Moving from Light Room to Capture One/Media Pro or alternative

Question

I've used Lightroom (LR) for the past year and I love that tool. However, I've recently looked into alternatives and the output of Capture One (CO) looks better than LR, at least for me.

I wanted to switched but realized that, CO was meant to be a Raw Converter (for their cameras) and ignoring the retouching tools, the tagging system is ancient. There's no easy way to tag multiple images and I wanted to easily import/export my hierarchical tags from LR. I know that you can import an LR catalog and run CO on top of it, but that's clunky having two programs to touch one image set and having to load one to sort and another to edit doesn't make much sense, workflow wise.

Today I've learned of Media Pro. Does Media Pro have the same offerings for organizing as LR but offer the same retouching engine as CO? I've watched a few videos from Capture One but none have touched on their tagging system in depth and what I can do with it. I can see it can do sets, and related but it doesn't answer my original question. Also does it make sense to jump to a different program or do people usually stay with what they prefer? Are there better alternatives I've not seen but is recommended?

Answer 1

I dunno. I'm not sure if it's changed in v 8 but you're right, C1P's implementation of keywording was lame.

Media Pro does have hierarchical keywords, but it's an organizer, and seems to be languishing a bit at Phase One. There's a demo though, so why not try it yourself? It's horrid on the Mac, but maybe better on a PC.

I also liked Capture One's out of the box RAW conversion, but with some work in Lr I could replicate it for the most part. I had Express, which was nice because I got the RAW conversion without having to go full-bore into committing to its organizer. But Phase One dumped it, and I didn't upgrade to C1P 8. Instead, I went with DxO Optics Pro. Dunno exactly what you wanna see in RAW conversion, but DxO works FAR better with Lr and produces results many like just as well.

It's a lot of money, but since you can reference files with C1P, you could always just use it as a standalone for RAW conversion, kinda like you would the software that came with the camera. Export from C1P and then just import the finished file back into Lr.