Photography

Nope. Not in my opinion. Nothing beats lightroom as a whole package. There are alternatives that do some things better but as a whole I don't think they can really compete.

I have to use Lightroom even though I’ve Lao used all the others. Lightroom presets are much more popular. Lightroom tethering from my Sony camera with smart shooter for dslr scanning. I just can’t drop it nut I do hate that it’s a subscription.

Make sure you check the contract length of the subscription. If you cancel with some time to go, Adobe could charge a cancellation fee of a certain % of the remaining time. Not sure if they still do this after the amount of complaints they got last time this was in the news.

Masking and the new Point Color control are keeping me tied to Adobe.

If you google "alternative to _____" you normally will get a website that lists good alternative software.

You're looking for a RAW editor and organizer, and there are a bunch out there. For free there's Darktable and RawTherapee, and if you're just a hobbyist, that's a great place to start, I prefer RawTherapee personally.

But for paid software, which may be necessary for some people, there are a couple. I landed on Capture One because of all the non-Adobe options, it's the only one that had support for Tethering, which was a feature I needed. It's probably the most full-featured competitor to Lightroom, and it does most things as good or better than LR, but it's also a pretty expensive program in the category. I'd only go there if I was an advanced amateur and have a need for the power.

r/genp

I went down this path a year ago. Apple Photos would have been easier but I didn’t want to give up the filesystem based catalogue organization I had - >70,000 pictures over 15 years.

I went with Darktable. There was a definite adjustment period and I think I still have to Google around. Lightroom was easier / I was used to it. But Darktable has seemingly every feature I need and then some.

Knowing my photos won’t be hostage to a greedy corporation is liberating!

I honestly don’t understand the hate for Adobe.

Is it the subscription model? Ya… business is business. Please suggest a better model that funds software development consistently. I hated it initially, but like not having to buy and install updates all the time.

Is it the performance of the tool? Usability? These are both great to me…

I mean you get what you pay for, more or less. There are other good tools out there, but nothing that is way better all-around that I’ve seen.