Mac Or Pc Desktop For Lightroom Editing 2018

In this Mac vs. PC test, our results showed that the Apple iMac was behind by 35% or more across the board, making the PC the clear victor. Final Thoughts There’s a lot of debate on what these tests actually mean, I wanted to share my thoughts. The best photo editing app for the Mac Lightroom. August 20, 2018. In many cases, especially for existing users, that will remain a traditional desktop or laptop computer. In my case though, it means my iPad Pro, and I can make that choice knowing that I’m not giving up functionality. That’s the power of cross.

It’s no longer enough for a photo editing application to be great at what it does in isolation. Modern computing is defined by connected workflows. The ability to pass tasks seamlessly between devices, between contexts, and between coworkers is increasingly important.

That’s why, despite some potent new competitors, Adobe Lightroom remains our pick for the best photo editing and management application for mainstream users. Lightroom provides a strong editing and photo library management environment, but it also builds a powerful ecosystem of apps, learning resources, and community around those tools.

It’s a joint pick, in fact, because Lightroom now exists as two distinct versions: the cloud-first Lightroom CC, and the familiar, more powerful Lightroom Classic CC. Both have their merits, and we’ll discuss what kind of user each is best suited for.

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How We Chose

It’s important to note that this comparison is specific to photo editors that also provide Digital Asset Management (DAM) features.

This all-in-one approach is appealing not only because it provides an integrated workflow, but because it allows you to manage your photo files with more organizational control than a simple file structure would. We’re interested in tools that are designed to take you from initial import and culling all the way to final polish and export.

As a result, while standalone editors like Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator Pro, Skylum Luminar, etc. are fantastic at what they do, they are beyond the scope of this piece.

Main Criteria

That first restriction narrowed our field of contenders significantly, and from there we considered the remaining apps according to the following characteristics:

Features and processing quality: It’s all too common to see photo editors judged based on their initial rendering of a file rather than the potential results after processing. While initial rendering can be a useful data point, it doesn’t say enough about the quality of the processing engine.
We took the time to comparatively edit a variety of photos across all the apps in an effort to see which provided the best results up front, which provided the most editing leeway, and which got us from raw file to edited output most efficiently.
Design and ease of use: Though much of the core functionality is shared between apps in this category, the way tools are presented, how granular the controls are, and how customizable the interface is can all influence how you work.
We looked for something that’s relatively easy to start with, but has room for growth as your needs and skills develop.
Ecosystem: A crucial aspect of an app’s appeal is the ecosystem of supporting resources that build up around it, both from the manufacturer and from third parties.
The availability of communities, tutorials, classes, presets, etc. can not only help with the initial learning process, but also speed up workflows for more confident users.
Price and cost structure: Cost is a tricky subject, but in general we’re looking for products that have a clear, understandable cost structure and that feel like good value for money.
This is very subjective territory and we recognize that there are differing schools of thought on price ranges, single-payment vs. subscription, and so on that are beyond the scope of this comparison.

Lightroom is the Best Mainstream Photo Management and Editing App for macOS

Adobe has been firing on all cylinders with Lightroom development this year, introducing an entirely new cloud-first version of the app, establishing a strong cross-platform presence, and improving core processing tools like color profiles.

Today’s Lightroom is a refined, ubiquitous environment for managing your photo library, whether you choose the re-thought cloud-based Lightroom CC, or the more familiar, professional-oriented Lightroom Classic CC.

Features in Lightroom Classic CC

Lightroom Classic CC is the evolution of the familiar Lightroom we know and love. It borrows a limited version of the cloud syncing capabilities from its younger sibling, Lightroom CC, while retaining the robust feature set it’s always had.

This includes a powerful catalog system capable of handling thousands and thousands of photos with ease, plus the tools for triaging and organizing those photos quickly. Similarly, you have thorough metadata editing controls; a deep, nesting keyword system in place to help categorize photos by content; and a map module dedicated to managing geotagging information.

