Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Capture One Q&A => Topic started by: Rhossydd on September 25, 2021, 05:51:01 am

Title: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on September 25, 2021, 05:51:01 am
I read Phase are offering a free upgrade to 22 if you buy or upgrade 21 now.

Yet another dubious gamble as to whether by buying now you'll pay more than the deals they might offer like last year at release or Black Friday.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: tcphoto1 on September 25, 2021, 11:22:09 am
I will pass, I don't know who is more greedy between Capture One or Adobe. I'll stay with my v12 and wait till my larger clients are comfortable getting back to shooting.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on September 26, 2021, 04:03:38 am
I don't know who is more greedy between Capture One or Adobe.
I think Adobe have won that prize. Although until the 22 upgrade pricing is set it may be too soon to say.

CO has a lot going for it, but compared to LR6 it still has some significant omissions for me.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: UnfamiliarLight on September 27, 2021, 04:11:12 pm
I read Phase are offering a free upgrade to 22 if you buy or upgrade 21 now.

Yet another dubious gamble as to whether by buying now you'll pay more than the deals they might offer like last year at release or Black Friday.

Last time (from 20 to 21) owners of 20 had a better upgrade price once 21 was out than that deal. The buy 21 now get 22 free is meant for new customers. Back a few versions ago they would give free upgrades for any one that bought with in n weeks of release. The trouble was no one knew exactly when the release was coming out. That lead to a lot of annoyed customers and likely meant people would just not buy the current version in the late summer or early fall because it was too much of a gamble.

Now they declare buy now and you get the new version. It's clear. No one has to guess when they can buy. This is just not an upgrade plan for existing users so those of us that are should just ignore it until they have an upgrade price ready for us.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on September 27, 2021, 04:30:23 pm
This is just not an upgrade plan for existing users
That's not the way it's worded. It mentions how upgrades are regarded in the small print.

But as you say "owners of 20 had a better upgrade price once 21 was out than that deal" and that changed later too.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Ferp on September 27, 2021, 07:40:43 pm
There is nothing unusual in the current offer.  Towards the end of each year a new version of C1 is released.  As that date approaches a "free upgrade to the next version if you buy now" offer is announced.  I guess it's needed to stop sales drying up, and may even get a few buyers across the line. 

This offer tells us nothing about what the upgrade price for existing users will be.  It tells us nothing about whether C1's reprehensible behavior last year will be repeated, when different discounts were offered at different times, and loyal customers who opted to buy a pre-release upgrade sight unseen didn't get the best deal.  See here for the best comment that I saw:   https://www.bythom.com/newsviews/capture-one-pricing.html

You can't treat loyal customers like that and expect them to stay loyal.

As a result, I won't be jumping in immediately, if at all.  Not this little black duck.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  The fact that these last few upgrades have been pretty minimal and the price for them keeps going up doesn't help either. 

Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on September 28, 2021, 03:56:02 am
The fact that these last few upgrades have been pretty minimal and the price for them keeps going up doesn't help either.
This time they've outlined what they're adding though. Panoramas and HDR will be welcome additions, but possibly far too late.
I'd guess that anyone who uses C1 and has an interest in those features will by now have bought dedicated software for that purpose. Will C1 manage to deliver this functionality at a high enough level ? at their first attempt ? to beat standalones ? I haven't a lot of confidence in that.

If this is all they're adding there will still be holes in the feature set that won't convince new users to buy in.

As Thom hints at, they've got to start getting a more customer friendly update policy (and improve customer service) if they want to continue to be a serious player in the market.


Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: ronaldnztan on October 12, 2021, 05:18:26 pm
I agree with many long-time veteran users of C1PRO. I mentioned I've been loyal C1PRO user since their 3.7.8 days, when the "PRO" version was expensively priced almost the same price as the copy of Photoshop version on DVD back then. Anyways....

Depending on what exactly will be "revolutionary" features are added to the forthcoming version 22, I think I am going to remain with version 12.

Capture One Pro should definitely bring back the answer to Tech Support within a business days. This was guaranteed to us "PRO" license users going back years ago.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: kers on October 16, 2021, 11:52:57 am
I see B&H has a deal : buy the full license C1 v21 for only 180 $ and get the upgrade to v22 for free... ( Till 18th of october!)
That is not too expensive; 18 months of LR and perpetual...

As a LR user, I have seen some very different and better results in skin colour ; but the completely different workflow turned me off.
If i would work with it i would use the collections approach.

