another dumb question...

[back alley]

...hope i don't get a lecture on this one...

capture one...is it a stand alone like lightroom or a plug in?
does it edit images or is it simply a raw converter?

 

[geertvn]

Stand alone. It's a raw converter. A very good one at that. I prefer it to lightroom, it's much more responsive. Lightroom supports more cameras (especially older compacts that do raw) though, has arguably better noise reduction if you depend on that. Lightroom 4 isn't bad, but is unworkably slow on my windows computers - almost a minute to render a Fuji X raw file! (Other files are a lost faster, though far from fluid.)

I'm eagerly awaiting support for Fuji in Capture One.

 

[back alley]

thanks!

the support for fuji is what caught my eye as well.

though i'm happy with the jpegs so far...

 

[icebear]

...Lightroom 4 isn't bad, but is unworkably slow on my windows computers - almost a minute to render a Fuji X raw file! (Other files are a lost faster, though far from fluid.)....

If you have a windows machine running on Windows 7, it's fairly easy to beef up the RAM substantially. I had 2x4 GB initially and added 2x8, so 24GB's total and I can flip through my Library in LR4.2 without any delays.
My old machine was running on XP, so LR on that old box 😉.

 

[Photo_Smith]

The critical thing is you need a 64bit OS and CPU both of those and an upgrade of Ram will speed things.
Capture One has a nice set of profiles for different supported cameras, I always found it gave nice colours but tend to use Aperture or Photoshop for Raw files now.