Alternative for Adobe Lightroom?

[whg]

Would the new ACD Systems Photo Studio for Mac 4 work as a lightweight alternative of Lightroom for my wife? In the past she used the Mac photo viewer from the same company, which is no longer compatible with the latest macOS. Normally, she doesn't process a lot of images, and would mainly use the cataloguing and viewing features. ACD Systems currently runs a 60% saving campaign.

 

[kenoh]

Sorry no experience of ACD I am afraid but...

The cataloguing and viewing features of Adobe still work without a subscription right? it is only the develop module that is disabled I thought ?

So can she not get by with Pixelmator for edits or something and continue to use the capabilities of the disabled lightroom going forward?

 

[maflynn]

Sorry no experience of ACD I am afraid but...

For some reason not too many people seem too, either that or I just live under a rock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The cataloguing and viewing features of Adobe still work without a subscription right? it is only the develop module that is disabled I thought ?

Yes, and that's what I'm doing right now. I'll edit the images in another app, but I'll use LR for my DAM capability for the short term. Not an ideal situation but it allows me to take my time in choosing the best application for my needs

 

[MCAsan]

If she does a relatively small amount of images and has no bleeding edge requirements on editing tools, why not have her use Photos? She can always have a few extensions installed for plugins to expand the basic editing capabilities.

 

[Alexander.Of.Oz]

What about DarkTable? It's free and seems to be a pretty good replacement for simple editing needs.

Or LightZone? It's also free!

 

[whg]

For some reason not too many people seem too [have experience with ACD Systems], either that or I just live under a rock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you all for the suggestions. My wife used the ACDSee viewer already in the dark ages when the family still used Windows PCs. She is very resistent to change (only with her Mac!) and really hates it when Apple breaks things with new versions of macOS (such as making her old Photoshop unusable). I was very fortunate that she allowed my to upgrade the original HD with an SSD, both on her mini and the Macbook Pro 12" from 2011

I will probably just try the new ACD Systems app and report back with my experience. My wife stores most images on an external HD and she hates using the cloud.

 

[kenoh]

Thank you all for the suggestions. My wife used the ACDSee viewer already in the dark ages when the family still used Windows PCs. She is very resistent to change (only with her Mac!) and really hates it when Apple breaks things with new versions of macOS (such as making her old Photoshop unusable). I was very fortunate that she allowed my to upgrade the original HD with an SSD, both on her mini and the Macbook Pro 12" from 2011

I will probably just try the new ACD Systems app and report back with my experience. My wife stores most images on an external HD and she hates using the cloud.

I hope you are taking multiple copies of that external HDD...

 

[maflynn]

I hope you are taking multiple copies of that external HDD...

Why are you suggesting that Photo Studio will do something bad?

 

[steve123]

What about DarkTable? It's free and seems to be a pretty good replacement for simple editing needs.

Or LightZone? It's also free!

Does anyone here use Darktable on a mac?

 

[MCAsan]

No one I know.

 

[steve123]

No one I know.

There was mention of a new version 2.4.0 at DPR. I found a guy on DPR that moved his workflow from Lr on Windows to DarkTable on Ubuntu a bit more than a couple years ago now. He posted a couple posts about his experience along the way. He said he was not going back to Lr and was happy with DT.

The dmg for the latest version of DT on macOS is not yet posted at the github page. I downloaded the dmg for RC2 and had a brief look. The UI is not great to my eye but I think that is mostly because the app is an X windows app on the mac. First impression is that it appears to have a lot of features. Not sure of this but it seems a bit “slow” but I need to do a comparison with Aperture to be fair. Watched a few youtube videos. It appears to be a usable app.

It uses xmp sidecar files to maintain the metadata and edits keeps a copy of this info in a database as well.

It would be nice to find someone who uses it that came from Aperture and could provide an objective review. I will poke around some more on DPR.

 

[MCAsan]

Does it do luminosity or color range masking? Can you send one of the Darktable files to Photoshop or other editor as a smart object that allows for non-destructive editing?

 

[steve123]

Does it do luminosity or color range masking? Can you send one of the Darktable files to Photoshop or other editor as a smart object that allows for non-destructive editing?

I will take a look at see regarding the masking question. The fellow on DPR uses Gimp in his workflow but I do not recall he mentioned anything about how it integrates as an external editor.
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I will take a look at see regarding the masking question. The fellow on DPR uses Gimp in his workflow but I do not recall he mentioned anything about how it integrates as an external editor.

I think this YouTube video demonstrates an overview of the luminosity and color masking:

 

[steve123]

I will take a look at see regarding the masking question. The fellow on DPR uses Gimp in his workflow but I do not recall he mentioned anything about how it integrates as an external editor.
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I think this YouTube video demonstrates an overview of the luminosity and color masking:

I played around with the mask myself and it looks pretty cool. I like the ability to combine the parametric and drawn mask to isolate a certain local area.