Best alternatives to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop

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MiqsPix

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Name
Roger
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After many years of using Lightroom and Photoshop in the Adobe Photographers Suite I am now balking at the new increased monthly cost and now seeking an alternative. Admittedly I don't use these apps as much as I did (now retired) so thinking of trying something new and less costly. Any suggestions please would be welcome.
 
Photoshop elements. Affinity photo. OnOne RAW, all standalone software packages.
 
Affinity Photo is good, an alternative to Photoshop rather than LR, will cost you £67.99 for a perpetual licence at the moment. Couple of times a year you get a much cheaper deal. You get free updates until they make a new version. When I eventually upgraded to AP2 I got Designer and Publisher thrown in for a similar price!

I use Capture One Pro rather than LR; it's very good, but licensing has been a bit controversial in recent years. I have a perpetual licence; I don't get any free upgrades now, and haven't had a paid upgrade since some time in 2021. This is OK for me as most of my cameras haven't changed since last century! I may well pay for one more (quite expensive) upgrade to sort out an issue I have with processing black and white scans, but if/when C1Pro becomes more untenable I'll definitely be looking much more closely at darktable.
 
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You must decide for yourself based on your requirements and budget. However, I find LR/PS has no competition in respect of performance. Many of the "competitors" are missing important functions and thus not good value. I also find that around £100 p.a. this is fairly trivial compared to the amount I spend on other aspects of photography (includes camera equipment and attending suitable events for photography). I have spent many times that £100 for petrol money alone connected with my photography.

Dave
 
I have Affinity Photo and use it intead of Ps in my soon to be expired subscription.

Anyone use ACDSee? It seems to have decent cataloging and features but it never gets mentioned. I did trial it plus a load of others a few years ago when Lr went subscription and if I hadn't decided to just buy a voucher on black friday each year it's probably what I'd gone for.
 
woodworm said:
I have Affinity Photo and use it intead of Ps in my soon to be expired subscription.

Anyone use ACDSee? It seems to have decent cataloging and features but it never gets mentioned. I did trial it plus a load of others a few years ago when Lr went subscription and if I hadn't decided to just buy a voucher on black friday each year it's probably what I'd gone for.
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I use ACDSee, I’m not an expert user user so take my views as food for thought. Decent cataloging library. Things I don’t like is the quality of edits if you go to too extreme(even with RAW) as banding etc. Not suitable for high iso images unless you use something like DXO Pureraw which I do. I’m on the 2013 version so can’t comment on the recent releases but some of the AI stuff is not refined. Personally I think this software is for hobbyist and for social media posting and not particularly suitable for professional work where image quality is paramount.
 
Were I to change from Lightroom, DxO would be my choice. However unless functionality changes, I see no reason to move from LR. The cost is peanuts compared with a) what I spend on hardware, and b) what I used to spend on film.
 
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