It’s really been years since Adobe has really made any substantial updates to Lightroom. More importantly, their image processing algorithms aren’t up to par with a lot of their competitors. Also, their Lightroom software tends to bog down even the fastest machines.
I’ve already been using competing video editing suites to Adobe for years due to their outrageous pricing strategy. Now, I’ve completely made the change to the following apps:
- Photo Mechanic – I’ve been using his for years for culling images and browsing folders – fast, groups RAW+JPEG images, batch renaming, and frequent free updates. Totally worth it!
- Capture One – fantastic RAW image editing! It blows Lightroom out of the water. As a catalog though, it’s just plain awful and a total waste of time. It’s worth paying the premium for the software and then paying for the upgrades if needed.
- Perfectly Clear – buggy, but magical. You need to export TIFF files from Capture One to it. After you tweak your images, save again as TIFFs, then use Photo Mechanic to rename and save as JPEGs. Yes, it’s an extra step or five, but worth it.
- On1 Photo Raw – right now, I use it for the catalog and if I need Photoshop like filters or layers. Also some cool presets.
- JPEGmini – this is my go to software for image resizing and compression. Easy and works great!
- Google One aka Google Photos – for $10 a month you get 2TB of backup data and the best search functionality and face detection of any solution I’ve tried. You can’t search by metadata or EXIF though which sucks, but if you’re trying to search for a specific image, there’s nothing like it!
Join the revolution, don’t renew your Adobe subscription. They need to offer a product without a subscription that people want and are willing to pay for. Being locked into a contract for buggy software is bad business – no thanks.
Bye Adobe – good riddance!
2018-08-11 Update
I’ve gone back to Adobe – sigh. See why here.
