I have been using Lightroom since version one and my whole library of thousands of images is being managed by it, let's say I'm very invested in the application.
Over the last few years I have been shooing with my sony cameras (a7R through to the a7rIII) in addition to medium format pentax (645d and 645z). I have most of the time been happy with what i could do with the medium format files in terms of color in Lightroom but not so much with the sony files. I have always assumed that the "brittle" nature of the files had to do with the smaller sensor and some of the pre cooking that sony has been known to do.
I have downloaded capture one before to see what is on the other side of the fence, but it never really impressed me that much over Lightroom in order for me to consider using it.
Today I downloaded capture one 12 to see if a particularly difficult series of images would behave differently in that environment compared to Lightroom. What I'm getting is really confusing me and for the first time I'm wondering if a lot of my issues have been due to the way Lightroom is dealing with the sony files. First of all, I'm getting a lot less of the flat posterized look in higher ISO images under strange (mixed) lighting conditions. I can also white balance the images in Capture one to a state that I can't seem to in Lightroom using acr's WB and Hue sliders. There are also subtle areas of color that are seemingly not present in Lightroom's version.
The image below was shot under a red tarp in Thailand and Lightroom has a hard time white balancing that out if one wanted to. The cheeks and lip area of the woman also have a much better rolloff in the CaptureOne version. The adjustment I did in capture one took less than 3 minutes to get the image to this state which is not the case for the Lightroom version which had to be wrestled with a lot longer.
Besides maybe the rendering of fine textures like the sleeves, Lightroom seems to be totally failing on this image and many others shot in similar conditions. Has anyone else experienced similar things between both applications ? I shoot sony's uncompressed raw and the images are read using the new(ish) "adobe color" profile.
Any insight would be great, and if anyone is wanting to take the raw file for a spin please PM me, the difference is more pronounced on a wide gamut display.