But i would like to know the system requirements of v22 for i want to keep working with Macos Mojave 10.14
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on October 16, 2021, 01:12:26 pm
I see B&H has a deal : buy the full license C1 v21 for only 180 $ and get the upgrade to v22 for free... ( Till 18th of october!)
That's a good deal, the upgrade in the UK from 20 > 21 is now £199. I'd hope that would include a free upgrade to 22 right now, but it's not guaranteed :-(
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Malcolm Payne on October 26, 2021, 09:57:38 am
Looks like Capture One are up to their old tricks again. I've just had an email offering 20% off the pre-upgrade to the December launch of v22, sight unseen, valid to 9th November. The claimed improvements are Panorama Stitching, high dynamic range images with HDR Merging and quick batch adjustments with Auto Rotate.

I'm signed up to their Beta programme so it might be interesting to see what the new version actually brings when the first beta is released, but given that the Black Friday discount last year was greater than the initial 20% pre-release discount, it might be prudent to wait this time. Though I thought David Grover had said in one of his recent webinars that they had learned from last year's pricing debacle and the discontent it had caused.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on October 26, 2021, 10:32:52 am
an email offering 20% off the pre-upgrade to the December launch of v22, sight unseen,
To be fair this year it's not completely 'unseen' we have an idea of what's new.
Quote
I'm signed up to their Beta programme so it might be interesting to see what the new version actually brings when the first beta is released,
First Beta not released yet ? but full release in December ? 6 weeks away ? Maybe not everyone that thinks they're a beta tester really is ;-) or they've left it VERY late.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Malcolm Payne on October 26, 2021, 12:41:10 pm
Quote
To be fair this year it's not completely 'unseen' we have an idea of what's new.

Fair comment. Though it's not the same as actually getting your hands on a working product, beta or otherwise, before shelling out for what has now become a rather pricey upgrade and with only a small window of opportunity for the discount.

Quote
Maybe not everyone that thinks they're a beta tester really is ;-) or they've left it VERY late

The latter, most likely. I was thinking much the same, but they may have been more tied up than usual at this time of year with the late 14.4.1 update that reinstated the previous export facility. I certainly had beta access to that release, and my account still shows me as signed up to the programme but without any later beta version available than that one. And I have always fully respected the terms of that agreement and haven't done (or said!) anything that might have upset them, to have it withdrawn.  :)
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on October 26, 2021, 01:07:50 pm
only a small window of opportunity for the discount.
On past experience there'll be better offers, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or a couple of weeks after release.

At current upgrade prices, even with a discount, I want to see something significantly useful before getting the credit card out.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Ferp on October 26, 2021, 06:11:43 pm
Are Capture One up to their old tricks again?  Yes and no, it would seem.  FujiRumors reports that you can in fact get 30% off by combining the pre-upgrade 20% offer with the FujiRumors 10% coupon.  That would again suggest that loyal customers once again are not being offered the best deal up front.  But FujiRumors reports that Capture One also said to him that this will be the largest discount offered:

"Capture One wrote me: 'This will be the best opportunity to upgrade to Capture One 22, we will not have a bigger discount' ".

Which does suggest that they recognize the ill-will that last year's antics caused (see my previous post above).  It is hard to see a larger upgrade discount that 30% being offered.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: gazwas on November 02, 2021, 05:47:31 am
Never again will I upgrade to C1 before release following last years shameful, money grabbing pre-release discount to loyal cash cow customers.

With the lacklustre year of underwhelming updates in version 21 and shocking removal of core features (that were then put back) I will wait to see how these revolutionary features function before upgrading this year.

Capture One need to man up and release the software to try the so called revolutionary new features (even Adobe does that) and offer the discount in the first week or so of release rather than this pathetic yearly nonsense.

Adobe and LR has seriously upped its game and considering its free with PS on the subscription plan I'd consider it a serious alternative to C1. While it won't replace C1 for me, if I have a project that needs HDR or panorama stitching I'll just use LR.

 For the first year since 2008 and the introduction of Capture One Pro, I'm not upgrading and sticking on version 21 for now.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on November 10, 2021, 01:53:24 am
"Capture One wrote me: 'This will be the best opportunity to upgrade to Capture One 22, we will not have a bigger discount' ".
This is rather daft thing to write. What trust in Phase people had will evaporate if they do offer a better discount at some time in the future and last year's upgrade experience tested a lot of loyalty.
At £160 in the UK for an upgrade, it's starting to price itself out of the market* when the upgrade cost is 30% more than Adobe's photographers plan that has not only Lightroom, but also Photoshop included too. lacklustre 'catch up' upgrades shouldn't cost more than the competitor's full product package.


