PhaseOne’s site now has an excellent series of movies by Peter Krogh showing how to use Expression Media with CaptureOne.

I must admit that since taking up the free CaptureOne offer, I’ve not done much more than install the program on my main computers. Over the years, while respecting it as one of the very best raw converters, I’ve never used it much and am pretty unfamiliar with its workflow, so I was mostly interested in seeing the CaptureOne related material.

But I was also keen to see what Phase had added to  CaptureOne  in the 5.1 update released shortly after the Expression Media acquisition. So I particularly liked “Sending Images from Expression Media 2 to Capture One” and “Sending Images from Capture One to Expression Media”.

It’s bound to be a while before we see any real fruits from the change of ownership – and let’s hope one juicy morsel is a change of name back to iView or at least choose something that’s less of 5 syllable mouthful than Expression Media. Yet 5.1′s little tweaks are promising and give some idea of what to expect. CaptureOne now reads Expression Media’s catalog sets and mirrors them as its own “session albums”, and other metadata is also passed back and forth. At certain points you do have to tell it to make this information transfer via menu commands, so that needs to get slicker before the integration could be called “seamless” (for what that often misused word is worth). But am I just too jaded, too cheesed off that Microsoft proved the Mac-lovers right when they whined about iView being swallowed by Redmond, or should I be more convinced that a two legged suite can prove a better way to manage and adjust your pictures than a Lightroom-style program that addresses both sides of the pixel mountain?