Those who know me know that I’ve been trying to eliminate Adobe products (specifically, Lightroom and Photoshop) from my photo processing workflow. And so it is that I come to be in possession of licenses for both DxO‘s Optics Pro and PhaseOne‘s CaptureOne RAW processing software.
CaptureOne software is one of the best RAW processors on the market today – and (remarkably), to an even greater degree than Lightroom, it eliminates the need for Photoshop in most situations. Its library (digital asset) management, though not stellar, is adequate to the degree that’s it’s a fairly solid replacement for Lightroom. I’ve come to a point where I’m using it fairly exclusively in my workflow.
In my (unscientific) testing, however, DxO’s Optics Pro is superior for lens aberration correction and is far superior for noise reduction (in fact, in my opinion, Optics Pro is the best noise reduction software on the market today).
So how to integrate Optics Pro into the CaptureOne workflow? Prior to CaptureOne v8.1, it wasn’t any fun, and it’s still not exactly straight-forward – but it’s very doable. Here’s how!
- Perform your standard workflow to get your images into CaptureOne.
. - In CaptureOne, Select the image you want to process in OpticsPro and then right-click it. On the context menu, select Edit With…
. - On the EDITING OPTIONS dialogue, set the format to TIFF; with the exception of the Open With option, the remainder of the settings are irrelevant because you’re not actually going to edit this exported image anyway.
. - In the Open With dialogue, browse to your Optics Pro executable; on Windows, it’s probably at C:\Program Files\DxO Labs\DxO OpticsPro 10\DXOOpticsPro.exe. Once you have the executable selected, click Open. You should be returned to the EDITING OPTIONS dialogue.
. - Click the Edit button. Optics Pro should open with the new TIFF selected.
. - In Optics Pro, select the RAW file. You are going to apply your edits to the RAW image and then overwrite the TIFF that CaptureOne just generated.
. - Apply desired edits in Optics Pro. I would recommend that you restrict your edits to exposure (with the knowledge that it impacts noise reduction), noise reduction, and lens/sensor corrections (chromatic aberration, dust, distortion, and if you have Viewpoint, perspective and volume deformation). CaptureOne, especially for skin tones, does detail, saturation, and color balance adjustments better than Optics Pro.
. - Use any of the nearly half-dozen methods available to you to direct Optics Pro to Export to disk.
. - Set the output to TIFF and then set Process as to TIFF.
. - Set Quality as you desire; you would be well-advised to select 16-bit.
. - Set Destination to Original image folder and then clear any value in the Suffix field.
. - Set your Resolution and ICC profile as you see fit. FWIW, 240 ppi is generally considered to be the minimum resolution for quality printing. The ICC profile should probably be set to Original or AdobeRGB; you probably want to preserve as many colors as possible at this stage.
. - Click Export. When prompted, overwrite the existing TIFF!
. - Switch back to CaptureOne.
. - Click File and then Regenerate Previews. Voila! You now have an Optics Pro corrected TIFF in your CaptureOne library!
. - Edit the “new” TIFF in CaptureOne as you see fit!
