There’s also the question of more widespread support. While Lightroom is certainly a powerful application with a decently-steep learning curve, Capture One arguably offers the less-accessible experience. Capture One offers an incredible amount of power, but that power is often buried beneath fairly involved dialogue boxes and tools with names only a pro could love. Lightroom also offers a somewhat softer landing for newcomers. Our Lightroom library is scraping 130,000 images and search performance really has to be seen to be believed. Want to find images shot at 300mm, at f/7.1, 1/640th of a second, tagged with “polar bear” and assigned a star rating of four or higher? Lightroom makes unbelievably efficient work of quickly – instantly, often – returning the images you’re looking for.

Want to sort 100,000 images by the focal length they were shot at? Done. If Lightroom only included its Catalog module it would still pretty much be worth the price of admission. But Capture One’s primary strength is as a powerhouse editor Lightroom is a bit more of an all-rounder. Both Capture One and Lightroom are catalogue applications, allowing you to import big batches of images, then flick through their thumbnails, rating, deleting, tagging and generally sorting as you go. Let’s start at the start: importing images. What can you do in Lightroom that you can't do with Capture One?

Read our in-depth Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC review.

It doesn’t hang about when it comes to editing, though, and most amateur photographers and perhaps all editorial professionals, as well as many commercial photographers, might find it does all they need. If you’re a photographer with a decade’s worth of digital files totaling 100,000 or more and you’re tired of endlessly searching through thumbnails in either Windows’ Explorer view or the Mac Finder, Lightroom will revolutionize things. On the other hand, Lightroom’s cataloguing and search tools have to be seen to be believed. It’s important to say that there’s not much in it, but if you’re looking for a full-on per-pixel editor and you don’t want to roundtrip images through Photoshop – like, ever – Capture One might be the one for you.

Capture One offers more editing tools, and they’re generally more sophisticated. Perhaps because of this, its editing tools are a little less full-throated than Capture One’s. Lightroom is a standalone application, but is affordably available as a Creative Cloud subscription that includes Photoshop. The applications aren’t interchangeable, though.

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