When it’s time to edit your selects, Lightroom Classic CC features very capable core editing tools, from exposure, to color balance, to detail. It’s a well-chosen assortment, and most of the sliders are more intelligent than their name suggests, performing several tasks behind the scenes to achieve their intended effect. This is particularly true of combo sliders like “Dehaze,” which performs several contrast-related adjustments in a single action.

Beyond the basics, Lightroom Classic CC includes merging capabilities for processing HDR photo stacks, as well as stitching together panoramas. These are unique to Lightroom Classic CC, as most other tools require you to handle this kind of task externally.

Once you’ve edited your shot, Lightroom Classic CC offers a dedicated print module for preparing for physical output, and you can set up digital export presets in a variety of formats and fidelity settings.

Features in Lightroom CC

New to Adobe’s ecosystem is Lightroom CC, a streamlined version of the app built around cloud storage and cross-platform sync.

Compared to Lightroom Classic CC, Lightroom CC has no Print module or proofing tools, no Map module or support for geotags, no tethering support, no HDR or panorama merging, limited batch editing, limited keyword support, no smart collections (there are only “albums”), no face recognition, no file renaming, no adjustment history, JPG-only export (and only in the sRGB color space), and support for a single catalog only (you can’t create multiple catalogs like you can in Classic CC).

This sounds like a lot of missing stuff, but in exchange you get a number of important benefits:

A unified interface and tool set across Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and (to a more limited extent), the web and Apple TV.
The ability to sync and edit raw files and presets across those platforms (instead of just Smart Previews like with Lightroom Classic CC) and manage storage use on each device separately.
Leaner, faster operation.
Access to the Adobe Sensei cloud intelligence for smart search and organization without having to manually keyword everything.

Lightroom CC retains all the core photo editing tools from its older sibling, and Adobe has been updating it at a breakneck pace to fill in the functionality gaps. Case in point, Adobe has introduced synced presets, whereby any of your custom presets within Lightroom CC will be automatically synced to Lightroom CC for iPhone, iPad, and even on the web. For many users, the inclusion of synced presets may be the kick to jump over to Lightroom CC full-time. While there is still a large gap between the capabilities of CC vs Classic CC, this gap has dramatically narrowed over time at a very fast pace.

Note:Synced presets are only available on Lightroom CC. Presets will not sync between Lightroom CC on the iPhone or iPad and Lightroom Classic CC on the Mac.

In the meantime, being able to access and edit your raw files from any device is a spectacular feature, one that genuinely transforms the way you can think about photo processing in ways that adding a new tool here and there really doesn’t.

Unlike iCloud Photo Library, Lightroom CC lets you manage storage very precisely, so you can explicitly choose which albums should be stored locally and which should remain in the cloud until you call them down. This is crucial for phones and tablets, where storage space is often at a premium. Of course, the fact that it’s cloud-based means that you’ll need a strong internet connection to take full advantage, but assuming you have that, it’s tremendous.

While it can be daunting to trust your photo library to the cloud, in my usage, the system has been flawless—no delays, no strange errors, no missing photos. Adobe clearly spent a lot of time making sure the underlying architecture is solid, and it has paid off.

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Design in Lightroom Classic CC

Lightroom Classic CC hasn’t changed its overall look and feel much over the years, which is both good and bad.

It’s good because it’s now familiar and those of us with years of muscle memory built around its interface won’t be forced to re-learn anything.

It’s also a bit of a negative point though. I remember when I first switched to Lightroom from Aperture (RIP), I was surprised by how cluttered it felt. There are a lot of sections and panels, and it can be a bit much to take in at first.

Once you do though, you begin to grasp the logic. The interface exists as a set of purpose-built “modules,” including Library for organizing and Develop for processing, and you can customize your Lightroom Classic CC experience to hide ones you don’t use (Web, in my case).

Within the Develop module, all the controls are glued to the right side of the screen and exist in a fixed order. It’s a sensible order, following the usual path from exposure corrections through color and contrast adjustments, all the way down to perspective and calibration tweaks.

