[c0nsumer]

I use two Adobe apps routinely:

- Illustrator (for making PDF maps from OSM data). - Lightroom.

It'll take a bit of work to move my workflow to Affinity, but I think I've got a solid plan for that. (No, Affinity Designer does not open AIs properly... It does funky things with lines.)

But, I can't find a solid replacement for Lightroom. All I need is basic DAM (digital asset management) and crop/rotate/color. Can any of you suggest a GOOD alternative? Something that can import my library from Lightroom Classic would be ideal, but I can work around it if not. I'm very much willing to pay, and would prefer well-supported closed-source to OSS.

[CharlesW]

> (No, Affinity Designer does not open AIs properly... It does funky things with lines.)

I hope you'll report that! They seem to be pretty on top of fixing interop issues.

> Can any of you suggest a GOOD alternative?

If you need traditional DAM you'll want to look elsewhere, but if you're macOS-based I finally landed on Apple Photos with its extensions ecosystem (which includes software from Affinity, ON1, etc.). It also works great with RAW Power¹ — by Nik Bhatt, who previously led Aperture and iPhoto development at Apple — which is itself looking more and more like a complete Lightroom replacement.

¹ https://www.gentlemencoders.com/raw-power-for-macos/index.ht...

[Tagbert]

AI is a closed proprietary format that is not published. What Affinity had said in the past is that they don’t read AI but do read the PDF portion of Illustrator files

[c0nsumer]

...and that's exactly the problem. The result in Affinity Designer is akin to opening an unoptimized PDF. Decent, but not great.

[c0nsumer]

Huh... I am on macOS and I never even considered Apple Photos. Thank you, I'll give that a look. This could work out very well. Thanks!

[belthesar]

I know folks are going to recommend RawTherapee and Darktable, and those are some admirable projects, but I also know that a lot of long-time Lightroom users bounce off of them. I'd still encourage you to give them a try, but also if you're willing to catalog what things are missing and provide feedback to those teams. Even better if you're willing and able to help make the change you want to see in OSS, but additional reinforcement on the things that are misses currently in their offerings will help strengthen those projects.

[darekkay]

> All I need is basic DAM (digital asset management) and crop/rotate/color. Can any of you suggest a GOOD alternative?

Check out digikam. I'm using it as DAM only and Affinity Photo for RAW development and image manipulation (but digikam can handle that as well).

[mr_tristan]

I've been using digiKam in a similar way, where Affinity Photo is where I do manipulation, and digiKam for organization. It's been working well enough, though, I am very much an amateur hobbyist.

[Auracle]

CaptureOne. Many of us pros use it for a reason. They have both a subscription option and a one time fee.

[Kye]

This is probably next on their list. I know they were at least thinking about one the last time I saw someone ask about it.

[SanjayMehta]

Check out dxo.com - recommended to me by a professional photographer.

I'm stuck on LR 5 myself as I'm too lazy to move my library.

[highhedgehog]

Maybe RawTherapee?

[datalopers]

darktable

[t0bia_s]

Not a chance if you need it for professional editing. No clone tools, no camera profiles, probably lack of lens correction profiles as well. UI is prehistoric. RawTherapee is little bit less nerdy than darktable but still not suitable for serious photography work.

[orbital-decay]

Huh? It has all that. UI is optimized for hardware controllers and customization, and I think if you value workflow and features you can tolerate your dog barking at your app. I personally observed darktable being used in a mid-to-large studio along with C1. I think the weakness of darktable in production is mainly speed and highlight restoration, not anything of what you said. And possibly its filmic module which confuses a lot of people. (subjective, many swear by it; you can use classic curves instead)

RawTherapee being less nerdy is also bizarre to hear, since it exposes much more technical details at once, without offering a definite workflow.

[t0bia_s]

From my experience RawTherapee has little bit more visually pleasing UI and default settings is more suitable for editing than in Darktable.

[orbital-decay]

My problem with RT is that the ordering of its operations (an absolutely crucial thing) is not specified anywhere. It's just an explosion of sliders, more or less arbitrarily grouped into categories. Same goes for ART, the somewhat streamlined fork of RT. In contrast, DT offers a sane and documented pipeline, which reasonably follows the pipeline known from the video world, with its separation into scene-relative and output-relative parts based on physics and perception, adjusted for photography needs.

Strict terminology based on fundamental principles, strict reasoning and control over the pipeline, rooted in the video world. Perhaps that's why it looks somewhat foreign to you, it's a bit unlike most other photography tools which need to be marketed and typically offer "magic" with little reproducibility from one software to another. Like the saturation slider which is not actual saturation known from the color theory, at least in Lightroom and C1. Hence the endless bickering between photographers who don't understand fundamentals of color perception and fight over what software gives a better look.

