Lightroom Alternative SHOWDOWN - Which One Is The Best in 2021?

Lightroom has been the go-to raw editing program for the longest time. But, if you don't want to use Lightroom, there aren't really videos running down the plethora of alternatives. That's why I chose to download the trial to 9 different alternatives and see how they work.

Drive folder with the finished images:

#Lightroom #PhotoEditing #LuminarAI #LightroomAlternative
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[villerasku]

I have now tried Exposure X7 as well as On1 Photo RAW and here are my conclusions.

Exposure:
The UI is just wonderful. It is really really simple to start using and everything I feel like I need are just there instantly. Overall, all features work very very well and I feel like it's going to be the one that I go with.
Exposure X7 costs 129$

On1 Photo RAW:
The UI at first seems very good. At first, On1 almost went to the top of the list for me. But, problems arose when I wanted to do the HSL adjustments. Sadly, the features were nowhere to be found (at least easily), so that kind of ruined it for me. I will say, the extra touch-up features on On1 are very extensive and seem fantastic as well.
On1 Photo Raw costs 113, 95€ or 9, 10€/month or 102, 50€/year (subscriptions cost 200gb) also, I'm not sure if these are sale prices or what.

Also, I did both of these trials on my laptop which is not a powerful rig and both pieces of software worked really well. All edits were nearly real-time. And exports only took seconds once again.

Have you ever used any of the programs from this video? If so, which one? Which one of them looked like the most pleasant to work with?

PS. The focus box on my head is a byproduct of this video being the second video I shoot with this camera. Apparently a common bug. Quite frustrating.

[Vanalleswa]

exactly your reason why i am watching this. If i just could buy Lightroom and have it for the rest of my life, i would be happy.. but noooo, they want my money every year!!! i hate it.

[lphilpot]

Regarding RawTherapee and darktable you're absolutely correct, they *require* learning: "With power comes responsibility", sorta. 🙂 They're both very much in the "here are all the tools, now you need to learn (to use) them" school. They're designed to give you total control, but with total control comes the necessity to learn and manage that control (i.e., they're sharp tools). Both of them have a huge depth of functionality. Your 'intentional newbie' approach is certainly how it usually happens in the real world. But I don't think it's valid long-term since no one serious about it will stay there. Generically speaking, if you're shooting raw in the first place you're probably well past "one-click-fixes". So IMO, pick the tools that'll allow you to go the farthest and then invest in learning it.

To compare then at a very high level, the major differences (UIs aside) is that darktable is a conversion / editing plus DAM tool (import, tagging, etc.). RawTherapee is purely conversion / editing. darktable is moving to a scene-referred workflow that's as minimally as possibly limited by display device restrictions (larger color gamuts, etc.). There's a fork of RT called ART that targets UI simplification.

For RawTherapee I recommend Andy Astbury's channel and the official Rawpedia documentation. For darktable, check out the channels of Aurelien Pierre (a primary DT developer, advanced), Bruce WIlliamson (beginner / intermediate oriented) and Boris Hadjukovic (advanced) to name a few. Also see its official online documentation. Both of their forums on PIXLS.US are massively good resources.

RawTherapee

darktable

P.S. - I did hear your disclaimer about your approach... just saying my $0.02 🙂

[bradleygro]

This was SO helpful! I also appreciate your attention to the UI, which is a monumental factor for me. Most every other review I've seen completely ignores the interface and control layout which directly impacts how well I'm able to learn and use a program. Thanks!

[Tinaleann_]

New subie here just because you mention other photo editors aside from Lightroom.(I can’t stand subscription stuffs). So, thank you for this video.

[Mica]

pirating Adobe Products is always morally correct

[mrt_tube]

For ACDSee you were in the wrong place for raw editing, switch to develop mode first

[dissipatezz]

The reason you made this video is the same reason I am watching it. Thanks for doing the leg work so we don't have to do as much!

[EPeltzer]

I settled on RawTherapee about 4 years ago and have been happy. I initially tried DarkTable, it was maybe easier to pick up but then I soon realized the more advanced operations were not as satisfactory or simply missing. RT is really deeply capable and even in some cases more granular controls than LR. So a pretty and intuitive UI is great, but if it doesn't do what you need . . .

[jeffkogler]

A very good video. It addressed to a significant extent the questions I have about comparable software. Thank you.

[xoneeleven]

Luminar has a file size limitation, that has not been fixed. Additionally, Luminar is slower than dirt. We have an enterprise workstation with two-Xeon processors, and 128GB RAM. Affinity Photo is good, but as you said, it is not "enough".

[signedelacroix]

Affinity photo are now v. 2 now. But it's not a LR alternative as your video show. It's a Photoshop alternative. But I understand your point of view, it's hard to lean a software and when you do it's hard to move to another one.
Photo director is certainly the easiest to learn, it's very geared to beginner. And it give incredible results.

[greatpix]

Good review! If you ever do an update to this video maybe it would be a good idea to find other pro photographers who have switched from Adobe products to one of these other alternatives, then have a sort of roundtable discussion speaking on what each person liked or disliked about Adobe vs alternative. So you could speak of your switch to Luminar (and since there is Luminar 4, Luminar AI, and Luminar Neo maybe you could speak on differences?) Someone else could talk about their switching to Affinity Photo. Capture One. DXO, etc. It would be interesting to speak with photographers who, like you, have tried all the alternatives and speak on why they finally went with the software they did?