If you find yourself following that processing path for every kind of image, then you’ll feel right at home. But it feels rigid compared to the way other competitors, like Capture One Pro, allow you to customize not only the order of tools, but also which side of the screen any given panel is attached to for a truly personalized workspace. The closest you can get to customizing your Lightroom Classic CC workspace is showing or hiding certain panels, and showing your name/logo in the corner of the window.

It took me quite a while to get used to the denser, fixed interface conventions in Lightroom, which is part of why I’m excited about the new Lightroom CC starting from scratch.

Design in Lightroom CC

By taking a clean slate approach with Lightroom CC, Adobe freed themselves to explore what a contemporary photo management and editing environment should look like.

Their main focus was on having it scale seamlessly across different devices and screen sizes. This seems like a strange idea until you experience the result in person; it allows you the freedom to choose your editing device based on what you prefer to work on. In many cases, especially for existing users, that will remain a traditional desktop or laptop computer.

In my case though, it means my iPad Pro, and I can make that choice knowing that I’m not giving up functionality. That’s the power of cross-platform feature parity.

In more concrete terms, the new interface is a lot less busy, and a lot less modular. The left sidebar is now dedicated to your photo library and the albums it contains, and the right side has become a home for different editing panels. All of these slide in and out of view, but you never actually leave the app’s main view. The tools change, but the context doesn’t.

Also notable is the very prominent search bar that now lives front and center at the top of the app. This search field is powered by Adobe’s cloud-based Sensei AI technology, which competes with the likes of Google and Apple Photos to intelligently recognize content and metadata from your images and present results accordingly. It works well, and because it is powered by machine learning, will continue to improve as more people use it.

By consolidating things into a single-window design, Adobe has made Lightroom CC feel cleaner, easier, and quicker than its older sibling for mainstream use.

The Lightroom/Adobe Ecosystem Advantage

Scale is a powerful ally in any comparison between apps, and Adobe’s tremendous reach and established history in the industry have given it an unfair advantage.

The number of resources — from both first and third-party vendors — is simply unmatched. If you need a tutorial, hundreds exist. If you want some presets to work with, you’ll find almost endless options. Forums, YouTube channels, and entire websites exist around this community.

Then there’s Photoshop. Users of both Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC have the most seamless roundtrip workflow with the photo editing titan.

This is particularly important for professional users, who will find that any gaps in editing functionality within Lightroom are handily filled by Photoshop. In this way, some pros may find themselves preferring the streamlined experience of Lightroom CC, knowing that they can toss images out to Photoshop when they need more powerful editing capabilities.

Ultimately, while features and design can be argued back and forth, ecosystem is one area where Adobe is so far ahead of the competition that it’s basically no contest.

Lightroom Cost & Pricing

Adobe is no longer offering standalone licenses for their Creative Cloud apps, a fact that has put a lot of subscription-averse people off of using their products.

For the rest of us, Adobe has two main plans dedicated to photographers: the Lightroom CC Plan, and the Creative Cloud Photography Plan. Both plans start at $9.99USD/month, but they offer very different things.

The Lightroom CC Plan gives you access to the new Lightroom CC, as well as 1TB of cloud storage for your library. The Creative Cloud Photography Plan, on the other hand, only gives you 20GB of storage, but it includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, and Photoshop. You can also increase your cloud storage up to 10TB for an additional fee.

Both plans have their merits. The former is ideal for mainstream users who won’t need the editing power of Photoshop and who will be used to cloud-based photo libraries thanks to the ubiquity of iCloud Photo Library and Google Photos. They’ll get a powerful editing tool that works everywhere, and the cloud storage functions as an offsite backup of their image library too, a service you’d otherwise have to pay for separately.

The Creative Cloud Photography Plan is a good fit for advanced users and pros. It gives you the full spectrum of Adobe’s photography apps, and assumes that you’ll prefer to use local catalogs in Lightroom Classic CC, hence the stingy default cloud storage quota. It’s easy to get more storage though, so for a bit more money you can have the best of both worlds.

