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by lukasgraf 705 days ago
I am, intentionally so ;-) Because this mix is where Lightroom excels, and competing products just fall short.

As an enthusiast or professional photographer you really need both, preferrably in the same application, or at least in tightly integrated applications.

I started with Lightroom 1 beta3, and while it was dog slow, the speedup in workflow to cull and edit thousands of photos after a shoot was revolutionary at the time. In the beginning it only supported global edits, which was enough anyway for 95% of photos. But you could sync and apply these edits in bulk to other photos, and get through hundreds of them quickly.

Capture One certainly is the closest. But switching costs are huge. My catalog contains tens of thousands of images, professionals will have hundreds of thousands. If I'm to switch, I need to be certain that every single Lightroom edit is, in principle, supported too, and will be converted faithfully on import.

And their pricing is weird. In the beginning they required you to pick a RAW edition - you could have support for Canon, or Nikon, but not both. That's gone now, and as you say, I think it has come a long way. But their perpetual license now is nowhere competitive in price with the Adobe Photography Plan ($9.99/mo, infamous "Annual paid monthly", for LR+PS). The $300 for Capture One is for one major version, for the price of 2.5 years of Photoshop and Lightroom.