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After the announcement from Adobe last October that there will be no more a perpetual licence for Lightroom but just a monthly subscription including also cloud storage and/or Photoshop, many hobbyist photographers have started to look for alternative software that do not required to pay more than 100 $/€ per year to be used. Competing companies are pushing more than ever their products to make the best of this period and attract photographers away from Adobe.

We have tested for you the most popular alternative software to Adobe Lightroom for photo development -especially RAW- and image cataloguing as a guide to evaluate their latest versions and eventually choose one of them. We will look both at free and paid software. Let's start!

In the following of the article, when referring to "usual development tools" we refer to standard tools like the following: exposure compensation, highlight recovery, shadow enlightment, contrast/saturation correction, RGB curve correction, noise removal, custom white balance, free angle rotation, saving correction presets (full or partial ones for changing just some corrections), crop. We consider these as mandatory tools so we will not cite those features in the review unless something unusual is offered or limited in a specific software.

Want to jump to the conclusions? Go to the conclusions.

 

Capture One 11

capture one

General

Capture One (often called just C1) is one of the most long standing competitor of Lightroom, made by PhaseOne that builds also medium-format cameras so they know the photographic world. It also provides an import from Lightroom functionality that does a good job though not every Lightroom information is imported from Lightroom catalog (smart search folders and people taggings are not imported).

Browsing the folders to show a preview is quite fast and in general performances are good, with a better overall navigation speed than in Lightroom. Compare mode among multiple photos is available and also with more than 2 images with zoom, that is not supported by Lightroom (for performance reasons I think) and it's a very useful feature to pick up the best shot among multiple ones.

Tethered shooting is supported as well as export with watermarking. Keyboard shortcuts are configurable while in Lightroom they are not.

At the end of November, version 11 has been pushed out which greatly enhances layer tools plus other minor updates.

Photo development

All the usual corrections for RAW development are present and the quality of the RAW engine is very good, including lens corrections but the coverage of lenses is somehow limited with respect to Lightroom: for example in the current version you will not find any Samyang/Rokinon or Canon lens with TC adapter - in these case you have to go with generic/manual corrections. Also with respect to Lightroom, chromatic aberration correction is not customizable; on the other side, it offers also corrections for movements lens (like Tilt&Shift) and for resolution decrease in the corners/borders and due to diffraction.

The development section is divided into tabs and each tab is fully configurable about the very many tools available to appear there - a degree of flexibility that is not provided by Adobe Lightroom.

It is possible to save snapshots of the current corrections (like the virtual copiers in Lightroom) but the history list of corrections applied is not provided (though there an undo/redo command of course), strange.

Local corrections are available - they are the same tools that can be used for the entire image just applied to a mask that acts as a simplified layer.

Just the dehaze feature from Lightroom is missing: you can simulate the effect changing some parameters combined (structure, levels) but there is no one slider direct effect.

Cataloguing

Capture One is also a photo asset manager so that you can define a catalog of your images and videos, in which you can star rate and color label items, filter the view based on characteristics (camera model, place, keyword and so on). There is also an advanced search feature, exactly like in Lightroom that calls it "smart search folders", to define filter-based collections, also on multiple levels as needed when the filter expression has parentheses like "country = XXX AND (city = YYY OR city = ZZZ)".

Lightroom is nevertheless superior as asset manager. In summary:

Other aspects

Price

There is a one-time licence option for $299 / 279 € (plus VAT) and a subscription option at $20 / 20 € per month with annual subscription. There is a discounted version for Sony camera users. A trial is available. Link to official site: CaptureOne highlights.

 

ON1 Photo RAW 2018

ON1

General

ON1 Photo RAW 2018 (it's version 12 of the product) is emerging as another alternative to more famous RAW management software, in general it has many powerful tools, in particular has a very good support for layers, panorama and HDR photo merge, though the image quality is not top like in Adobe or Phase One products (e.g. in highlight recovery). Overall speed is about Lightroom's that is not fantastic (Capture is better). Let's see in details.