Runner-Up: Capture One Pro is the Best Professional Photo Management and Editing App for macOS

Despite casting a wide net with its two incarnations, Lightroom can’t possibly encompass the needs of all photographers. Luckily, this leaves room for some excellent competitors, the most impressive of which is undoubtedly Capture One Pro. Now in its 11th edition, Capture One Pro is a proven powerhouse, trusted in high-end studios all over the world.

Many of its adherents swear that it provides superior processing to Lightroom, a claim that’s difficult to test. While it’s true that the default rendering tends to be more pleasing, that only accounts for the starting point (and Adobe’s new Adobe Color profile in Lightroom closes the gap by providing a rather…familiar rendering).

In my usage, I do prefer the output I get from Capture One Pro, but that has more to do with the nature of its tools than their capability. They’re almost always more granular, more sophisticated, and more customizable, allowing for different approaches to processing. While the tools are more complex, understanding them allows me to get to a pleasing result faster than I can in Lightroom, despite having significantly more experience using Lightroom.

Color tools are vastly superior, offering a powerful wheel-based editor with precise controls for making adjustments to specific color ranges, and a dedicated skin tone module. Similarly, where Lightroom gives you a basic “Split Toning” tool, Capture One Pro provides dedicated highlight, mid-tone, and shadow color balance wheels, each of which has its own hue, saturation, and lightness adjustment control.

In the Curves tool, Capture One Pro goes beyond the RGB curve with a very useful “luma” curve that can manipulate contrast without affecting color saturation. Speaking of contrast, where Lightroom has a single “clarity” control, Capture One Pro has four clarity algorithms you can switch between, each of which behave differently. It also provides a dedicated “structure” tool for refining micro-contrast (separate from the sharpening tool). And for adding that finishing touch, you can choose between six grain algorithms instead of just one.

What’s more, all of these adjustments can be made on layers, like in Photoshop, with dedicated masking tools and opacity controls to help tailor the effect to taste.

These are just a few examples of where Capture One Pro’s tools take a step beyond what Lightroom offers. Features like annotations, sessions, tethering, Photoshop round-trip support, and more really push the envelope for professional usage.

In terms of workflow and capabilities, the biggest advantage is in Capture One Pro’s flexibility. The interface is deeply adaptable, allowing you to add or remove tools from the sidebar, detach any tool and resize it for more precise control, re-order tools, even move the location of the sidebars entirely to create dedicated layouts, called Workspaces, that you can save and recall with a keyboard shortcut.

Compared to Lightroom, the main features that are missing are the same degree of cross-platform support, cloud sync, and a few specialized features like HDR/panorama merging, or an equivalent to things like Survey view for culling shots.

And all of its power comes at the expense of intuitiveness. Capture One Pro is more daunting to start with than either version of Lightroom. Also, while it’s been around for years and has a large user base, it still has nowhere near the ecosystem richness that Lightroom has, with relatively few third-party preset (or “style” in Capture One parlance) packs. Credit where credit is due though: Capture One Pro has an extremely active YouTube channel that’s constantly putting out excellent tutorials and hosting webinars to help people get started.

Capture One Pro’s flexibility extends to pricing as well. You can choose to purchase a perpetual license for $299USD, which gets you all updates until the next major version. Or, you can get a subscription license for as low as $20USD/month (annual subscription with monthly billing). Pre-paying for the year saves you 25%, for a total of $180/year.

Capture One Pro is unashamedly focused on professional users, but the growing library of tutorials make it a great choice for ambitious beginners as well. Still, it’s very much an “old-school” sort of app, built around the idea of bringing home your photos, importing them into a computer, and editing them on that machine only.

Other Contenders

While Capture One Pro’s track record, polish, and processing quality cement it as our runner-up, there are a number of other extremely promising competitors that deserve a mention.

Apple Photos

While we’re fans of iCloud Photo Library as a general photo management solution, people who are looking to take their photography seriously may run into the limitations of Apple’s service.

