My university is kicking me off their free creative cloud by the end of the summer. What are the best Lightroom alternatives?

  • HidingCat
    2•1 year ago

    Wow, this is something I’ve been wondering for a very long time. I’ve researched a few but I’ve never really tried to take the plunge.

    • ACDSee, from Pro version and above; fast to work with, but not really faster once you need to actually work on the raw file. Felt the imaging rendition wasn’t as good as LR.
    • DxO Photolab. Never tried it, but the current version with the new Denoise algorithm looks very nice.
    • Corel AfterShot Pro; this one is based on the very old Bibble, but Corel’s not always the best steward of it at times. It is super fast though. Tried it out when I was really sick of LR’s slowness.
    • Darktable, the open source alternative

    If you do try any of these, let me (and us) know what you think!

    • @PotjiePig
      1•1 year ago

      Have a look at Capture One. It has a free version, and although I absolutely love Lightrooms masking tools and batch editing tools, Capture One is pretty darn good for most things.

      • HidingCat
        1•1 year ago

        It’s been a while, but I recall Capture One’s image management is either non-existent or very lacking. That’s what I really want in a LR alternative, something that can do management with raw processing at the same time. If I didn’t need the former I’d just buy Affinity Photo and call it a day.