.

This post is a blatant theft of an idea from Matt Kloskowski’s Lightroom Killer Tips blog. He’s a Lightroom guy so he’s offering some Lightroom thoughts to Aperture users. I’d like to provide a similar perspective, as an almost ex-Aperture guy, but for Capture One Pro. Sorry, Matt, but I only steal from the best…

I’m imagining that there must be a boatload of Aperture users who are looking for an alternative, but don’t much like Lightroom. If you listen to them you’ll hear plenty of reasons: Lightroom’s interface is not up to Apple standards, its library module is flawed, module switching is an unnecessary context switch, the Creative Cloud subscription service is a bad idea for users, and on and on.

There’s no need to go over all that again, or even to take sides. But for me, the choice is to move away from Aperture for my photography workflow and over to Capture One Pro.

I’ve tried a lot of CMSs (Content Management Systems) over the last couple of years. And I’ve written about them all, most recently in connection with migrating this site from WordPress to Statamic. And it wasn’t long ago that I wrote about getting comfortable with WordPress. So why did I migrate this site to Statamic?!

Simply put, Statamic works for me now unlike any other CMS has. That doesn’t mean it works for you. Or that it will work for me in a year. But I sure do like it now.

What Makes It So Good?

For me, it’s a wonderful combination of simplicity, flexibility and convenience. Let me outline some of the high points.

Aperture has been my go-to photo tool since it first came out. I love everything about how it handles my pictures from the way its library function work, through its edit anywhere correction abilities and on to output whether it be prints, photo books or Facebook.

My occasional gripes are around its slow progress in adding photo correction tools such as lens correction and advanced noise reduction. Sadly, we know why that is now; Apple announced yesterday that development on Aperture has ceased. We’ll see an update for compatibility with this fall’s OS X Yosemite and presumably some new camera support. I’d guess the camera support will come mostly because Aperture uses OS X’s raw decoding, and Apple will need to keep up with that regardless, not because of any attention spent on Aperture.

The new hotness in early 2015 with be Photos, a whole new application that will replace iPhoto. Aperture libraries will have a way to transition to Photos, but we can’t tell yet whether it will replace Aperture. Will Photos be a professional tool or will the pros need to go somewhere else? This is a place that Apple’s secrecy does not serve its users well.