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.

Lightroom cost per year