For one thing, handling of raw files is rudimentary and inconsistent across platforms. File management in general is a lot less refined, with almost no export options, and only two choices for file storage: keep a local copy of everything, or trust Apple to manage local/cloud storage distribution for you (“Optimize Storage”). The unpredictability of the latter makes for an untrustworthy system when you need to be sure that a certain album is available when you need it, even offline.

That being said, organization is good: Apple Photos includes the ability to create smart albums, and handles face and location data, along with keywords. Search is also very good, competing favourably with Google Photos and Adobe’s Sensei.

If you work primarily with JPG files, Apple Photos makes for a simple, seamless pick that’s built right into your Mac and offers affordable storage tiers for more storage.

DxO PhotoLab

The second is DxO PhotoLab, the successor to DxO Optics Pro.

In many ways, DxO’s processing is a bit ahead of the curve. It had a tool called ClearView long before Lightroom introduced Dehaze. It had Smart Lighting before Capture One Pro added a Brightness slider. And, of course, its PRIME noise reduction algorithm is legendary, capable of cleaning up images that I would have thought unsalvageable in other editors.

Thanks to its parent company’s extensive research and review of imaging technology, PhotoLab also has sophisticated camera/lens combo correction profiles to optimize sharpness, distortion, and aberration more precisely than any other app.

Setting aside its uncertain future, PhotoLab falls short on a few fronts. Firstly, its interface is cramped, and many of its best tools are hidden in the clutter. For instance, PhotoLab has a secret weapon that I love: the ability to impart a color rendering from classic cameras. I often use this to apply a beautiful classic Canon color tonality from the 1Ds Mark III to my Olympus photos for a pleasing starting point.

Unfortunately, the tools for organizing and culling photos are rudimentary, exports are slow, and PhotoLab doesn’t support Fujifilm cameras at all, which cuts a lot of photographers out of the picture.

Still, it’s a capable, affordable choice that starts at $129USD for the Essentials version, though you should probably spring for the $199USD Elite edition for access to the best tools.

ON1 Photo Raw 2018

One of the newest options in this space is ON1 Photo Raw 2018.

Photo Raw is an amalgamation of several formerly-separate apps or algorithms that come together to form an extremely feature-rich choice.

It has a dedicated skin retouching module similar to Capture One Pro, it features native HDR and panorama merging like Lightroom, and comes complete with a comprehensive and intuitive set of image editing tools.

Certain tools, including the marvellous Dynamic Contrast, are separated into an Effects tab rather than the normal edit area. I would prefer they all live in the same area, personally, but it’s not a big deal.

One area that does deserve its own module is the Resize tab, which provides amazing resizing results tailored to your intended output, with presets for print and screen. The algorithm running under the hood is the famous Genuine Fractals one, known for producing very detailed, natural looking enlargements even when pushed to extremes.

ON1 Photo Raw 2018 is a very close contender for the top spot, but its relative youth as a product has some consequences, like the quality of the image having changed noticeably even since launch. Improvement is great, of course, but it’s hard to build workflows around a tool that’s still growing.

Still, this is one scenario where taking a chance on a newcomer can be a great idea, and the price of entry is a reasonable $120USD for a perpetual license, or $130USD/year for a perpetual license along with free upgrades to the next version and a bevy of extra content and monthly loyalty rewards.

Darktable

It wouldn’t be fair to discuss this category of apps without considering the open source options.

Darktable is very much an open source version of Lightroom. It shares a similar interface paradigm, similar features, and of course has the tremendous advantage of being completely free. In some areas, particularly the degree of control over masks, Darktable is superior to all the others.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with open source software, there’s an off-putting lack of interface polish, user experience sensitivity, and accessibility to new users. The app’s many editing tools are often cryptically named, and the interface is decidedly non-native feeling, to the point where it might leave you disoriented unless you have some familiarity with Linux software (Darktable is available on macOS, Windows, and many Linux distributions, but is clearly built for the latter).

If you’re willing to read the manual and the idea of getting powerful editing and organization tools for free appeals to you, then Darktable is a very capable option.

