Do any of you have experience with scanned film and Capture One Pro 9? How good is sharpening in Capture One Pro?
I am grateful for any advice on this matter!
I am using Capture One for both digital and scanned film and have made a couple of blog posts on
black-and-white workflow and
sharpening respectively.
There are a couple of gotchas. Firstly, C1 will only allow editing of TIFF files if they are in RGB format (not greyscale, as is normally output from a scanner). To work-around this I use a Photoshop (CS6) script to convert the scanner files before importing to C1. Secondly, the cloning/healing tools in C1 are not particularly powerful. If you get a lot of dust (especially small fibres) in the scans, you will need something else to edit them. Again, I use Photoshop for this.
Recently I switched to using a DSLR and macro lens for scanning - mainly because I get vastly less dust this way than with the Epson flatbed. C1 has excellent colour control and it is fairly easy to take the raw negative scans, invert them and then adjust the colour mapping to get a good result. While it may take a while to figure out the correct colours, once you have them for a given film type/processing and colour balance it is easy to save them as a profile for future images.
I also wrote a
review of the slightly older CO version 8 - the current version is very similar and most of the pros and cons still apply. Coming from Lightroom, I found the UI a bit of a culture-shock and it took a while to adjust to the different ways of doing things, and I suspect the same would be true when coming from Aperture. The documentation is a very thin, and does not help much when dealing with fundamental questions such as the difference between catalogues and sessions, for example (short answer, if you are coming from LR or Aperture you want a catalog...).
The CO UI is very customisable, so it may take a while to figure out a setup that works well. One neat feature is the workspace concept, which allows me to switch between UI configurations for a laptop on the road (small screen) and a laptop connected to an second external display.
I have stuck with CO mainly because I like the results it gives, and also because I really do not like the Adobe subscription model. That said, there is a lot more support for Adobe - and LR also runs more smoothly than CO9 on my laptop, particularly if you use a lot of local adjustments.
I think both CO and LR have 30 day free trials, which should be long enough to figure out which you prefer...