Photo development

Cataloguing

Other features

Price

A one-time licence is available at $119.99 (often discounted to $99.99) for new customers and a trial for testing - link to official On1 presentation.

 

DxO Photo Lab 1.1

DXO Photo lab logo

General

This is the new product name from previous DxO Optics Pro launched at the end of October in the rush of every vendor to offer something appealing to Adobe-tired photographers. It essentially adds local adjustments using Nik Software U-point technology (basically you pick a point and apply adjustments around that point).

DXO is the company behing the famous testing of photographic sensors and lenses (DxO Marks) so we expect good level of usual corrections of lens defects (aberration, vignetting and distorsion) and noise removal and infact DOX Photo Lab performs well in these aspects, while all the cataloguing features are missing with no more than a browser and the possibility to define static collections.

30-Apr-18 update: On March 7, 2018 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (i.e. problem of financial sustainability) though assuring its customers that there will be no impact on DxO Photo Lab product that even is planned to be updated to 1.2 next June.

Photo development

Cataloguing

Other features

Price

One time fee of € 129 / 199 + VAT for the essential / elite edition - often discounts are available, where the essential edition lacks features like latest denoise and light corrections, camera ICC profiles, anti-moirè, preset editor also to define partial presets.

Official page at Dxo PhotoLab site, a trial is available.

 

Luminar 2018 1.2

luminar logoGeneral

This product from Macphun, that will be rebranded as Skylum in 2018, is gaining momentum in the latest months with an intense ads campaign; started as a Mac only product and in 2017 a Windows version has been published, with lacks some of the Mac features like batch export (clone & stamp has been just added this month).

It's quite rich in offering effects for intense colors & atmosphere scene and offers support to layers, but lacks completely a catalogue feature (even a browser feature ) - Macphun promised that it will offert this functionality in 2018 free of charge for existing customers.

30-Apr-18 update - at April 16th version 1.2 has been pushed out with a huge number of updates/fixes, mainly a big performance boost, automatic lens correction tools (distorsion and chromatic aberrations that were manually corrected only so far), updates to the Raw engine (essentially for better exposure calculation, cleaner gradients, minimized chromatic aberrations). Batch processing and free transform-rotate-flip have been extended to the Windows version.

Photo development

Cataloguing

Other features

Photoshop and Lightroom plugins are supported and that's a great thing (of course specific compatibility should be checked).

Export with watermark is not supported.

The company even publishes a comparison between its product and Lightroom - see Luminar comparison.

Price

One-time fee of 69 € with frequent discont to 59 € with some bonus pack. See Luminar site.

 

Affinity Photo 1.6

affinity logoGeneral

It's a fairly new product like Luminar and as this one maybe targeting more Photoshop than Lightroom since it offers very good support for layers and effects but not a catalogue for managed media. The GUI is different than in other products since there are different "modes" to work on an image that are called "personas", each of them providing a set of tools - the personas are Photo (the main editing interface with adjustments and layers), Develop (pre-processing of RAW files), Tone Mapping and Export (batch is supported).

RAW conversion (Develop persona) is a different, and in my opinion less flexible, with respect to other tools: the conversion is a one-way process, so when you have decided how setting contrast/details/etc, you get a layer on which you can apply adjustments (Photo persona) but then it is not possible to go back to Develop and change parameters while preserving the adjustments - you need to restart from the start.

Photo development

Saving snapshots of corrections is supported as well as panorama and HDR merge of multiple shots.

Cataloguing

Other features

Official list of features available in the Affinity Photo site.

Price

€ 54.99 as a one-time fee with a bonus pack of filter/effects. Trial available but it lasts just 10 days, too short.