RawTherapee

The last contender is probably the most powerful image editing suite available. It is also the least accessible.

If Darktable is the open source version of Lightroom, then RawTherapee is like an open source version of Capture One Pro designed by a syndicate of alien engineers who are aware of human beings only as the inconvenient creatures that report bugs and otherwise interrupt their pursuit of the über editor.

Using RawTherapee is an exercise in humility. Its dense, terrifying interface is home to a labyrinthine array of tools that bear only a passing resemblance to their relatives in other apps. Wherever Lightroom hides five obscure, inscrutable parameters from you by consolidating them into a single slider marked “Contrast,” RawTherapee will reveal all those hidden parameters and invite you to manipulate them.

Have you ever heard of the l*a*b color space? Do you know what wavelet editing is? Have you been clamoring for 13 different choices of algorithm for raw file demosaicing? If so, RawTherapee is the editor for you!

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Conclusion

With such a low barrier to entry (thanks to the smartphone revolution), it’s no longer just dedicated hobbyists and professionals looking to manage and edit photographs. Everyone can benefit from a good system for organizing, processing, and sharing their shots.

Adobe’s developing Lightroom ecosystem is the ideal choice for most people because it caters to a broad range of needs, from beginner to professional, and does so with the support of a huge community of users, experts, and developers.

While it’s true that other options sometimes exceed Lightroom’s capabilities, they tend to do so in specialized ways that don’t impact a normal workflow.

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Beyond the details of functionality, though, the main appeal of Lightroom is its forward-thinking, device-agnostic approach to managing photos. It feels decidedly modern, and while it makes ambitious promises, Adobe is certainly well-positioned to deliver on them.

If you’re in the market for an all-in-one approach to organizing and editing your photos, Lightroom should be your first stop.

Adobe Lightroom – the most trusted Photoshop software that addresses all the editing and retouches needs of digital photographers and lets them focus on the raw images and editing works immediately. First version Adobe Lightroom 1.0 was released on 19^th Feb 2007. Entering into the eleventh year Lightroom created a revolution among the photo editors in both the tools and interface perspective.

But there are other Lightroom alternatives to look out for if you feel Lightroom is too complicated for you or if it’s out of the budget.

What Can You Do With Lightroom As A Photographer?

Manage all the photographs.
Effortlessly display them in print, and dynamic slideshows and interactive Web galleries.
The cross platform solution offered by Lightroom supports you to finish the projects without much effort.
You can use Lightroom on both Windows and Mac.
Use in office, home or at any location with the cross sync feature.
Spend minimum time on the system to spend more time behind the lens.

If you feel Lightroom dominates the market in the last one decade, then find the ten best Lightroom alternatives along with their features.

Take a look at the Five Interesting features of Lightroom, before diving into the alternative options.

Five Dominating Lightroom Attributes

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Lightroom allows Editing and does not demand to create layers, and it is non-destructive.
No need to swap between different applications for editing. All under one Library makes life easy to navigate between images.
Get back life to the images that have a dark background or an over exposed brightness using the Lightroom’s Graduated Filter Tool.
The cropping option available with Crop Overlay tool highlights Lightroom in its unique way letting you crop the image you want the image to look like.
Web export feature in Lightroom offers 30 templates to present your images elegantly.

Downsides of Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom has some downsides too.

For those who do not want to pay monthly charges look for alternatives.
Even though there are many RAW formats, Lightroom supports a few image file types only.
GPU support added to Lightroom 6.0 needs further improvement.
Lightroom supports only single-user image measurements and has not scaled to a multi-user settings

Let Us Look At The Ten Best Alternatives Of Lightroom To Break The Monopoly.

List of Top Ten Lightroom Alternatives

Exposure X2 – Alien Skin

Exposure X2 can offer that change you look for from Lightroom. Yes, the initial migrating trouble might happen to you from the familiar Lightroom perspective. But worth a try. Exposure X2 offers catalog-free design. Alien Skin describes that the software it has employed makes use of the “the identical familiar folder structure” like your Windows or Mac. This results in an efficient and spontaneous storage system. This feature makes managing Exposure X2 quickly and easily when compared to Lightroom.

