Continuing the blog serialisation of my popular X-Pro Series lust/hate/love story:
Part 134: Fujifilm and Capture One Express
Fujifilm and Capture One Express.
The short version of this week’s article could simply read:
Fujifilm and Capture One Express = thank you, thank you very much.
Back in the day (the first and second time I owned the X-Pro1) I was a fully paid up Capture One (C1) user.
But then, and I’m not trying to be rude – just stating facts, I got the X-Pro2 and it took them ages to support it, then ages to implement the native lens corrections, and well I moved on.
This week (week ending 30th September 2018, for those of you reading this as a blog post in about 20 weeks time) has been a massive week for camera announcements… Fujifilm have announced the smaller format medium format GFX50R, there’s many new cameras from many manufacturers, maybe you were surprised by the FF Panasonic, or maybe the now open source (sic) Leica L mount, the fixed lens Zeiss or even the Russian M240 (I had to pinch myself at that one!)
But my personal shock announcement was that Fujifilm had teamed up with C1 to bring us “Capture One Express”
C1 has always had its fans, personally I think the quality of C1 isn’t and has never been in doubt, the sticking points within the community have always been paying for it and learning it. 😀
And let’s be honest… many people’s de facto choice for serious editing, Adobe’s LR has always received some flak from Fujifilm X-Trans users for the apparent lack of absolute quality of the demosaicing process. Let’s not open that can of worms (see what I did there? Oh never mind) but one thing that’s done the back-and-forth since day one of X-Trans has been this split of opinion between who exactly is too blame for LR’s apparent failings, Adobe or Fujifilm?
I feel this has now become a mute point. Between them Fujifilm and Phase One are now giving us a stripped down version of C1. This is a massive gift to the X-Trans userbase. Sure we had RFC Powered by SilkyPix (probably still do), but the free version of that was fully featured in some areas (perspective correction) and embarrassingly lacking in others (highlight and shadow recovery)
I’m not going to write a review of C1 Express (C1E) and a gap analysis of what features (layers, local adjustments and keystone corrections from memory) you sacrifice to get it for free. I’m sure other far more knowledgeable folks can do that. I’m not going to write a tutorial either (because I’m too busy asking the superb Fujilove FB community how it works 🙂 )
Nope. I downloaded my copy of C1E, and went to play with some X-Pro2 images to see what I could see!
I wanted to see how recoverable highlights were…
I don’t think that’s too bad at all (I mean the blown out bits still look bad, but the level of recovery is good)
A RAF as opened in C1E
The same RAF after editing
I’ll now just show you some images that I’ve edited in C1E, sure some of you won’t be overly enamoured with my efforts, but I only spent a brief amount of time on each image and it’s been over two years since I used C1
One of my very first X-Pro2 shots
I’m certainly not claiming that C1E is the answer to my incessant I want to be happier with my XP2 images rhetoric, but nevertheless at this stage I’m liking what I’m seeing from it
Yes, yew!
A bit of vertical/horizontal perspective correction wouldn’t go amiss here…. not sure that C1E has it though
I know you’ve seen this one before 🙂
I think I like C1E blue sky a lot
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Remember this from last week? And it still doesn’t look like Kodachrome 😀 😀 😀
A rare (for you, not for me) shot of my daughter
I have to say that I’m impressed and delighted that Fujifilm has partnered with Phase One, sure there’s far more fully featured image editing applications out there (C1 Pro for instance), but for free of charge, C1E is a credit to Fujifilm.
And if you already have an application that’s more fully featured (for example I have On1 Photo that uses layers), then C1E is able to export to that application and let you work on a copy of your image (like how light room does)
If you already had a fully featured app that you’re happy with, then this probably won’t really excite you… But if you’re just starting out with RAW editing or typically don’t need a lot of features in your work flow application then I think it’s fair to say that Fujifilm and Phase One just gave you a great present.
You can download Capture One Fujifilm Express here
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See more of my work on Instagram and Flickr
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One way you could help me is if you want to buy from Amazon, if you do so using the links below, then I will receive a small percentage of your expenditure, and you will pay NO MORE than you would have paid anyway.
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Fujifilm X-Pro2
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Another way you could help, is by making a donation. The donate button can be found on the link below
Thank You Very Much!
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Adam Bonn Fotografia 
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