[CWuestefeld]

I strongly disagree. Have you used Lightroom in the last, say, two years?

They've had a revolutionary upgrade in their masking tools. ML models power automated, smart mask creation. For example, on a landscape photo I can get, with just a couple of clicks, separate masks for sky, water, land, foliage, structures, and natural ground. The power that this gives me to edit my photos is amazing. To the best of my knowledge, Darktable and others have nothing approaching this.

[miladyincontrol]

By large agree, the most recent years in lightroom have been some of it's most transformational. A lot of tasks that used to require going into PS have been borderline automated. Their more recent denoise methods as well have been nothing short of excellent.

Not that its perfect when 100% automated but it takes a fraction the time to adjust things towards perfection, no one misses doing it by hand.

Rapidraw does try to compete some having ML based masking but I gotta agree most the open source solutions have been lagging behind bigtime.