What Capture One is
Capture One is professional photo-editing and tethered-capture software widely used by unit stills photographers on film and TV sets. It is valued for its colour handling and for tethered shooting, where images appear on a laptop the instant they are taken, letting a photographer and production review coverage live on set.
Like other professional tools, Capture One edits non-destructively: adjustments to exposure, colour and crop are stored as instructions in a catalogue or session, not written into the RAW file itself. This is similar in principle to an XMP sidecar, but the edit data lives in Capture One’s own catalogue or session structure rather than a separate sidecar file per image.
The practical consequence is that those edit files must travel with the RAWs, or the look is lost when images are converted. Preserving Capture One settings (and .xmp sidecars) is part of what the Image Approvals lab handles, so cast and client see images as the photographer intended. For how edited RAWs become deliverable JPGs without losing that work, see RAW vs JPG for production stills.