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Question of the Day: Are you keeping your Prime subscription?
Lightroom alternatives?
- Thread starter bwana
- Start date
koffiejunkie
Executive Member
About as good as you expect from one of the major players? I don't use it often, and this depends greatly on how bad your photography skills are
I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Each app I looked at was slightly different, but once none were meaningfully better than the other in this regard. LR certainly wasn't lightning fast in any way. If anything, it had the slowest UI and, at the time, poorest support for hardware acceleration. What exactly are you talking about?
wizardofid
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Late to the party, but gimp should have been your first stop, it has both batch editing and importing functions, plugins for stuff like that has been around for ages. Look up BIMP for gimp
BIMP. Batch Image Manipulation Plugin for GIMP. | Alessandro Francesconi
alessandrofrancesconi.it
Sorry but in my experience Gimp is horrible. Plus it's hardly a replacement for Lightroom. It barely even measures up to PS.
I replaced PS with Affinity Photo which was worth the [minimal] expense. I'm still a little surprised they haven't released a Lightroom "killer" yet. They've successfully taken on much of the Adobe suite.
wizardofid
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I use both gimp and photoshop.
Personally once you try the G'mic-QT plugin, with bimp it pretty much leaves photoshop and lightroom bloodied, pants down and face down in a gutter, but that plugin is now available for photoshop as well. Out of the box gimp is pretty meh, but once you customize with plugins, I would argue it is better. With gimp you will have to get your hands a little dirty, but that is the price of open source and free, but worth it.Gimp and photoshop commands and functionality is quite similar, the benefit is that i found with gimp it uses less memory, especially working with lots of layers, just opening photoshop uses a gig of ram compared to gimp using 69mb.Only reason I use photoshop is because I have a paid plugin for texture creation, otherwise I would have kicked it to the curb ages ago.
airborne
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About as good as you expect from one of the major players? I don't use it often, and this depends greatly on how bad your photography skills are
I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Each app I looked at was slightly different, but once none were meaningfully better than the other in this regard. LR certainly wasn't lightning fast in any way. If anything, it had the slowest UI and, at the time, poorest support for hardware acceleration. What exactly are you talking about?
Importing with a preset auto applied, batch processing, batch exporting with multiple resolution and file types, database and keyword management.
Basically the process to get large amounts of images into and out of the software and also manage the files in terms of location and metadata and it all must happen with the least amount of fuss or bother. The hardware acceleration seems good these days, LR can nearly bring my 16core cpu and reasonably high end gpu to its knees if I push it hard enough, it’ll max out all the cores bulk building previews or exporting, which it definitely didn’t do in the past.
Barbarian Conan
Executive Member
It seems many people here just don't "get" Lightroom.
Lightroom and Photoshop are not the same and not even similar, so anything that can be compared to photoshop is unlikely to be comparable to Lightroom.
Photoshop is great if you want to spend time and really go to town on an image and create a piece of art.
Lightroom is for when you want to spend 30 seconds to a minute per image maximum, and then apply those settings to a whole heap of others. I want to adjust some exposure settings, colour balance and crop it. Maybe if I feel like putting in extra effort I'll sharpen as well.
And I want all that with the organization functionality of Adobe Bridge.
Rawtherapee is actually pretty close in what it tries to do. The UI will just take some time getting used to and it requires more clicks than Lightroom, it's slightly slower, and I don't have as much faith in the auto adjustments.
The batch editing is also not quite there.
I would honestly pay the sub for Lightroom if I used it even 10 hours a month instead of the current 10 hours a year.
I have no doubt that it works well, but looking at the UI it's more of an IrfanView competitor than a replacement for Lightroom.
Lightroom and Photoshop are not the same and not even similar, so anything that can be compared to photoshop is unlikely to be comparable to Lightroom.
Photoshop is great if you want to spend time and really go to town on an image and create a piece of art.
Lightroom is for when you want to spend 30 seconds to a minute per image maximum, and then apply those settings to a whole heap of others. I want to adjust some exposure settings, colour balance and crop it. Maybe if I feel like putting in extra effort I'll sharpen as well.
And I want all that with the organization functionality of Adobe Bridge.
Rawtherapee is actually pretty close in what it tries to do. The UI will just take some time getting used to and it requires more clicks than Lightroom, it's slightly slower, and I don't have as much faith in the auto adjustments.
The batch editing is also not quite there.
I would honestly pay the sub for Lightroom if I used it even 10 hours a month instead of the current 10 hours a year.
I have no doubt that it works well, but looking at the UI it's more of an IrfanView competitor than a replacement for Lightroom.
wizardofid
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You can do exactly that with bimp, add g'mic qt to the mix and job done, and sure lightroom manages and deals with library of photo's much better and is laser focused on that aspect. Like I said gimp out of the box is great but you need to get your hands dirty a bit, you can really customize and laser focus your gimp work flow with the additions of the right plugins, in this case bimp pretty much does exactly what it needs to, want a little more editing done add g'mic qt and you are sorted. I am well aware what lightroom pros and cons, the fact is, gimp is open source, and there is likely light room like plugins and functionality, which allows for much better end user experience, instead of resorting to two different programs, you can get a more rounded all in one experience, but you will need to put in a little effort.
Like I said it is the price you pay for going open source, it isn't over complicated UI either, it has a very much a adobe like experience, but you will need to go searching for some functionality some time which can be annoying.
Gimp and Lightroom are fundamentally different. My understanding is that in order to edit with gimp you need to rasterise your raw file first. With something like Lightroom you're only rasterising your file when you're ready to export it. You're not touching your raw file.
While both have their places gimp, photoshop, affinity photo are great at pushing pixels but that's not what apps like Lightroom are about.
I'm hoping Affinity's upcoming "Something Big" is a lightroom killer.
But just in case it's not I'm giving Exposure X7 a shot.
But just in case it's not I'm giving Exposure X7 a shot.
Cool I wonder what it is. Was thinking maybe video but DaVinci have that covered at a decent price already. Lightroom does seem like a good possibility. Few more days.
I really hope so, trying out Darkroom for a bit and it seems decent. Although not cheap, at least you have the option to buy once. I already have Affinity Photo though, so it would be nice if they release a LR competitor with integration into Affinity Photo.
RedViking
Nord of the South
A Video Editor I hope!
Really? As saor pointed out there's already DaVinci Resolve for that, and Blackmagic has set the bar pretty high.
RedViking
Nord of the South
Lightworks is my favourite. Don't like DaVinci.
Would be awesome if Affinity has their own package. Also a Lightworks alternative.
I'm sure they are going to get there.
Yeah colour grading etc. using their color tab is miles ahead of what most image editors offer. Worth it sometimes just to do the color work on an image in Resolve. I also really enjoy the node-based workflow.