 

RawTherapee 5.4

logo rawtherapeeGeneral

It's an open source solution with the richest list of features for RAW development, so that normal photographer may even remain confused at first usage with tons of sliders for tuning every aspect of the development, from the demosaic algorithm (first conversion from the monchromatic raw data from the camera sensor to a usable color image) to mathematical transformations of details, colors and so no. On the other side, no catalog is offered and some useful features are missing (like local corrections and layer support) so for a complete retouch solution you would need a companion software.

Photo development

Extremely rich features for global corrections, no layers support (like Lightroom), the product includes a database of lens and cameras for automatic lens corrections (chromatic aberration and so on as in Lightroom).

Cataloguing

Other features

Full color profile support (monitor, export, really full camera profiles with both ICC and DCP profiles). Batch export is supported.

Price

Completely free.

 

DigiKam 5.9

digikam logoGeneral

It's the most feature-rich cataloguing tool and it's free! It provides also many editing feature and some effects, fully support color spaces (sRGB, Adobe Prophoto and so on).

Photo development

Many tools for RAW development, adjustments, some artistic filter/effects (e.g. rain drops). No layers as in Lightroom. Automatic lens corrections for quite a number of lens/camera models.

Cataloguing

Unbeatable features and flexibility, including geotagging on a map and face tagging as in Lightroom. As in Lightroom no more than 2 images can be compared with zoom.

Other features

Price

Completely free. Here is the DigiKam site.

 

DarkTable 2.4

Darktable logoGeneral

Another very interesting open source project, that just released also a Windows version in addition to Mac and Linux ones, it provides many functions (implemented as internal modules) for image treatment and also it provides a catalog.

Photo development

Very complete in tools for RAW development and adjustments. Automatic lens corrections for quite a number of lens/camera models both for chromatic aberrations and distorsions with possibility of manually tune the effect. Good watermark creation is available.

Cataloguing

DarkTable is one of the very few competing software with full geotagging - you can see and place image on earth map with several configuration options and even import a GPX track (as in Lightroom) for example recorded by your GPS smartphone to automatically place your pics taken during a hike using the time of the shot and location from the smartphone.

Other features

Like in Lightroom, you can make automation script in Lua (a programming language).

Official page and download in the DarkTable site.

Price

Completely free.

 

Others and conclusions

We have compared the most famous competitors to Adobe Lightroom, and there is not a product that is better in every aspect than Lightroom, some one has some more advanced features but lack other ones, so everyone can weight pros and cons and pickup the best alternative and I hope this guide will be useful for that.

Capture One is one of the top competitors as an integrated high quality editor with an advanced catalog and offers some plus with respect to Adobe but it currently lacks some useful features like panorama and HDR merge, geomapping visualization and people face tags, and it's the most expensive.

Most of Lightroom alternatives offer good support for layers (ON1 RAW Photo, Luminar, Affinity Photo, Capture one). Luminar shines with effects but in my opinion is still uncomplete for being THE tool (e.g. it's not color managed in visualization, highlight recovery and lens defect corrections are not optimal), Affinity is an appealing alternative but more to Photoshop: both Luminar and Affinity does not (currently) provide a catalogue so you need another piece of software for organizing your images (and very few support video while Lightroom does).

The open source alternatives are also very interesting, RawTherapee RAW development features is unrivaled and is updated regularly but it needs an external software for local corrections and (maybe another) for cataloguing media, like digiKam for a fully open source kit - digiKam is the most flexible cataloguing solution with a bit of development tools (for pro development use a dedicated software). DarkTable is maybe a more complete solution than RawTherapee offering the catalog and a lot of tools. The downside of these open source products is that once in a while you can encounter some small artifacts in the RAW development that are more rare in famous commercial products like Lightroom and Capture One, but they are completely free and we have to praise the work of such good guys behind them.

Besides the products that we have analyzed in this review, the market offers other products for image and RAW handling, just to name a few for who is interested:

In conclusion some advice to choose:

What do you think and what is your experience? You can comment and ask below.