Capture One Lays off Staff

[griffljg]

I have just seen this link on Cameraderie: https://petapixel.com/2024/01/30/cap...l-restructure/

Most concerning! 😳

[Ian]

Thanks for sharing, Larry.

Ian

[Miketoll]

Yes it looks like they are in trouble. I watched the PetaPixel YouTube blog last night and they did chat a bit about it there.

I also noted that they will soon be releasing their review of the OM-1 MkII which might be interesting.

[timboo]

Thanks for this, I love Capture One so hope nothing drastic happens.

[BDennis]

A shame for the people losing their jobs.

I did not know they had been sold into private equity ownership. The problem with that is the PE company often wants to reduce costs to make the best return on their investment so these layoffs can come along - I experienced this myself after my former employer was sold into private equity ownership (by Intel, selling a stake in the company for a lot less than they paid for it!).

I hope they survive as I like the software. The online tutorials by David Grover are good too - I hope he is still there!

Bill

[wornish]

I see they do both the monthly subscription model and the permanent licence model. Is the subscription a new offering?

[BDennis]

I see they do both the monthly subscription model and the permanent licence model. Is the subscription a new offering?

They’ve had subscriptions for a while. The last few years they’ve made the perpetual license somewhat unusable because you don’t get any fixes and updates for the licensed version. Say I’ve just bought the license then in a couple of weeks or months get a new camera or update the Mac OS, I would need to pay for another perpetual license to get the C1 version that has the camera and Mac OS support. I think previously you got about a year of updates then a reasonable upgrade price on the next version if wanting to renew it. So I’ve changed over to a subscription now paying it annually starting with a Black Friday deal. If you look at C1 forums online, there are lots of people ranting about the new license policy. Life is too short!

Bill

[drmarkf]

Yes, I did the same.

It would be a pain if they went under, mainly since I’ve been using CO since 2011. The colour management and new ‘AI’ masking tools are great, saving a lot of time on most images and from what I’ve seen of other people using Lr, they seem a better fit for my needs.

However, I’ve learned over the years that software companies come and go and it’s a fool’s game to expect otherwise. I’ve got a lot of time and muscle memory invested in my CO catalogues, but in reality these days I reprocess any image dating from more than 2-3 years ago that’s needed for any serious purpose. So once I’d gone through the learning curve of anything new, it wouldn’t be too much of a hit.