I'm a Real Estate photography business owner, as you can imagine I have to manage a lot of RAW's and exports so I can have myself and other staff complete edits quickly. Naturally in this business, my real estate clients cannot always wait for the perfect weather to showcase a property. Sky Replacement is basically a mandatory/incredible/competitive feature to have in order to showcase the house in a normal sunny sky environment when clients are limited on time and the weather is rainy or generally bad. Business aside, it's just nice to have when time didn't allow you to wait for the next day or week for the weather to clear up, it's just all around an amazing feature when needed.
When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool?
Currently I have to use Photoshop to sky replace. However, I'm currently trying to disconnect and remove myself from Adobe overall for obvious reasons. In short, I would rather put my money into a well thought-out service like Capture One, than split between services.
Related to this topic of using a pixel editor along-side Capture One for things beyond its capabilities, the new AI Masking magnifies the desire to be able to export masks that can be used in the pixel editor like for a sky replacement as mentioned here, but also for many other things. I'd like to see Capture One able to export a layered TIFF where the base layer contains the rendered pixels from all the editing done in Capture One (flattened to use Photoshop terminology), but any layer masks used where preserved somehow in empty layers. You could then use any of those masks in your pixel editor for further editing (such as sky replacement). There are already a feature request in that regard which you can vote for: https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/14101640061085-Export-Masks-as-alpha-channels and another post about something similar here: https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/15190661685789-Layer-Masks-to-export
FYI, I have no opinion on whether it makes sense to add sky replacement directly to Capture One or not (so not commenting on that), just noting a theme in several different requests that if layer masks could be exported then third party pixel editors could more easily fill in for the missing Capture One functionality.
No one commenting except Capture One can “gatekeep”. You can absolutely request that C1 take on Photoshop-like pixel editing functions. Sky replacement is a poster child for pixel editing. I think the point others are making is that there are other applications that do it much better than C1 ever would - like Ps - and may not be the best use of the developer’s time at C1. That’s their call though.
Some other competitive/similar software simply offer it at as a free or paid optional plugin, nothing crazy or overly elaborate; the only reason I don't use the others instead is because of their filing/organization structure. Forums "being flooded with additional requests" about a new feature are none of our concern or even something to consider, it's just part of owning a business with open forums, adding a new/beneficial feature far outweighs this. If the developers don't want to, that's fine and their decision, this program simply may not be for myself and/or others, but it was worth a suggestion.
On another note. I understand thinking that it may or may not happen for reasons, or if the developers are not interested, I'm just not sure who or "why" this would be down voted as it's just a new OPTIONAL feature/improvement added to a great program's arsenal making it that much more appealing to others. It's off-putting as a whole to think features are potentially being gate-kept by the community or by elitist/die-hard-traditionalists, it can make a newcomer like myself feel like alternate perspectives or progress cannot be made and that maybe we should look elsewhere.
Anyhow, just offering an alternative perspective. Wish you guys the best, thank you for your comments! Unfollowing this post and moving on, cheers.
I think the problem with looking for pixel editing additions is that the market has existing software that is very mature and very comprehensive.
Whether any software with cherry-picked partial solutions could make a case for itself is unknown (as far as I am aware).
One could be fairly sure that whatever was provided, thousands of additional requests would flood the Community pages.
To integrate a pixel editor application in a way that was both comprehensive and seamless and did not require separation of RAW file development and pixel editing via some sort of intermediate file creation could be very useful, even though a little complicated and challenging to the user before becoming fully proficient.
Sky Replacement is a pixel-editor capability. You are effectively combining separate images. Capture One is unlikely to provide that kind of feature but we can always hope.