James,
we've been masking in PhotoShop for years -- but keep in mind that we got into PhotoShop when we had an ad agency with 17 designers and bought our first Macs which were running PhotoShop 1.0. That was a long time ago but that tells you how long we've been operating in PS.

Lightroom is fine but I don't use it because I think it's greatest advantage is when you're going through a lot of images and need to sort, file, save and do basic first adjustments. For final adjustments, I still think PhotoShop is king. I think for Performance Dog Photographers, Lightroom would be perfect. But for me shooting shows -- even Nationals -- I'm going through about 3,000 images usually and PS/Bridge does it just fine for me.

And I feel the same way about Capture One. What I want from my RAW processor is the ability to recover highlights and/or shadow detail and reduce noise in a more elegant way than you can do using other 3rd party software like Noise Ninja. And important to me is the quality of the files both in terms of noise, dynamic range and in terms of overall look. What I'm finding with Capture One (very early reaction to stuff I shot several years ago) is that it gives a real film-like quality to the images and I mean that in the best possible sense. The colors and the dynamic range are not "brittle" the way some digital files look coming out of PS. I'm not sure how else to explain it and I'm usually not at a loss for words. But the files I'm seeing look the way I wanted them to look when I first shot them.

Having said that, I still have to figure out how to use Capture One more efficiently and more intuitively since I've been a PS guy for about a century LOL. But, so far, I'm seeing great image quality. And that's what I'm looking for.

More later with samples.

Jim