Built in, not bolted on: Photoroom inside Capture One 16.8

I've been in this business since 1989. In 2000 I converted Gap's global photo operations from film to digital. Eleven years at Amazon hired me to build staff and operate global photo studios in the US, Japan, India and the largest EU apparel studio under one roof in London, producing 500,000 SKUs a year. After that, in 2022 I cameto imaging across 34 countries at Wolt where merchants were producing millions of images per year. I've sat on the customer side of every shift in this industry.

I lived through the film to digital revolution - some of the biggest names in imaging didn't make it, Kodak, Polaroid and some large individual studios. The businesses that won didn't bolt digital on, they rebuilt around it. AI is the same kind of moment, and it's moving faster.

Today, Capture One 16.8 ships with Photoroom built directly into the new Actions framework. Not a plug-in, not a side process, it is embedded.

Here's what that means in practice. A Digi-Tech connects a Photoroom account once, through a web console. They define named actions: "Remove background, white." "Generate AI background, studio." Every photographer in that studio gets those actions inside Capture One. Once you have your API key /  setup, no account juggling, no interruption to the shoot-to-delivery workflow.

Want flexibility? Leave a parameter open at runtime. The photographer fills in a color, or supplies a reference image. The Studio Leaders still control what's available and how it's applied.

Anyone who's spent time in a high-volume studio knows where the friction sits, it isn't in the capture. It's in everything that happens before and after, frequently the photographer has to leave the environment they're shooting in to get it done. Our previous Capture One integration helped with that, but it was still a plugin which meant it still asked the photographer to step sideways. Capture One 16.8 takes a different approach. Background Removal, AI Backgrounds, AI Shadows and AI Expand can all be triggered from inside the capture session itself. The photographer doesn't move, the work moves to them. That's what I mean when I talk about AI as a flywheel rather than a bolt-on, and it's the part of this release I'm most excited about.

Photographic integrity is non-negotiable

Professional photographers are skeptical of AI, and often rightly so. They choose their tools carefully, they are protective of their images. There are plenty of AI tools that alter, enhance, or substitute parts of a photograph without saying so and may not tell the truth of the item.

I share that skepticism because brand consistency and image fidelity are the basis of how a consumer shops online. Without them, sales suffer, listings fail, frustrated consumers return items losing money for the merchant. It is that simple.

Photoroom's answer is precise: keep AI work at the edges of the image, not on the product itself. Background Removal uses a cut around the subject — the product is preserved exactly as captured, nothing is regenerated or replaced. For AI Shadows and AI Backgrounds, the tool operates on the environment around the subject. As with any generative step, studios should review output for their own quality standards. Images processed through this integration are not used to train any AI model.

That distinction matters most in exactly the context Capture One serves: studios shooting for fashion houses, luxury brands, high-end retailers. Image fidelity is the table stakes.

Four Photoroom actions ship inside Capture One 16.8:

Background Removal. Edge-preserving, trained on e‑commerce imagery at scale. Jewelry, glass, fur, reflective surfaces, all handled.

AI Backgrounds. Generate context-appropriate product backgrounds from a prompt or preset. Applied consistently across a batch.

AI Shadows. Add realistic shadows with control over angle and intensity.

AI Expand. Extend the canvas in any direction with realistic fill.

The studios pulling ahead

I see one pattern across every studio doing this well. They are not building AI from scratch, they are embedding trusted AI partners into the platforms their workflows already run on. Capture One is one of those platforms. Others are following the same path - the infrastructure for trusted AI embedded in professional workflows is building quickly.

The photographers and operators who figured out digital early didn't adopt it as a side process, they rebuilt workflows with it at the center building efficiencies. The studios doing the same with AI today are the ones who won't be catching up later.

How to get access

The Photoroom integration is live in Capture One’s upgraded version 16.8 through the Actions framework, available as an upgrade for Capture One customers on the Studio for Teams and Studio for Enterprise plans through their account managers.

Visit photoroom.com/integrations/capture-one to see how it works. Enterprise studios can get in touch with our team.