Exposure X2 provides the users with a list of photo filters that help the user to get the desired Polaroid look on the digital photos with just one click. These filters get connected by manual photo adjustment controls. This allows all the changes in the image including color, clarity, exposure, grain, and much more. Lens distortion gets adjusted for different camera lenses under Exposure X2 editor.

ACDSee lets the user carry out the primary elements of their photography workflow without much effort and time. Apart from allowing the users create, view, edit and share the photos, it also arranges your pictures, shows them in a sequential context. The edit accuracy is retained with the faithful color matching and pressure sensitivity brush tool. Extremely high DPI support makes it possible to view on 4K monitors.

It becomes straightforward to move your Lightroom collections to ACDSee without destructing the copy. Grouping photos using ACDSee makes life very easy even for a sophisticated search.

Any other alternative cannot surpass the image management feature of ACDSee.

Though some unused features are bloating in the upcoming releases, still it makes sense using ACDSee as an alternative to Lightroom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDZCkAsqL-c&feature=youtu.be

Capture One Pro software has started gaining popularity, and it has many features that deserve acknowledgment. Phase one has taken conscious efforts with Capture One Pro software. This software does not work only for the casual photographers who share images on Instagram. Capture One Pro has more to do with its technologically advanced features bundled into one application. Yes, Capture One Pro allows adjustments to a selected few elements within a photo. Numerous lens correction tools made Capture One Pro a real pro amidst the professional photographer community.

Capture One Pro claims with pride about its high-performance engine, and hence it can take care of fast browsing. Zooming happens within no time. Toggling and Panning unsurpassed all other alternatives. The three-step sharpening process highlights the software features.

It makes life easy by merging folders into catalogs depending on the orientation. The focus of the camera tethered to the PC for professional computer-adjusted photographs.

Tethering process of Capture One Pro, without any doubt, warrants the shift from Lightroom.

Yes, Corel is no more as familiar as it was in the past. But for the offers made by the company on all the image editing features one can make it an alternative to Lightroom.

AfterShot Pro 3, the best Corel’s alternative for Lightroom. With the features most pronounced including the non-destructive photo editing and the multi-version editing. There are a vast collection of fine-tuning tools like color adjustment, temperature modification, and much more. Add on features such as HDR, local contrast, noise correction, and lens adjustment. The present tools and water marking tools all make AfterShot a better alternative for Lightroom.

Professionals used to shoot in RAW mode can make use of Corel regular update on RAW camera profiles.

The plus side of Corel’s AfterShot Pro is regarding the software installation. Use one license and install software in a maximum of 3 PC.

AfterShot Pro license price slashed down from $79.99 USD to $54.99 USD for the benefit of the buyers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH9YlTsVLx0&feature=youtu.be

Darktable, an open source tool supported by Mac and Linux. However, Windows does not support Darktable. This virtual lighttable and darkroom software makes a good alternative for Lightroom to all photographers.

All your photo negatives get stored in its database and can be viewed using zoomable lightable.

Darktable works hard to bridge the gap flanked by all the other free raw converters. Nondestructive editing option offered by darktable ought to have a big applaud.

Check the darktable website to know all their features in detail and download your copy for free.

https://vimeo.com/194672406A new entrant in the market is coming up with efficient features. Supported only Mac when it began the journey and now supporting Windows OS as well. Offers a slick package but provides useful workflow and editing tools.RAW and regular processing options combined under a single app make Affinity Photo a seamless app.Worth the price, a viable option to replace Lightroom. Apple awarded the best Mac app for uninterrupted services to Affinity photo.

Camera bits launched Photo Mechanic, a third party app used by professional photographers looking for importing, tagging, and rating photos quickly.

Photo Mechanic cannot do the editing job. Although it cannot be a complete alternative to Lightroom, just combine both to improve the speed. The rate at which Photo Mechanic works directly makes Lightroom more efficient.