Regarding the UI, maybe I'm different from the most but I honestly don't care how it looks, as long as it delivers and is usable. A professional tool is a truck, not a luxury car; it's alright to have it a bit dirty. I remember the days of Softimage 3D; when I've seen it the first time in 2000, it looked terribly ancient to me. But it was one of the most powerful CGI toolkits at the time.

Regarding the defaults, they are easily changed once and are used afterwards, provided you understand the fundamentals. However I've never needed to do so once I understood how it functions under the hood. The defaults look fine to me.

I'm not a professional photographer though, and despite DT being light years ahead of everyone in several areas I find it lacking in others, which prevents me from using it on a constant basis.

[virtualritz]

TLDR; lies.

Kindly substantiate your claims.

DT has a clone tool. It's part of the retouch tool.[1] Which is very powerful and allows way more than just cloning. It is also non-destructive, like anything in DT.

DT has camera profiles, new cameras get added regularly.

You can also create them yourself if you have access to a color checker using a built-in tool.[2]

DT has tons of lens correction profiles. Basically anything you find in lensfun.

If your lens is missing, lensfun has a service where you send images and they send you the calibration data back and add it to to their database.[3]

I shoot (often exotic) manual glass most of the time.

If someone tells me DT is lacking in this regard it's a good indicator for me they have no clue what they are talking about or never used the app seriously.

UI: it could see improvement in terms of parameter exposure (no novice/simple mode) and ranges (some sliders go from 0..1, others from 0..100%) but otherwise?

What in the UI is prehistoric?

The catalog part of DT is also great. i.e. when your catalog is on a slow network or cloud drive DT can automatically cache RAWs locally and send back the XMPs with the edits only.

Caveat: I regularly get paid for photography work (it's not fulltime but give I worked professionally in blockbuster VFX for two decades I think I qualify).

I do all my processing in DT. If I have to do compositing work beyond that I export to Fusion.

[1] https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/3.8/en/module-referenc...

[2] https://pixls.us/articles/profiling-a-camera-with-darktable-...

[3] https://wilson.bronger.org/calibration

[palotasb]

I'll substantiate regarding UI: On a Mac it has no items in the menu bar. The default cursor is changed to a low-resolution raster image instead of the default OS cursor. The image metadata pop-ups keep appearing even though darktable is in the background and I'm typing in a textbox in my browser. Something's really off with the UI toolkit they rely on.

I agree with the GP that the UI makes it practically unusable. Prehistoric, and I'd be surprised if this can be used by anyone as-is. I'd take a look at the features, but while it's importing my catalog I can't open any subfolders to look at images already imported. Once I click open my top-level Pictures folder, it closes it again after half a second.

[palotasb]

To be fair, this was using Darktable 3.6 (I had to open /Applications/darktable.app/Contents/info.plist to check as there is no About menu). Updating to the current latest 4.0.1.1_arm64 at least the metadata popup issue is mostly, but not 100%, fixed, and I could navigate through my catalog.

Adding: Even though my Fujifilm X-T4 is listed as supported on https://www.darktable.org/resources/camera-support/, and the preview images in grid mode appear, opening a single image displays two visually overlapping error messages about not being able to open the raw file. (One message is about switching to lighttable, the other about not being able to read white balance info. The image is not displayed.)

[michaelmrose]

Your post is full of great information but didn't need the heading. Odds are really good that the poster you are replying to isn't actually lying. Instead they just aren't as familiar with DT as you are. You could have imparted the same information beginning with an opening that educated the user instead of insisting they were lying and a demand for proof.

Firstly calling someone a liar basically shuts down all discussion in most cases and secondly after you have provided the proof you needn't demand it of them. You can instead wait for them to absorb the data you have provided.

Example:

> Darktable in fact has the features you mentioned and more. I enjoy using it for professional work myself so let me tell you a little bit about the features that make it competitive.

This would refute the position without directly engaging in negativity which is more likely to be read especially by poster but I think we are all a bit tired of people calling each other liars on the internet at this point.

[stonogo]

Shutting down the discussion should be the priority when one participant is just confidently asserting misinformation. Their motivations for doing so are not of interest.

[t0bia_s]

I cannot find anything like heal tool or camera profiles (ie Fujifilm Provia, Canon Natural, etc.). Which brings me to prehistoric UI... There is tons of useless features, that are really pointless for serious workflow, but those most necessary things are missing or are hidden in obsolete UI. You really need to spend many hours by tweaking UI to get what is really needed and then find out, that it is not working correctly. I was not be able to get on DT from RAF same result as from LR. Ever.

Lens corrections are there and database has most used lenses.