Goodbye Adobe Creative Cloud...

I have been very happy with DXO PhotoLab over the past couple of years; just recently updated to PhotoLab 5. The tools are intuitively laid out and I am able to do what I need and want without too much fuss or muss. I particularly like that the program, unlike Lightroom, does not take control of my images by establishing its own "catalog" and such. I can arrange my files and folders in the way that I choose on my computer.
Don't you find it extremely slow? I tried it for couple days and I have to give up.
Pass from one image to the other and open an image it takes seconds in a new Mac Book Pro with SSD, it's scary.
 
I've been using Darktable for quite a while. Free, open source, incredibly powerful, plenty of support. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's an extraordinary free program. It is updated once a year, although the last two years they've updated twice.

What doesn't it do? It doesn't do much in the way of editing, it's a processing program first. I recently purchased Affinity Photo for editing purposes. Of course it will process RAW as well, but I have Darktable down to several clicks and done. I would usually then save as a jpeg for posting or printing. If I want to do some editing, which is rare but happens occasionally (like maybe adding snow to a Christmas card), I will save as a TIF and open in Affinity.

Affinity is inexpensive ($54.00 US) and I am told that so far, every new release has been provided free to purchasers. People tell me they've never spent another penny. Unlike Luminar who consistently misrepresents their products and intentions to their customers. I almost bit once, a little research saved me from that nightmare.
Darktable, I'll try this today, thank you.

Actually, I'm trying to find a tool similar to Lightroom that is not Lightroom.

I tried :

- DXO PhotoLab 5, powerful, complete, but SLOOOOOOOOOW, to slow.
- Luminar, not bad, I may go back to this.
- Photo AI, missing catalog collections.

Next : Affinity Photo, Capture One.

Any other software to try that can replace Lighroom?
 
Don't you find it extremely slow? I tried it for couple days and I have to give up.
Pass from one image to the other and open an image it takes seconds in a new Mac Book Pro with SSD, it's scary.

Slow? No......not for me! In my 2018 Apple 15" MacBookPro [MBP] which has 1 TB SSD, 32 GB RAM, the extra graphics card (I forget what that is called now -- maybe Vega 20??), the DXO PhotoLab 5 program works very smoothly and quickly. No issues here. I also have an M1 13" MBP but haven't really used it all that much for processing images, and in fact haven't gotten around to updating it to PhotoLab 5 now that I think about it.
 
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Darktable, I'll try this today, thank you.

Actually, I'm trying to find a tool similar to Lightroom that is not Lightroom.

I tried :

- DXO PhotoLab 5, powerful, complete, but SLOOOOOOOOOW, to slow.
- Luminar, not bad, I may go back to this.
- Photo AI, missing catalog collections.

Next : Affinity Photo, Capture One.

Any other software to try that can replace Lighroom?
Do some searches on Luminar and their business practices before you spend money on them. There is one somewhere in here, plus all over the web.

Affinity is pretty decent and inexpensive.
 
I use Capture One Pro and Adobe photo - C1 cost me more per year than Adobe. I pay annually for Adobe which is $108. Why both? Because I find the tools I use within this software too useful to give up just yet. I mainly use C1 until I need to use PS. As for the catalog in LR, you don't have to use it. Open the raw file in PS which will open ACR - ACR is LR except you don't have the catalog to deal with.

I never ingest my raw files into a photo editor, I use Photo Mechanic or FastRawViewer and only edit the files I want. I use sessions in C1 and just manage the files I work with in the session. Whenever, I want to look back I just open the session - can keep it stored on backup and bring it back to the main computer for when I might need it.

Which reminds me, it is the last day of the month - time to do my monthly backup of backups backup process. 🥴🥴🥴
 
Slow? No......not for me! In my 2018 Apple 15" MacBookPro [MBP] which has 1 TB SSD, 32 GB RAM, the extra graphics card (I forget what that is called now -- maybe Vega 20??), the DXO PhotoLab 5 program works very smoothly and quickly. No issues here. I also have an M1 13" MBP but haven't really used it all that much for processing images, and in fact haven't gotten around to updating it to PhotoLab 5 now that I think about it.
Excuse me, just to be sure we are talking about the same subject, can you preview and open your pictures in less than 3-4 seconds?
It takes 13 seconds to visualize a new image once I clicked on it :(
Needless to say, if I want to see 5 images, only look at them, it takes me a whole minute.

MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
2,3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 4 GB
 
Well, I don't keep a stopwatch around to check to see how quickly my images open but definitely it doesn't take all that long, certainly not 13 seconds or longer..... My machine is only a year older than yours and looking at your specs I note that you've only got 16 GB RAM, which may be a contributing factor, and it looks as though you've got just the standard graphics, not the extra VEGA as well? Those two things may make a difference, I really don't know.
 
Well, I don't keep a stopwatch around to check to see how quickly my images open but definitely it doesn't take all that long, certainly not 13 seconds or longer..... My machine is only a year older than yours and looking at your specs I note that you've only got 16 GB RAM, which may be a contributing factor, and it looks as though you've got just the standard graphics, not the extra VEGA as well? Those two things may make a difference, I really don't know.
The graphics card will make all the difference in the world.
 
