Where do you go when you want to learn more than the Capture One Pro online users guide tells you?

The bad news is that the learning resources available for Capture One Pro are no where near what they are for Lightroom. Many famous photographers use and write about using Lightroom; there are books and whole seminars devoted to Lightroom. Jeff Schewe has written the must read books for Lightroom users, The Digital Negative and The Digital Print.

But there are places to go to learn and get help with Capture One Pro.

In my last post about Capture One Pro, I mentioned its occasionally awkward, quirky design. You may consider some of it to be missing features, or features “not done right.” Remember that Capture One Pro is not Aperture nor Lightroom and can’t be expected to work just like them. But, in some cases, a design pattern has become so commonly used among other photo applications that Phase One’s design philosophy does stand out.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It does mean, at least to me, that some of those design decisions lead to frustration or confusion. Maybe they rub you the wrong way, too; or maybe they are so objectionable that you (or I) will be so bothered that you (or I) can’t get comfortable using Capture One Pro.

Let me tell you about a few such things that annoy me.

My history with a near-fully RAW workflow goes back to the initial release of Apple’s Aperture; that past has set my expectations for what software of that genre “should be.” I was very happy with Aperture until its RAW adjustment capabilities began to fall behind Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s and Apple left long gaps between new camera releases and Aperture support for those RAW formats.

Lightroom never felt right to me, somehow, but the discontinuation of Aperture left me stuck with it. Having dabbled with Capture One Pro over the years, I have found a lot to like. Could I happily switch to Capture One Pro after life with Aperture and a fling with Lightroom?

This post is not a review of what new features are in Capture One Pro 8 (C1); it’s a post about what’s not in it.

Ever since Apple announced that there would be no more development done for Aperture, I’ve been looking for a good alternative. One of the highly respected possibilities is C1, but it hasn’t been my choice because I find its digital asset management (DAM) tools to be too weak. I sure was hoping that the upgrade from version 7 to version 8 would solve that problem.