The crop tool in Capture One Pro works very well, but does not make it easy to see what crop ratio has been applied. I usually crop for standard frame sizes; 11x17, 10x8 (4x5), and 5x7 mostly. When I go back to look at an image later, I can’t always tell which frame size I cropped it for.

When you choose the crop tool while viewing an image that has been cropped, the crop dimensions, in pixels, is shown. But not the aspect ratio.

One very popular sharpening approach for digital images is the three pass sharpening technique described by Bruce Frazer and Jeff Schewe in their book Real Word Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom. Those phases are Capture Sharpening, Creative Sharpening, and Output Sharpening.

Capture Sharpening attempts to correct for the inevitable blurring that occurs in any digital capture. If there is a desire to bring attention to a particular area of the image, Creative Sharpening might be used to achieve it. Every output medium has its own particular requirements for sharpening, be that to a computer screen, or to paper. Output Sharpening optimizes the image for the media requirements and expected viewing distance.

Phase One Capture One allows for that same approach, in its own way. That way differs a bit from Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), but will achieve much the same results. If I discuss Lightroom’s sharpening, it is for all practical purposed the same as ACR’s.

Yes, after plenty of false starts, I think I’m moving to Phase One’s Capture One from Adobe’s Lightroom for good. With version 10.1, Capture One has made enough progress that its good points now outweigh its bad. And it is now overall better for me than Lightroom.

This is not to suggest that Lightroom is bad; quite to the contrary, a huge number of photographers use Lightroom happily and reliably to handle their image organization, editing, adjustment, and output needs. Adobe has a solid, and deserved, reputation for advancing the science of digital image processing.

Some programs are shallow in powerful features, but wide in their different uses. Others are have power features that offer deep functionality, but are mostly concentrated on those speciality features. Capture One Pro, by Phase One, is an application that offers class-leading raw conversion and color adjustment algorithms, but trails the pack in DAM (Digital Asset Management) and printing tools.

That’s sad, and somewhat surprising, because Phase One also owns a long-established digital media library tool, Media Pro (it was Microsoft Expression Media and iView Media Pro before that). The power of the RAW adjustment abilities leads to pain when attempting to manage, or print, the results.