Alternatives to Lightroom

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Name
Michael Sanders
Edit My Images
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Hey all..

First post so please be kind.

I am currently using Lightroom to manage a modest (3000+) image library and Photoshop for advanced editing and image creation (graphic etc). I would like start looking at alternatives on the off chance Adobe do put up the price.

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on Apple Photos and an external editor - of which there are quite a few now I see.

Thanks.

Michael
 
ive used AP's with Affinity Photo,they blend together well. Afinity for editing etc and Apple photos for catologueing and slideshows albums etc
 
Afinity is great if you dont mind the slower pace,its not the fastest with multiple images but if you like to take your time then its a lovely programme,lots of helpful videos on youtube and their own website and forum
 
Hi Michael, try On1 PhotoRaw or DXO photolab, but paid perpetual license packages.
I'd also recommend ON1 Photo Raw if you need asset management and/or IPTC headers.

Hi Toni and Garry,

How are you finding On1, I'm interested in the next release 2019.5 due out any time soon. Is there any performance issues or major errors you have found so far in the version you have.. I did try out a 2018 version, but had some problems with it. I note there is a special offer on it at the moment.

Pete
 
Honestly I prefer Lightroom 5.7 for general development because I've used it since 2014 and know how it responds very well, however if it should become unavailable then I'd move to On1 and grumble for a bit while I learned it.

Performance issues - I don't like the way the highlights/white point control behave, the slight discrepancy between what I see on screen and the output file sharpness, nor having to re-learn where stuff is between each major iteration. Pushing sliders too hard results in fringing, just like it does in Lightroom, and the controls feel just a little cruder, less refined. No major errors or performance issues that aren't typical for the genre.
 
@seaodyssey - if you but On1 Photo RAW 2019.2 right now you will get the upgrade to 2019.5 for free when it is released.

I tried 2019.2 a few weeks ago and was very impressed with it. At the time I decided to stick with Adobe but my free 2 months is about half way through and I'm back looking at 2019.2 again. TBH, I can get just as good results from On1 as I do from LR so I am very tempted to make the switch.
 
Hi Toni and Garry,

How are you finding On1, I'm interested in the next release 2019.5 due out any time soon. Is there any performance issues or major errors you have found so far in the version you have.. I did try out a 2018 version, but had some problems with it. I note there is a special offer on it at the moment.

Pete

On my quad-core i5 with 16 GB of RAM on an Asus P8Z77-M motherboard with an Nvidia 1050Ti graphics card, it can be grindingly slow, even when the processor is in overclock mode. It seems to spend a lot of background processing indexing files, even when you think it's indexed everything in sight. And even if you export photos in the background, there's too little processor left to make it worth doing anything in the foreground.

On my Surface Pro 3 i7 with 8 GB of RAM and an onboard Intel G400 card, it's much better. Why that should be, I don't know. It's possibly partly because the cache is on an SSD, not an internal HD.

Having said that, it's still my preferred everyday post-processing software. I have PS Elements 2018, Luminar 3 and Affinity Photo if I want to do anything more adventurous. Overkill, really, but they were all cheap at the time.
 
I actually prefer the results from On1 over those from Lightroom.
I chose Lightroom because, at the time, I considered it's highlight recovery was the best of any available software.
That is no longer the case.

Another good thing with On1 is that you do not have a "catalog" which was one thing I never liked about LR.
You can still title and keyword your images, which makes searching just as quick and easy as with LR.
 
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I've just cancelled my Adobe CC subscription and use either Luminar 3 or ON1. Personally I prefer Luminar 3 workflow. They're both pretty slow on my Macbook Air Mid 2015, but to be fair so was lightroom
 
On1 Photo Raw spends a heck of a lot of time indexing things, for something that doesn't have a "catalog"

One good thing about it is that it implements IPTC headers; useful if you're putting your photography out for other people to buy or use. Luminar doesn't, though the developers have indicated that it should be coming in a future update. Affinity Photo doesn't either, but then it doesn't have any asset management; it's more of a Photoshop replacement.
 
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My old pc died a few days ago, it was 32bit Windows 7 and a slow old processor. I've got a new one now 64bit Windows 10 with i5 processor and 8gb RAM. Not spectacular but better.

I had Lightroom 5.7 but wondering if it's time for a change. Don't fancy a subscription so been reading about Rawtherapee and Darktable. Both sound quite interesting.
 
(y)(y) for Darktable I use it on Linux
 
My old pc died a few days ago, it was 32bit Windows 7 and a slow old processor. I've got a new one now 64bit Windows 10 with i5 processor and 8gb RAM. Not spectacular but better.

I had Lightroom 5.7 but wondering if it's time for a change. Don't fancy a subscription so been reading about Rawtherapee and Darktable. Both sound quite interesting.

I've used all three. By all means experiment, but even considering the relative costs involved I'd buy LR 5.n again.
 
I've tried various packages, and always come back to LR. Maybe because I know it better, but I've tried C1 on my Mac and I don't find the output any better, and it doesn't catalogue. I've got Affinity on my iPad Pro and that's more like a PS "wanna be". Over the years I've dabbled with most, but LR & PS is such a powerful combination, and it just works....
 
Has anyone tried Capture One?

My partner at work left it too late to get hold of a perpetual version of Lightroom and doesn't use his camera often enough to pay for the subscription.

He's got a Fuji something or other, so was interested in the Fuji-specific version which is available for around £180. with three 'style packs'. Are these worth adding on? Or is the one with no style packs better at £108?

More than LR6 was, but cheaper in the long run than subscribing.

In his limited research so far, he's come across numerous posts mentioning how much noise you get with LR compared to other programmes.
 
