Best alternative to Lightroom

[trainmania100]

Looking for suggestions on what you use that's good for editing photos, free and paid.

For past few months I've been using lightroom, happy with the results.

But I bought a month of after effects, and I must have chosen the wrong subscription because they want a £100+ cancellation fee (as pictured...) So I've had to remove all money from my PayPal account until it blows over...

What are the best alternatives to Lightroom?

Ideally the features I've been using are reducing highlights, increasing exposure and shadows, and sharpening / noise reduction.

What can you recommend that would manage those ?

 

[1369]

I use Lightroom and Photoshop.

I am very happy with both.

 

[etr221]

A free equivalent to Lightroom is Darktable ; to Photoshop GIMP or a recent fork Glimpse ; other free options I have seen are DigiKam and RawTherapee . At the price you can afford to the try them...

Always worth Googling for 'Best Free Photo Editing Software' - there are some review/comparison sites - read and compare what they say.

 

[Bevan Price]

Few people need the full, rental-only, full version of Photoshop. For paid software, you have the choice including Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, and Serif Affinity Photo. All will do most of what everyone here needs, and cost a fraction of what they charge for the full version of Photoshop.

As etr221 posts, there are also some free software options available. Of those listed, I have only tried GIMP. It works, but personally I founs it a bit fiddly, and I prefer Serif Photo Plus, no longer sold, but basically a predecessor of their Affinity Paint.

 

[ac6000cw]

I've been using Serif Affinity Photo for a few years - it does far more than I could ever need (or get my head around!), it only costs a one-off (no subscription) £24.99 at the moment with the current 50% discount offer - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/#buy - and it's a UK product as well.

 

[John Luxton]

Looking for suggestions on what you use that's good for editing photos, free and paid.

For past few months I've been using lightroom, happy with the results.

But I bought a month of after effects, and I must have chosen the wrong subscription because they want a £100+ cancellation fee (as pictured...) So I've had to remove all money from my PayPal account until it blows over...

What are the best alternatives to Lightroom?

Ideally the features I've been using are reducing highlights, increasing exposure and shadows, and sharpening / noise reduction.

What can you recommend that would manage those ?

For just over £100 a year one gets not only Lightroom and full Photoshop and both programs are continually updated with many enhancements appearing. I must admit I was reluctant to sign up around three years ago but as I use both programs regularly for around £2 a week it isn't bad value for money. In the old days full alone Photoshop cost over £300 when it came as a disk based package hence most people like me bought the cut down elements package.

 

[Swanny200]

If you shoot RAW like I do, then some of the free software will not work with RAW, it is more geared up for the standard JPEG type files.

Lightroom has always been my goto, and I have not updated it since it went to Creative Cloud to save on all of the payment plans and all that, I did try out some of the others, I got a new Acer laptop and it came with Photodirector which was a bit meh, Affinity is supposed to be one of the closest out there to match Lightroom but where Affinity does shine is with photo retouching which is something that I may in future take the gamble on.

If you want it free though, I do agree that RawTherapee and Darktable are your best options.

 

[Bevan Price]

For just over £100 a year one gets not only Lightroom and full Photoshop and both programs are continually updated with many enhancements appearing. I must admit I was reluctant to sign up around three years ago but as I use both programs regularly for around £2 a week it isn't bad value for money. In the old days full alone Photoshop cost over £300 when it came as a disk based package hence most people like me bought the cut down elements package.

OK if you can afford such prices, but for the less affluent - you are paying £1000 over ten years (at current prices), which is over £900 more than I paid for my Serif software around 10 years ago - and it still works fine despite the change from Windows versions 7 to 10. I tried Lightroom some years ago, but found it added little to what I could already do with the Serif software.

 

[trainmania100]

I've been using skylum Luminar with some pretty satisfying results. Thanks everyone that shared