Capture One

Capture One is RAW photo editing and tethered capture software for Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad, built in Copenhagen for professional photographers.

Capture One takes a photographer from the moment a frame lands to a delivered, color-managed file, and it comes from Capture One A/S in Copenhagen. It opens RAW files from nearly 600 camera models, develops them with the company's own camera profiles, and sends frames from a connected camera onto the screen while a shoot is still running. The software began in 1994 as a RAW converter for Phase One cameras and now runs on Mac and Windows and on iPhone and iPad. Editing works through layers and masks, with assisted masking that picks out a subject, a background, people or clothing in one click and lets masks be added, subtracted and intersected. The Color Editor, Levels and Curves shape tone and hue, Enhanced Denoise pulls detail back out of high ISO frames, and Heal and Clone, Retouch Faces and Sensor Dust Removal handle the rest. Tethering brings Live View, Snap to Eye focus checking, ReTether and Next Capture Adjustments, which applies an edit to every frame as it lands. Files live in Sessions or Catalogs, with Smart Albums, filters, star ratings and Cull mode for selects, and Styles for a look that repeats across a shoot. Capture One suits studio and commercial photographers who shoot tethered, fashion and product teams working to a client brief, and wedding and event photographers facing a large take. Digital technicians get Multi User Sessions and the Live for Studio app, which brings clients into the session from their own devices without an account. Companies buy it as Studio for Teams or Studio for Enterprise, where a web admin portal handles user access, devices and deployments. It is sold per user, either as a subscription or as a one time perpetual license. The software sits at the front of a photography workflow, between the camera and the retouching or delivery step. On set it drives the capture, names nested capture folders from tokens, and carries the first pass of ratings and color tags. Afterwards it handles color work, local adjustments and export presets for a client or an e-commerce catalog. Actions connects it to outside services such as Pixelz, Photoroom and Gemini for background replacement and retouching, and the mobile app carries the same Sessions onto an iPad on location.