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I actually prefer the results from On1 over those from Lightroom.
I chose Lightroom because, at the time, I considered it's highlight recovery was the best of any available software.
That is no longer the case.
What raw editing software do you feel matches or exceeds LR in highlight recovery?
 
Has anyone tried Capture One?

My partner at work left it too late to get hold of a perpetual version of Lightroom and doesn't use his camera often enough to pay for the subscription.

He's got a Fuji something or other, so was interested in the Fuji-specific version which is available for around £180. with three 'style packs'. Are these worth adding on? Or is the one with no style packs better at £108?

More than LR6 was, but cheaper in the long run than subscribing.

In his limited research so far, he's come across numerous posts mentioning how much noise you get with LR compared to other programmes.
Capture one generally reckoned to be excellent for image development, but limited compared to LR in other areas.
 
whos still using lightroom 6.14?i dont see any reason to upgrade and if I bought a new unsupported camera I would convert to DNG.Im thinking even the older 5 version would do the job?
 
whos still using lightroom 6.14?i dont see any reason to upgrade and if I bought a new unsupported camera I would convert to DNG.Im thinking even the older 5 version would do the job?

I'm still using the last perpetual version (whichever it is). I had to upgrade to get a version that supported my 80D.
 
I have an old version of Lightroom, 4.something
It reads my xe1 raw but not my xt1
I am using a combination of Lightroom,Iridient X and the free fuji Capture 1
I must admit that input to Capture 1 and immediate output to tiff then process in Lightroom looks better than just processing in Lightroom. This is for the xe1 files
Will try xt1 files same way
 
well for me 6.14 is more than enough and I can stick a finger up to Adobe with a smile,well thats what makes me feel ok anyway lol
 
What raw editing software do you feel matches or exceeds LR in highlight recovery?
The one I'm using, which is the one I mentioned in my post.

I also found, during the course of evaluation, that Dxo also provided better highlight recovery than Lightroom.
 
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I've pretty much always used Lightroom. Since LR2 I think, then 3, now I'm still hanging onto LR5.

My boy has recently got into shooting the night skies. Bought him an A6000 & 12/2 & then realised he'd need something on his laptop to edit..... Set him up an old version of Photoshop really just for resize & layers. Tried Capture One Express for a month or so now, reading tutorials, watching YouTube videos, etc & (maybe it's just me/us) but the images just don't edit as well as they do in Lightroom. He's now running LR5 too (since teatime) & the first image to come out of it is way nicer than C1.

I did always say I wouldn't go to Subscription for LR/CS but if it gives the best results......
 
ON1 Photo Raw not only has a highlight recovery slider it also has Haze reduction which can, if used judiciously, bring back even more detail in the highlights, whether haze is present or not.
Haze control also makes a very useful "sky enhancer" tool!
 
Yes, but you have to watch the corners. If you're facing at right angles to the sun and drag the Haze slider down too far, one corner of the sky will be darker than the other and the haze slider can make it a very fake looking dark blue.
Yes. I should have added "Used in moderation."
 
Having recently switched to on1 2019.2 I won't be updating to the latest .5 release as a lot of users are posting in the forums that it is full of bugs. It looks like a decent release but it's best to wait to see if they can patch it. Otherwise it's a good bit of software for my needs as I only process a few images a week.
 
Currently playing with Luminar 3. I'm liking the editor element of the software, but haven't really got around to using any DAM tools within it yet. I think there's a free trial but it was only £45 with a voucher so it seemed churlish not to try. DxO can give good results but there's no organiser to speak of, and I've just never been able to get my head around the concept of "personas" within Affinity,
 
Capture one generally reckoned to be excellent for image development, but limited compared to LR in other areas.
I used to think this too, but to be honest, I'm finding Capture One better than Lightroom for cataloging now, especially since embracing sessions for when I want to edit on the go.

It's a learning curve for sure, but the tutorials at https://learn.captureone.com and also from Scott Williams https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCftH7VvOhAwdavzbkO13puA are a great place to start.

It's missing maps but I never used that, but the tagging, rating, metadata organisation etc is just the same, the speed is significantly faster for querying on my 2014 iMac, and the ability to customise workspaces and have multiple for different jobs is great - of late I've even stopped culling in Photomechanic prior to import as it now just as quick.

Editing wise, it's layers capability is the stand out feature, but the other tools are also very strong. I can certainly do more of my workflow in C1 than I could in LR, and only occasionally dip into Affinity now.

I initially bought the Fuji Pro version as I was only going to use it on my 'new' images, but soon stumped up the cash for the full pro version (perpetual licence).
 
I use Capture One for all my RAW conversions and adjustments (I only shoot RAW) and have done so for several years. I also have ON1, Luminar Flex, and Affinity Photo installed but don't like any of their RAW development adjustment User Interfaces. I never use Apple's poorly named Photos application but used and liked Aperture, now unsupported. I have never used or been tempted to use Lightroom even though Adobe invited me to be part of their development team before it was publicly released and I would have been given free software - At the time I was working on InDesign CS for Adobe and didn't shoot my own photographs but just art directed professionals.

So, depending on the individual image I sometimes finish editing using ON1 or Luminar as plug-ins from within Photoshop CS6 as a TIFF on a round-trip back to Capture One before exporting a JPEG into my own folders. I trash my RAW files which have not been worthy of editing.

I have to say that ON1, although improving in leaps and bounds, still feels like a toy to use and I am really put off by their incessant marketing emails.

I think the bottom line is choosing which suits your work better and in terms of which you enjoy using the most. Perhaps cost might be a factor for some. It's rather like cameras in that a good photographer can get good results regardless (almost!) of which editing software they use.
 
I'm currently very interested in DxO PhotoLab that I find qualitative and most intuitive for the beginner.
 
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