I used to use lightroom all the time and loved it. It was Lightroom 5, as in pre-cloud subscription and it served me well for ~10 years. When I upgraded last year to a Sony camera, lightroom doesn't support its RAW files. To upgrade I have to go to the Lightroom CC, which is $10 a month. I am not a heavy user, so this fee is absurd to me.
I am not a heavy user, but also not a super advanced user, Darktable is total overkill. I've been messing with it, but I am a bit overwhelmed.
Any recommendations for an alternative? I usually need to tweak saturation, clarity, highlights, shadows, crop & rotate, etc. I dont need fancy plugins or AI features (to my knowledge anyway). I'm a casual user, but over the years being "ok" a photography with an SLR + editor has enabled me to get some really fantastic photos from vacations and I would like to continue to do that.
Mr_Asa
UltimaDork
11/29/22 6:18 p.m.
So let me clarfiy as our posts have different price targets.
I'm fine with pay $100 for software.
I am not fine with paying $120 yearly.
Adobe has a converter for proprietary RAW formats; it's free:
https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter.html
I have not used the resulting DNG format. My recollection, FWIW, is, it's lossless. If you want more info from actual users, you could check out a forum such as Lightroom Queen Forums.
ProDarwin said:
So let me clarfiy as our posts have different price targets.
I'm fine with pay $100 for software.
I am not fine with paying $120 yearly.
Unfortunately, since Apple stopped shipping Aperture, it seems that nobody else cares about this market.
Is $120/year just for Lightroom? That's what I'm paying, but I'm getting both LR and Photoshop out of it. Dunno if that was a special deal, or grandfathered, or what.
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
yes, the lowest I have found for lightroom is $10/month.
RawTherapee and Darktable are both worth looking at. Both are Open Source. I've used RawTherapee and it's decent though not without a learning curve.
I'm still using Lightroom 6, non-CC, and don't really want to leave it for CC or something else. Really dumb situation; there's a photo negative converting plugin for Lr that I really like plus the photo catalog management that Lr provides that makes me not want to go to something else.
I'm wondering if the best option here is to just dedicate some time to getting better at darktable. I've used it a bit so far but the image management is confusing as hell to me. I'm sure it's really powerful, but I don't need it. I wish there was a "lite" mode. As with the other open source softwares I have used, often the user interface is just not as intuitive as the main commercial competitor.
I will check out the raw converted posted above, but I am not excited about an extra step in the process- mainly because it's a hurdle that I think will make me less likely to actually sit down and edit.
Seems like another possible option if I end up paying for anything is DXO photolab. There is at least a free trial.
ProDarwin said:
As with the other open source softwares I have used, often the user interface is just not as intuitive as the main commercial competitor.
Heh, IMHO the lightroom user interface is pretty terrible. I really liked Aperture, I wish Apple still made it.
IIRC the last photo I touched up, I used Gimp because I already had it on the computer.
Toyman! said:
IIRC the last photo I touched up, I used Gimp because I already had it on the computer.
So I haven't used gimp in a while, but AFAIK it intended to compete with Photoshop not Lightroom. PS is about giving you fine control over a single image, allowing you to manipulate it in any way that you want, whereas LR is designed to allow you to work with many photos at once.
Imagine it's race day and you're shooting photos rather than driving, so you take your camera to the track, shoot a couple thousand images, and now what? You don't want all of those images, there's maybe a hundred in there that are worth keeping. You need to sort through them, find the keepers, perform basic adjustment (white balance, crop/tilt, exposure adjustment, etc) on them, and then export the results to somewhere you can share them and maybe sell them if you're a pro. That's what Lightroom is for.
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
No clue. I was brightening and cropping a handful of images and assumed that's what Lightroom was for. Generally I try to leave them as taken.
I usually sort them in as xl thumbnails in file manager or dump them to Smugmug and sort them there.
Toyman! said:
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
No clue. I was brightening and cropping a handful of images and assumed that's what Lightroom was for. Generally I try to leave them as taken.
I usually sort them in as xl thumbnails in file manager or dump them to Smugmug and sort them there.
Yeah, there are lots of different ways to do it, but it's when you're processing hundreds/thousands of images at a time that tools like Lightroom really shine. It's all non-destructive editing, so you can back out or change any modification you made at any point later. You can also do bulk edits, for example imagine you shot 100 portraits of 100 different people using the same lighting setup. The correct exposure and white balance are going to be the same (or at least very close) on all of those shots, so you can correct it on the first one and then cut/paste the edit to the other 99 and poof. It's a huge time saver when you're dealing with a couple of memory cards full of images.
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
Sounds like a great software for a pro. I'm too cheap to pay for it though and don't edit many photos over a years time.
What exact camera are we talking about?
ProDarwin said:...
Any recommendations for an alternative? I usually need to tweak saturation, clarity, highlights, shadows, crop & rotate, etc. I dont need fancy plugins or AI features (to my knowledge anyway). I'm a casual user, but over the years being "ok" a photography with an SLR + editor has enabled me to get some really fantastic photos from vacations and I would like to continue to do that.
It may be simple for what you want, but Irfanview has an easy interface and can make adjustments quicky. I recently went to an event where I shot about 1,200 pictures on my A6000 and A7Rii. People wanted to see the pictures of themselves ASAP. For each setting I did a quick adjustment on one pic using "Color corrections", then "Saved values on exit" and ran the rest through for the same adjustment.
While viewing, I quickly did any rotate and crop as needed.
After running through an inital sort and process, I did a bulk re-size using "Batch conversion".
From there, I uploaded 600 pics that weren't terrible to Flickr: Lime 100 Mini Bike Race
It aint Lighroom, but fo a casual user working bulk photos it can work.
I still have a very old Adobe CS, but it usually locks up on anything past Win 7. I'm not going to subscribe. For editing individual pics, I use Gimp and Corel PS Pro.
Ah this is an older thread. I gave in and bought a $10 class on Darktable and dedicated time to learn it.
Then I was traveling and fell into a hole and smashed my camera like an idiot. So now it doesn't really matter that much anyway.
Hope that your homeowners insurance can help you out on the camera.
For what it's worth, for my pics I use:
FastStone (free) to look through the bulk pics from a trip or the day, and rate anything that's good as a 2, and anything that's great as a 3.
Then I move all my 2's and 3's to the permanent pic storage folder and leave all the leftover crud in the temporary folder.
DXO Photolab (not free) gets used for RAW conversion and AI denoising, cropping, rotating, lifting shadows and taming hilights. You can set up a quick profile (color temp, denoise, sharpen, etc) and apply it to a bunch of your photos all at once, before doing a bulk export.
Google photos (not free) then automatically imports the stuff in my pic storage folder and I can share them with friends from the cloud.
the_machina said:
Hope that your homeowners insurance can help you out on the camera.
Wait what? Is that a thing? I was on the other side of the planet when I accidentally smashed the camera - why would homeowners help me out?
ProDarwin said:
the_machina said:
Hope that your homeowners insurance can help you out on the camera.
Wait what? Is that a thing? I was on the other side of the planet when I accidentally smashed the camera - why would homeowners help me out?
Depends on your policy, and depending on your deductible and your camera, it may be cheaper to just replace it. But the easy answer here is "it doesn't hurt to call your insurance provider and ask".