[arnonart]

i on linux and use rawtherapee as my main raw editor. it's a great tool with a relatively low learning curve. at least when comparing with darktable. what you mentioned about not being able to be precise with the sliders: press shift and scroll with the mouse. you can't review and compare anything if you don't know theme equally inside out. otherwise the comparison is biased.

[unyu-cyberstorm]

one thing with photo director is that you have to enable hardware acceleration for some features to work well

[greatpix]

Speaking for myself, I've been using home computers since 1978 and before that, in college, IBM mainframes that used punch cards. Over the years I've tried almost all those software alternatives and even others not mentioned. For paid software I did the purchase to have more time to test the product. The first thing I need to talk about is the interface. Some like RawTherapee, Darktable, Capture One - have over the years become more and more complicated to the point of making Photoshop look easy. The learning curve is getting steeper and steeper. I would like them to keep with more traditional design language. If they want to include every feature or control known to mankind at least offer a simpler control panel option somewhat like Adobe Photoshop Elements does with a Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced options. That way with RawTherapee you won't have beginners jumping into the deep end of the pool.

As far as color, I give the award to the manufacturer's own software, Nikon is a good example of retrieving the most accurate colors in Nikon's own color palette. After that I like Capture One for being able to get me closer to that color palette of the Original Manufacturer. Adobe is trying to improve but still hasn't gotten there, at least with Nikon's pallettel.

I'm not really a fan or 'looks' macros or filter based photo editing software like Luminar as they never get me anywhere close to where I want to go as quickly as I can get there using Lightroom's or Photoshop's interrace. That most likely comes because I used to edit photos for other pro photographers and companies. How much fun I had proceeding 1.500 images that I had to finish in 48 hours. I admit I did do some macros to use in the same set of photos but changed for a new sequence of photos.

I ended up using the wrist brace I sometime use when bowling to ease the pain in my wrists that weekend.

[cameraprepper]

You an also get Capture One in free versions for Fuji, Nikon and Sony, the Capture One Express, I use it for Sony and can highly recommend it !

[markdalbey]

I have been using Luminar since Luminar 2018. I simply do not like the Adobe SAS model, that is a deal breaker for me. 2018 was before Luminar got into ai and it was slow, but it was reasonably fast and it ran fine on my Haswell laptop, at least fast enough to live with. I wouldn't put ai on a Hawell laptop. When Luminar got in ai, things slowed down a lot, the speed was terrible in Luminar 4. The speed in ai is annoying, but I can live with it. Luminar seems to be getting faster with each generation. The computer you describe may be a little old for ai. You might try a newer computer. It seems that with people that have speed issues, the older the computer the bigger the issue. It may not be about the beefiness of the computer, it may be about the newer instruction sets in a newer computer. I built a 10400 and do not experience speeds anywhere near what you describe. Opening times are usually around 5 seconds, exports times seem to be on the average 15 seconds. Very rarely, export times go up to 45 seconds, but never over, and as very rarely as little as four seconds. File size seems to be a large determining factor in opening files. Using compression in DNG RAW converter before loading your files into Luminar seems to reduce the load times considerably. Luminar is slow for me, but it is more of an annoyance than a deal breaker.

[maartenpsion]

I tried all of the editors and went for On1 PhotoRAW in blackfriday sale.

These are my ratings. Lemme know what you think.

1: Capture one Pro (5/5)

I think this is the very best but it did not have a great black friday deal. The price is a tad too steep. Still the best editor

2: On1 Photo RAW (4.5/5)

I think this is second best especially for portraits. Tons of options and I think the workflow is great. They might have to do some optimization though.

3: Skylum Luminar (2.5/5)

Way too slow imo. Horrible performance. Also there are like 3 tools and they release 2 new ones every 1 or 2 year or what? It also has a trend in photography that I quite dislike. AI here and AI there. Its still good though but I wasn't blown away.

4: DXO Photolab (2/2)

I couldn't do even the most basic stuff that is easy to do in other tools. It just didn't work for me. Also expensive and you need to buy packs to do something as incredibly basic as adding a vignette?? No HDR or whatever and I think other tools do this way better.

5: SilkyPix Developer studio (3/5)

Terribly marketed in the west but not that bad honestely. Wouldnt instabuy this though.


I think the best is capture one pro. Great raw engine. Not really a lightroom clone but Affinity Photo is a great purchase as well. Especially alongside C1 or On1 or whatever. I would say to go either for capture one or On1 Photo RAW. I picked on1 because of their cool BF deal.

Thats it.

[DalsPhotography]

Lovely video ! I have tried all kind of softwares as well, and it also
depends a lot if you are using cameras like Fuji (like me) the best
color rendition for fuji I found it within a very old program, slow, but
efficient for a first tiff file : Silkypix, then I might use any other
program . With Canon, I find that they all, are kind of similar, I am a fan
of Topaz De-noise as well as Gigapixel Ai from Topaz. There are lots of
alternatives, even for a mac user as me. Great stuff, pls keep it on,
Best regards from Uruguay. Have used a lot of prg, Capture one is great, and On1 too!