The graphics card will make all the difference in the world.
Only to preview an image? Not talking about image modification, that's fast.
Come on, this is a +$3k laptop and it can't load a picture?

Why is it loaded in a fraction of a second if I open the image with Mac viewer, Capture One, Photoshop or Lightroom?

Probably the preview system in DxO Photolab is not so good. If you google it seems a common problem.
 
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That is my impression as well, that a graphics card makes a difference, and in the Intel MBPs, which have the ability to have the discrete graphics card in addition to the regular one, it just seemed like a good idea for photography, which is why I bought the 2018 machine with the VEGA 20 additional graphics card. I don't imagine that the same sort of thing is needed now in the new M1 MBPs.......
 
Only to preview an image? Not talking about image modification, that's fast.
Come on, this is a +$3k laptop and it can't load a picture?

Why is it loaded in a fraction of a second if I open the image with Mac viewer, Capture One, Photoshop or Lightroom?

Probably the preview system in DxO Photolab is not so good. If you google it seems a common problem.
No idea, it could be anything. Just saying a dedicated graphics card with it's own RAM will go a long ways.

I put this in a previous post in this thread: I recently downloaded Affinity and it didn't work worth a crap. It was taking as long to load a photo as yours, even though photos would load in other programs very quickly. A while back I had downloaded Luminar 3 as a trial. Since I wasn't using it and a few other programs I uninstalled them. Luminar had created it's own directory to my photos with over 16,000 files in it including duplicates, thumbnails and sidecars. I uninstalled the program and deleted the folder and all of a sudden the old performance was back, and Affinity is now lighting fast. The only thing I can think of is that those files were hogging up the front of the drive reserved for quick access beyond RAM, and it wasn't playing nice with Affinity.
 
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I installed DxO Photo Lab 4 and it's fine, it's not the fastest, but it's just fine. It has to be a problem with the 5.0 version and the fact I upgraded to Monterey, probably not fully compatible.
 
I use ON1 Photo RAW.
You know what Alan, you mentioned ON1 before and I didn't really explore your suggestion, my apologies.
Today on Fstoppers, there was an article about ON1 and it made me think to revisit this thread. Here is the article:
One commenter on that post said it was a bit resource hungry, specifically in the CPU specs, did you have any issues there?

ON1 Photo Raw appears to be on sale until June 29th for $50. not bad, not bad!
 
I've thought on-and-off about trying ON1 -- maybe now would be a good time for that.... The review definitely makes it sound quite enticing.
 
I've thought on-and-off about trying ON1 -- maybe now would be a good time for that.... The review definitely makes it sound quite enticing.
and the sale price makes it enticing too. The only other company I know that occasionally runs such deep discounts on a non-subscription product is Affinity.
 
One commenter on that post said it was a bit resource hungry, specifically in the CPU specs, did you have any issues there?
I have also had the same problem where it almost locks up for a few minutes for no apparent reason. In response to this a poster suggested making adjustments in Edit>Preferences>System menu. I looked at the ON1 video on the subject and I have tried moving the Cache size and video strength sliders to the right, as it suggests. Dunno how much effect these will have, I will have to wait and see.

 
I just pulled the trigger on ON1. I'll be playing around with it this weekend.
 
and have nothing for video editing.
If you ever need to edit video & hate subscriptions, check out Resolve. There's a free version that doesn't really miss too many things compared to the Studio version, although one of the missing features is GPU acceleration, which in my case is quite important. Nevertheless, Studio version is not expensive at all, I even got a promo that included both the software license and speed editor surface for the price of one.
These guys hate subscriptions as much as consumers do... even recently, the market has been forcing them to provide some cloud features and they built some sort of hybrid where you buy a device from them, that acts as your very own server.

There's also an optional $5/mo fee you may pay to host a shared library on their project server... but it's not even a per-user fee, you can have as many account as you wish accessing your library, as long as the library owner pays those $5, which seems to me like it's priced to just cover their server upkeep and not much more than that.

No forcing you to use more cloud features, no messing with your data, no dependency on their servers for every single click you make.
 
I will be interested to hear what you think after using it for a while.
Quick thoughts: I love it. The navigation was easy for me to grasp, the lens correction based on lens profiles is very useful, and the NoNoise AI is AMAZING. I'll create a thread with some examples soon.
 
Finally pulled the plug on Adobe's scam of a subscription service. So much money wasted I don't want to think about it.
Currently using Capture One Express for photos, and have nothing for video editing.
Wondering if Adobe will get any of my money for their Photoshop and Premiere Elements software, but now seems like a good time to make a clean break from Adobe altogether.
Thoughts?
I hope express suits you , it is worth getting the full version as express is quite limited compared to the pro version
 
I've now tried: Adobe photoshop elements, Capture One Express, and ON1.
  1. Adobe photoshop elements isn't worth getting. Though I have used it for limited editing and for stitching panoramas. Maybe Affinity would have been a better purchase instead.
  2. Capture One Express was good, and I assume the full blown version might be everything I need.
  3. ON1 has been a fun wild card. I got it on sale and I was surprised with how many features are included in a single payment (sale price $50) without a paywall blocking premium features. Of course, if one were to have extra spare change there is a cloud version available and optional luts for purchase.
Still playing around with ON1, have yet to successfully use any of their presets and haven't tried sky replacement yet.
 
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