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Capture One in my opinion has much higher output quality, better defaults, and specifically for supports Phase One backs better than anything else. I have not done a scientific study or anything comparing the outputs (maybe I should!), but it’s just really good at producing gorgeous photos.

Media management though is IMO much worse than Lightroom? No keyword search, the catalog gets extremely slow over 10k images, and no filters for different cameras or lenses, as far as I know. I use peakto instead to manage and search my 40k RAWs then open them for editing only in C1.

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If Capture One or any other buy-once commercial offering worked at all under Wine (or, in a dream land, had a Linux build), I would happily pay for it. But unfortunately, I've had no luck getting either Capture One or DxO PhotoLab running on Linux.

I struggle with Darktable's workflow, but it works without issue on Fedora with Wayland (including with my monitor's color calibration), so I'm sticking with it for now.

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Not getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.
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Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €. Lightroom is the more expensive one if you plan on using the software more than 2 years and 2 months.
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> Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €.

Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)

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> AIUI, they don't backport things like that.

Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.

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391 euro for a piece of software seems kinda crazy.
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That's less than €1/hour for how much time I've spent using Capture One.

Good, ergonomic, efficient tools are worth their weight in gold. C1 is one of them. Importing/triage, editing, color profiles, tethered shooting - it's an incredibly powerful suite and works well.

For particularly problematic noisy/dark shots I'll do manual editing in DXO, but I do everything else in C1.

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Private equity owed proprietary Mac and Windows exclusive. No thanks.
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Want the best software for editing photos? No thanks, I'd rather use inferior open source solutions. Go Gimp
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Yeah who needs the best software for hobbyist editing? $20/mo to Adobe forever until they jack it up even more, no thanks.
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Upvoting you, because I actually use Gimp. While it has its headaches, for photo editing it's still the best after Photoshop.

(Yes, still better than Krita).

But this is all a digression, as Lightroom/Darktable are not Photoshop/Gimp replacements. Not even the same category.

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Pretty sure they said "go gimp" ironically
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> still better than Krita

??? Krita is painting/raster image creation software, why would you use it for photo editing?

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You shouldn't. But I point it out because people keep posting "Ditch Gimp. Use Krita instead."

Krita's better for painting. Gimp's better for photo editing.

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Darktable is top class.
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