*Sure there will always be a small loyal market of long time, heavily invested users, but whether they can support CO going forward seems dubious if more cost conscious users drift away.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Ray Harrison on November 10, 2021, 04:00:23 pm
Yes, Adobe will always be able to offer their product more cheaply than Capture One (the company) based on their scale and diversity of revenue sources. If people's value equation is just cost, then for sure, there are cheaper options out there. And because Capture One offers both kinds of licenses (the single version "perpetual" or subscription) they're caught in the cycle of the expectation of delivering "significant features" (whatever those are) for people who buy the "perpetual" version. You wouldn't know it from this subforum on LuLa, but there are actually people like me who like and enjoy the software and it's not just "long time, heavily invested users".  :) 

I'm thankful that Lightroom isn't the only game in town. Don't get me wrong, it's nice high quality software and it's straight forward to use but I'd choose Capture One every day. I use Photoshop fairly frequently and occasionally crack open LR to see what they've done, but in the grand scheme of annual photography costs, the yearly C1 subscription is pretty minimal from my perspective. And yes, I hear you, last year's fiasco was silly and avoidable. It's quite obvious they haven't recovered from it.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Roscolo on November 11, 2021, 09:57:39 pm
Yes, Adobe will always be able to offer their product more cheaply than Capture One (the company) based on their scale and diversity of revenue sources. If people's value equation is just cost, then for sure, there are cheaper options out there. And because Capture One offers both kinds of licenses (the single version "perpetual" or subscription) they're caught in the cycle of the expectation of delivering "significant features" (whatever those are) for people who buy the "perpetual" version. You wouldn't know it from this subforum on LuLa, but there are actually people like me who like and enjoy the software and it's not just "long time, heavily invested users".  :) 

I'm thankful that Lightroom isn't the only game in town. Don't get me wrong, it's nice high quality software and it's straight forward to use but I'd choose Capture One every day. I use Photoshop fairly frequently and occasionally crack open LR to see what they've done, but in the grand scheme of annual photography costs, the yearly C1 subscription is pretty minimal from my perspective. And yes, I hear you, last year's fiasco was silly and avoidable. It's quite obvious they haven't recovered from it.

Yes, exactly. Everything you just said. There are some who seem to think Capture One is a competitor to Photoshop and / or Lightroom. What? These are 3 different tools I (and I believe most of us) use for different tasks. I use the Pro version of Capture One and don't even think about the cost of each new version. The entire REASONABLE cost of an upgrade to a new version is easily paid for with just a fraction of what is earned from just one job on which I use it. And I very much like that Capture One still sells the software and you can buy it outright, and if you don't need to upgrade, you don't have to. TO ME that is a better model than the monthly subscription. But Capture One offers both, so pick the one that works for you.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on November 22, 2021, 07:39:14 am
Looks like they were honest about the first discount not being bettered.
The Black Friday "deal" is only for subscriptions and style packs, nothing for upgrades to perpetual licences.

That means I can get two years of Adobe's photo plan with Lightroom and Photoshop for the 80% of the price of a single(uninspiring) upgrade to CO.

Much as I absolutely loath the concept of subscription software, there's enough new in LR now to be worth the jump now bits of LR6 are breaking.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Ferp on November 22, 2021, 05:35:47 pm
I thought it unlikely that they'd better 20% + 10% (from Fujirumors), but I expect them to repeat it at some stage.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Ray Harrison on November 23, 2021, 12:37:37 pm
Looks like they were honest about the first discount not being bettered.
The Black Friday "deal" is only for subscriptions and style packs, nothing for upgrades to perpetual licences.

That means I can get two years of Adobe's photo plan with Lightroom and Photoshop for the 80% of the price of a single(uninspiring) upgrade to CO.

Much as I absolutely loath the concept of subscription software, there's enough new in LR now to be worth the jump now bits of LR6 are breaking.

