By coincidence, also received mail from Phase One, advertising their new (I think) release of Capture One Pro 7, which does many of the same things that DxO Optics Pro does, though in this case the Pro is really in contrast to a non- Pro version. Again I get a free trial, this time 60 days, so I downloaded it and tried it out.
Where's the documentation? There's a user guide for release 6, but all I can find for 7 is a Getting Started guide. A bit more searching found an online guide with precious few images, whose rendering upsets firefox, but which with a bit of effort explains what you have to do.
The first thing is to create a Catalog! I can't just process files. It's happy enough with SMB file systems, but it doesn't want to do anything until there's a catalog.
About here I decided to give up, but after a while I reconsidered and went back and created a catalog, and then tried to access my files. No, sir, you can't do that. First they need to be imported . We can't have your photos hanging around on any old file system now, can we? Instead, it copied all the files to its own hierarchy:
Why do people do this? Potentially you can find a way around it, though I couldn't in the time I was playing with it. In this case there are only 5 files, but on Saturdays I have up to 300, which makes for gigabytes of duplication, not to mention the time that the unnecessary copying takes.
Still, the important thing is the quality of the conversion. Tried the same images as earlier in the day. Capture One Pro also has tools to lighten shadows, so tried that. It's fast enough that you can move sliders to lighten the shadows and also darken the highlights. The results in the preview window didn't look bad at all:
So I exported the images, which it happily did to the SMB file system, but I couldn't find a way to tell it to do it in JPEG. Instead it created TIFF files. So I used ImageMagick to convert them; convert complained bitterly:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/8) /Photos/00-Oly 125 -> convert P4127387.tif P4127387.jpeg
00-Oly: Unknown field with tag 306 (0x132) encountered. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
00-Oly: Wrong data type 3 for "PixelXDimension"; tag ignored. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
00-Oly: Wrong data type 3 for "PixelYDimension"; tag ignored. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
00-Oly: Incompatible type for "FileSource"; tag ignored. `TIFFFetchNormalTag' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
00-Oly: Incompatible type for "SceneType"; tag ignored. `TIFFFetchNormalTag' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
And the results? Nothing like the preview. Here the results from Capture One, then the same image processed by DxO:
But why the difference in saturation? I don't know. I wondered whether it could have been the conversion to JPEG, but xv didn't want to know about the TIFF files: it complained transiently about various format errors and refused to display it.
Still, the image did look good, probably better than the one created by DxO. These two images show the top left corner of each at natural resolution, first Capture One, then DxO. The blue shadows in the DxO image have almost completely disappeared.
One thing's clear from the image comparison above, though: the shape of the image is different. DxO has compensated for lens distortion, but though Capture One Pro offers distortion correction for some lenses, none are Olympus SLR lenses, and the cheaper non- Pro version doesn't offer it at all. And neither of them have lens-specific chromatic aberration correction. I'll look at what I can do about that tomorrow, but this looks like yet another reason to reject it.
Apart from that, though, and this stupid import/export business, it doesn't look too bad. But some things show how different the approach is. You can create a web page with contact prints , something that I've found useful and done myself. But my version shows reasonable sizes, and you can select them to get them in full size, and you can enter names for them:
The original sizes of these displays are 998×547 and 2535×747 (I trimmed mine, which was really full screen on the 2560×1440 monitor). My contact images are 300×400 pixels; the ones in Capture One's web page are roughly 108×144, and they can't be enlarged. So a nice idea proves to be less useful than what I have already.