A friend of mine is about to be interested in digital photography and is soon going to commit on a photo finishing suite. She already attended some courses and - of course - the mayority of those had users of and applications from Adobe, usually Lightroom and Co.
I know Adobe is scum (fuck Adobe), she knows Adobe is “bad”. I think I could steer her into free and/or open source or one-time-pay software but for this I have to have an alternative that is a viable substitute, especially to Lightroom.
As for alternatives I know of Darktable, Capture One, Affinity Photo and RawTherapee.
Any more recommendations? Or an opinion on these or other products?
Capture One fan here. Good software buy they are also pushing towards subscriptions although you still have the option to buy and get support for one year as well. Affinity Photo is similar to Photoshop and had a great price, but has less tutorials out there.
I like Darkroom and use it exclusively. Cons are it’s slow as beans, even on my decent machine. Pros are it has a ton of features. Another con is no AI tools built in, and it has a steeper learning curve because it doesn’t have the automatic adjustment tools Lightroom does. You can get a better result but it takes work.
Lots of the AI related stuff is a big draw for current Lightroom. There’s also a lack of Adobe colors, which aren’t a need unless you’re printing a lot
Full disclosure It’s been a bit since I’ve used it, but I may try to import the ~800gb photo library I have into it again and give it another shot
Version 4 has been a decent upgrade. I still have some gripes with the overall behavior and interface, but it’s very capable software.
With the exception of AI Denoise the AI stuff is of little interest to me. I got in on the Kickstarter for Abode and am hoping that will be a suitable paid alternative.
I use and love Affinity. Back on v1 I used RawTherapee to do the initial conversion, then AP for the “photoshop part”… but in v2 the raw conversion in AP is pretty good, so I just use that for my whole workflow.