Yeah, LR is a great offering and great software, quite obviously. I like that both Adobe & C1 have each spent the last year to 18 months adding a lot of great features (in my mind). It's sort of a golden age of raw processing out there so whatever fits your way of working, likes/preferences and cost/benefit equation, one can find a product that fits. I've really liked C1 21 more than many recent upgrades. I'm looking forward to version 22. I give Adobe my cash too for Photoshop and other tools in their Creative Suite that I use for my day job, and both are small expenses in the grand scheme of things and provide great value.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on November 24, 2021, 05:49:33 am
I like that both Adobe & C1 have each spent the last year to 18 months adding a lot of great features (in my mind).
Interesting how differently people see things.
For me the last CO upgrade offered so little it wasn’t worth buying. The addition of HDR & Pano building in 22 seems very much a ‘bolt in’ and seems unlikely to better LR’s offering and won’t match the quality and power of dedicated software that anyone interested in this genre is likely to already own. I don’t think it’ll offer much to CO’s big market of fashion and product photographers.
Adobe’s recent Lightroom improvements in masking do seem to have wide appeal and really offer benefits for all users. The annual cost now seems a bargain compared to keeping CO up to date too, especially at Black Friday prices.

For me the one stand out product for raw conversions in the past two years has been DXO’s DeepPrime noise reduction. It may be slow, but the results are really fantastic for high ISO images. Adding a degree of automation to and from LR will have won DXO many customers.

What remains a disappointment across this market is that some aspects just don’t seem to get any attention.
Adding keywords hasn’t got any easier. No simple way to add sets of keywords on import or even just buttons to click. Lightroom will find and mask a ‘subject’, or sort people by facial recognition(sometimes), but automatically keywording a daffodil as yellow or recognising a car seems not to be considered.
Maybe building web galleries has gone out of fashion now, but that’s not had anything new added in any of the packages I’ve seen.

A “golden age” ? maybe, but there’s still lots of room for innovation.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Ray Harrison on November 24, 2021, 08:49:29 am
Interesting how differently people see things.
For me the last CO upgrade offered so little it wasn’t worth buying. The addition of HDR & Pano building in 22 seems very much a ‘bolt in’ and seems unlikely to better LR’s offering and won’t match the quality and power of dedicated software that anyone interested in this genre is likely to already own.
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Adobe’s recent Lightroom improvements in masking do seem to have wide appeal and really offer benefits for all users. The annual cost now seems a bargain compared to keeping CO up to date too, especially at Black Friday prices.
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A “golden age” ? maybe, but there’s still lots of room for innovation.

I like what C1 has done with masking over the course of the v21 release. The magic brush, while a silly name, is absolutely fantastic. While it doesn’t isolate specific subjects in one click as an advertised feature, it is pretty sophisticated in its isolation capabilities for a lot of the landscape and architecture work I do. While perhaps not innovative, per se, the style brushes were also a great addition to masking capabilities this past year. The ProStandard profiles and Speed Edit features were sleepers but great additions. I still like how C1 focuses on and does color adjustments and editing (the aforementioned profiles are a good example of that), though I know that LR did some work in that area this year too.

Pano and HDR are features that a lot of people asked for, like dehaze that was added in v21,  and from what I’ve been able to gather, they’ve done a really good job. We shall see and to your point, I don’t know if I’d switch from the the pano tools I already use. I don’t do exposure bracketing in general.

To me, nothing touches Photo Mechanic Plus for keywording, culling and cataloging so I continue to use that as part of my workflow.

I call it a golden age because of choice and quality of solutions. The choice used to be Aperture, LR, and a distant 3rd with C1 and to some degree DXO. When Aperture dropped off the map, it gave the opportunity to a lot of players. I think C1 is trying to be as responsive as they can be to the market and trying to make it attractive to move to rather than just moving to it because people don’t like Adobe’s license model. Hence I think some of the “leveling up” with similar features to LR. I think some of LR’s work with their color management tools, tethering improvements and stuff like that are in at least a small way a response to what people say they like in C1.

I agree that DXO is doing some interesting work. They don’t support all of my camera systems, though I’m happy to see they finally started supporting Fuji XTrans.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Rhossydd on November 28, 2021, 04:14:57 am
Ray, you sell the improvements better than Phase do ;-)

With Amazon offering a year of the Adobe Photography Plan at £46 today I've bought into that. For the price of one annual upgrade to C1 I've got more than four years of LR + PS.

My understanding of Photo Mechanic is that is primarily a tool for very fast ingest, which does better than anything else, but doesn't have full DAM cataloguing options. Fast ingest or culling isn't an issue for me, but cataloguing is and I've found LR to be the easiest all round package for that.
Title: Re: Upgrade offer
Post by: Ray Harrison on November 28, 2021, 05:46:26 am
Photo Mechanic Plus has their cataloging, just FYI. It’s really quite good and very fast. The good thing about them is that not only are they super responsive with issues but once you pay, they don’t tend to ask for money more than once every 5 years or so.