Best alternative to Lightroom?

£10 pm still includes LR and PS, I believe, so that is a good deal if you use them both. But for people who only use LR it is a bad deal.

LR itself when it was available as an outright purchase was only just more than £100 IIRC, plus an upgrade of c £50 every 2 years if you wanted it. So do the maths and see who comes out on top .....us or adobe.........

i agree on who comes out on top but i know for me personally i wouldn't want LR without PS because there are times i find that the editing features (cloning mostly) just isn't good enough in LT. I think really the two of them just go hand in hand and the people who only need one of the two are possibly a minority. For me personally if i had to pick one i would actually pick PS, i could live without the cataloguing side of things and would rather have the additional editing tools in PS but that is just personal preference.
 
I shall take another look thank you.

Edited to add, now that I've taken a look at the comparison, I can see that they're quite well matched. Some of the differences would probably make it difficult to transition from LR but for someone starting a fresh On1 looks well worth a look.
Actually, ON1 can import LR catalogues. Never used it myself, I never even started with LR, but it's there.
 
Here you will see how Lightzone is very similar to function and user interface to Lightroom.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X_tRdospeY
For many years I was a user and fan of Lightzone, and I felt it offered features that were not to be found in any other raw developer software.

I kept trialling the different versions of Lightroom as they were introduced but it wasn't until Adobe introduced "Process 2010" (or was it 2012?) in LR4 that I felt that LR offered any improvement over LZ.

Because of the improved Highlight recovery, I adopted LR4 as my raw developer program and I was using it up until the introduction of "CC."

Testing has shown me that there are now several programs which offer better highlight recovery than Lightroom, and I have now moved on and no longer use any Adobe products..
 
On the same original raws?

And can you name those programs?
I have a 'standard' raw image that I use for evaluation.

On1 and Dxo are two that I recall, but there were others.
I have been using On1 for about 18 months and I am completely happy with it.
You need to adopt a slightly different workflow with On1 compared to LR for the best results.
As I have said, not everyone has the same requirements, but I for one am glad to see the end of the Lightroom "Catalog."
 
I meant its aimed at professionals because of the pricing - paying £ 10 per month as long as you use it.

I'm not a professional and I've paid my tenner a month for a few years now. I've tried other editing programs but nothing comes close to the cataloguing and editing abilities in one package. I also make extensive use of the cloud syncing abilities which no other package has, especially now I use an iPad as my main machine. Having my entire photo catalogue available on my phone, tablet and laptop is incredibly useful and something I access most days. Don't ever really use PS but I have made use of it on occasion, including making the table plan for my wedding which saved me a fair chunk of cash.

Don't forget your Creative Cloud subscription also includes Adobe Portfolio for making a website and a few other bits and pieces as well, it's not just LR and PS
 
I quite like CaptureOne myself. Suits my workflow. I used Lightroom for a while but had a free subscription through my uni. When that expired, I tried captureone and loved it.
 
Bonus question: for an iMac with maxed-out 6GB of RAM and leisurely processor (3GHz C2D!), which programs are lightweight enough to run reasonably well?
 
I've not read all the posts so sorry for doubling up on someone elses suggestions. Dark table is not bad, I'd also check out ACDSee, the version I have (no idea which one) looks enough like lightroom and does a fair job of editing too. the shadow highlights is way better IMHO.
That said my fav is still LR (and I dont use if for DAM either.
 
Bonus question: for an iMac with maxed-out 6GB of RAM and leisurely processor (3GHz C2D!), which programs are lightweight enough to run reasonably well?

TBH none of them, with the possible exception of Fotor.

I have a Macbook with 2GHz C2D & 8GB RAM, and Lightroom 5 sucks on it, even with 20MP raw files. Editing is possible, but far from enjoyable - there's simply too much data to move around in what's basically a really slow machine, and it doesn't really matter what software you use. If you can replace the HDD with an SSD that will make everything a bit less bad.
 
TBH none of them, with the possible exception of Fotor.

I have a Macbook with 2GHz C2D & 8GB RAM, and Lightroom 5 sucks on it, even with 20MP raw files. Editing is possible, but far from enjoyable - there's simply too much data to move around in what's basically a really slow machine, and it doesn't really matter what software you use. If you can replace the HDD with an SSD that will make everything a bit less bad.

Thanks Toni. Hmm... I'd rather upgrade the whole Mac than try to put an SSD in it! :-o

Useful info, though - I'll try to find out about Fotor. If it's better than MacOS' Photos, then it's a start. :)
 
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