Alternative to Capture One??

After hearing many good things about Capture One, I decided to download a trial

copy...only to find out that Capture One will not operate on Windows Vista! I

have Vista Home Premium. Can anybody suggest a good alternative to Capture One

that will work on Vista?

 

I'm considering purchasing Adobe CS3 Design Premium since I can take advantage

of a significant student discount at my university book store ($600), and then

maybe spending another extra $300 for Lightroom. I have Nikon's Capture NX 1.1

that came with my D80, but as others have said, it's deathly slow and useless

for large volumes of pics. I tried BreezeBrowser Pro today but I don't like the

interface. ACDSee wouldn't even open NEF files for some reason, so I

immediately uninstalled that.

 

For some background...I am starting up as a wedding photographer...just shooting

friends and family events for practice and to build a portfolio. A friend and I

are doing this together...I'm the photographer and she's the Photoshop

specialist. So maybe I can just purchase Lightroom and not Photoshop since

she'll be doing the heavy editing anyway? I'm not new to photography, but I'm

definitely new to this whole digital workflow thing...

Why would you need C1 if you will be buying LR? Or vise-versa? They are not exactly the same, but you generally use them for the same purpose -- processing large groups of RAW images.

Lightroom. I actually like it more than Capture One. The student price for Lightroom is $99.00

Capture NX will batch process over 1000 NEF files from the D200 in less than 2 hours on our computer (dual core athalon 2.2 GHZ with 2GB ram) - and the results are better than any other alternatives out there.

I've used Lightroom for processing my last two weddings and I found the interface to be much more intuitive than Capture One. I also found that Lightroom has replaced Photoshop for me for all but the more complex image alterations. Basically, if it involves masks or layers I use Photoshop; everything else can be done very well in Lightroom. In fact, I barely touched Photoshop at all since many of the image correction features work much better for batch processing in Lightroom (in my opinion). I also like the fact that all image alterations are non-destructive.

 

I work on Mac's so I can't address the Vista compatibility issue.

If you've got the latest version of Capture One, it does work on Vista - you just have to run it as 'Administrator' (and if you've got UAC enabled click on the 'Allow' button when you launch it). If you right click on the shortcut on the start menu and click properties, then on the Compatibility tab click Run as Administrator all will be fine.

The reason you have to do this is so it can save the settings between sessions.

I've ran it under Vista for a couple of months now without any issues.

HTH,

Chris