Photo Mechanic does not much alter the workflow of Lightroom so you can get going. But for the cost $150 USD, Photo Mechanic integrated with Lightroom proves to be a best-partnered app.

Use Photo Mechanic to import photos to your PC. Then Lightroom will do its editing job.

If speed is your requirement, then link Photo Mechanic with Lightroom.

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Get inspired by watching this

that demonstrates the Photo Mechanic and Lightroom performance together.Picktorial overtakes Lightroom by its unprecedented performance and speed. While some features match with Lightroom, Picktorial does not have modules like that of Lightroom.Picktorial got the third place as it works as an amazingly attractive alternative to Lightroom and Capture One. Like Affinity Photo always fall behind Photoshop, Picktorial comes next to Lightroom.Picktorial hails from raw photo editing platform, and this provides all the features demanded by professional photographers for the Mac OS.Without any plugin installed, you can look at the list of photos in the libraries and get going with promising editing.Luminosity and color mask options present in Picktorial helps to create a very sophisticated selection.

Last but not the least the RawTherapee software. Think of an alternative for Adobe Lightroom you will land up only at the Lightning-fast photo processing software RawTherapee. Intellectual workflow optimization software offers a free stand at the top of all software in alternating Adobe Lightroom.

RawTherapee, a sophisticated open source substitute for Adobe Lightroom. It can process raw files and image files including TIFF or JPEG. The processed images are sent to the GIMP.

RawTherapee employs non-destructive editing allowing you to revert to the actual file at any time. The photo processing feature is very advanced and supports adjustment of color, sharpness, noise, and much more.

The de-mosaicking algorithm used in RawTherapee decreases the art work in the converted images. The multi-core support enables RawTherapee to use the entire hardware.

Once you have completed all your editing work, you can save the settings. Yes, you can use this setting for all your future photographs.

RawTherapee allows you to handle images in groups. You can also edit multiple files at one go by making use of the tabbed interface option.

On the flip side, RawTherapee software cannot selectively edit the image regions.

Look at the table given for your perusal to know the license cost of all the ten Lightroom alternatives discussed.

Lightroom Alternative	Supporting OS	RAW Support	Price
Exposure X2 - Alien Skin	Apple Mac: OS X Yosemite (10.10), Windows 7 64-bit and above	Yes	$149 USD
ACD See Pro 10	Windows 7 and above versions	Yes	$119 USD
Capture One Pro	Windows OSX	Yes	$299 USD
Coral AfterShot Pro	Windows OSX	Yes	$79.99 USD (Current Offer $54.99 USD)
Darktable	Linux, Mac	Yes	Free
Affinity Photo	Mac, Windows, iPad	Yes	INR 4000
LightZone	Mac, Windows, Linux	Yes	Free
Photo Mechanic	Mac OS X 10.6.8 — 10.12.X, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10.DOWNLOAD	Yes	$150 USD
Picktorial	Mac	Yes	Introductory Price: $39.99 USD against $ (69.99) USD
RawTherapee	Linux, FreeBSD, Windows	Yes	Free

While it is good to check and compare the cost, platform compatible with, keeping an eye on the following list also would help to make a better decision.

Best Pc Desktop For Video Editing

Blending Modes
Customer Reviews
DCP Profile Support
Lens Correction
Nondestructive Local Adjustments
Tethered capture

Pc Desktop For Sale

Final thoughts

Mac Or Pc Desktop For Lightroom Editing 2018 Calendar

Yes, once you decide to go for a licensed alternative to Adobe Lightroom just make an analysis to understand the market before you shell out your money. Most of the software has a trial period, make the best use of the trial version before you jump to conclusion. Also, know your strengths and your requirement to take the right decision.

Finally, decide on your budget before you aim to fly high. Just start with cheaper software yet not compromising on the features, make sure that your budget can handle those high-end alternatives like Capture One Pro or the Alien Skin Exposure X2 before you make a solid decision.