This is a timely thread. I'm trying to ditch lightroom because it's just way too expensive, but the reason I keep using it is that content aware healing tool. I'm a film photographer and a lot of what I do is get rid of dust from scanning negatives. Do any of these solutions have something similar? (I mean, yeah, I could google it, but maybe someone has some experience to share)
Edit: I just watched a video on the retouch tool in darktable. It seems like an excruciatingly painful exercise to just remove a spot. I may need to just keep giving adobe $15/mth
I used Darktable for a few years, and while it is a very powerful tool, it was taking me a long time to edit a few pictures because of all the trial and error. I spend several hours watching YouTube tutorials to get the hang of it. But I decided to try Lightroom Classic again (you can get it for free if you know how) and I was surprised with all the new AI capabilities, it takes me a few clicks to get a very similar result to what I got in 10 minutes using Darktable. You definitely have more control on Darktable, but if you are already used to Lightroom, you can try to have a look at the Classic version. There are other alternatives that you can use for a trial period and see if you make the compromise and stick to a new workflow, all of these programs are the same but they will require slightly different skills from you. Mind you, I am not a Pro photographer and this is just my experience.
Rawtherapee is what ive been ising for awhile now and tbh does a lot better than Lightroom if you’re no fucking around with smart select features or just need a solid program to adjust some parameters of your raw files https://www.rawtherapee.com
There are tons of good editing apps. Darktable is a good one to check out. Rawtherapee might also be a good choice. Gimp is the classic but more photoshop than Lightroom.
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!
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.
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.
@HidingCat If Mac look at Affinity Photo which is very reasonably priced, incredibly powerful, but lacks any cataloging tools. But Adobe bridge is free and still a good alternative for cataloging. I like the tools in DxO Photolab- lens correction and denoise functions are unmatched - and the basic version rather than the elite is reasonably priced. Both programs have "learning curves" coming from LR, i.e. very different ways of setting up workflow that takes some getting used to.
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