Hi Subscriber First Name,

First issue of 2022, following a longer hiatus than I’d anticipated. But it’s still January, so… Happy New Year :)

Lots of snow and cold out here. I got my booster shot this week. The world is still on fire (meh), but it has its moments. Same old, essentially.

There was news this week in the land of Capture One: the company decided to drop the less expensive, branded versions of its software, and move everyone over to Pro. The announcement comes ahead of their upcoming iPad app and The Capture One Live service. It’s a simpler product strategy that certainly makes sense, apart from the now even greater price discrepancy when compared to their main competitor. Time will tell on that front.

Just before the holidays, following the release of Capture One 22, I decided to switch to the Fujifilm subscription. This means I’m now grandfathered into Pro at a lower price point (unless they eventually change their minds, or pull a fast one by tweaking what this includes, as companies often do). If you follow the blog, you may have noticed I didn’t write at all about C1 22: frankly, it felt like I’d just sent them cash. The two tentpole features in this release—panorama stitching and HDR—aren’t at all up my alley; new bugs were introduced (I can’t get rid of a plugin error on launch); and old ones remain (the keyboard shortcut to reset the output counter hasn’t worked since they messed with the export tool). I’ve rarely seen anything as artificially hyped as C1 22, and I even came very close to skipping this version entirely—it certainly motivated dropping my Pro license. I lucked out on this one. 

I’ve said this before, but I think we’re at a point where major releases no longer fit the development model. Capture One 21 was deeply lacklustre, and it only grew into a worthwhile update in the months that followed. But this is the reality now: we expect a regular drip of improvements, just like we expect new shows from Netflix. Companies can no longer afford to wait 2-3 years between cycles—they may as well vanish entirely. Capture One appears to be in transition, trying to justify a yearly upgrade when, in fact, they’ve moved to an Agile model, with their internal goals having changed accordingly. I suspect they’ve held on to promoting a “major” update as a way of differentiating themselves from Adobe, but they’re quickly reaching the end of the line. 

The future, as they say, will be interesting.
On to the links.