If you can stand to spend a couple of dollars, ON1 Photo RAW is easily the best paid Lightroom alternative. Luminar is a good alternative for those who don’t want to fight with a photo editor for a week or two, but you might pay for it in speed and instability. If you need a powerful tool and have some time to get up to speed, darktable is the best free Lightroom replacement. Conclusion: The Best Lightroom Alternative It doesn’t have enough of Photoshop’s power or enough of Lightroom’s speed to make it an appealing platform without those plugins, but it could make a great companion to either of those applications.
Masking and local adjustment controls are excellent, but overall the application feels more like a platform for DxO’s software plugins than a Lightroom replacement.
For local adjustments, there is access to a proprietary masking algorithm called “U Point.” With this, you can set precise and naturalistic adjustments on individual areas, building up a series of masks with specific effects on specific parts of the image. If you like the look of these tools, they can reduce processing time for repeated styles. Additional DxO plugins can be purchased and integrated with PhotoLab. The application includes use of some DxO plugins, like Smart Lighting and ClearView Plus. It includes detailed and powerful tools, but they’re hampered by an unusual organizational philosophy that affects the entire user interface. While it’s a functional image editor and browser, it’s clear that DxO PhotoLab wants to be a precision photo editor more than a batch editor. Those that rely on Photoshop’s more obscure or powerful features likely won’t. If you only use Photoshop for typically photographic edits (color, tone, sharpening, resizing, filtering), then you’ll likely find that ON1 Photo Raw could be your one-and-only photo editor. That level of control makes ON1 Photo Raw a reasonable Photoshop replacement. You can attain complex effects through layer blend and precisely control what elements of the image are affected by what adjustment. The app’s layers are powerful and functional.
Even cranked up to 11, the skin retains its natural properties, not going rubbery or plastic. Better still, the filters look believable. It smooths wrinkles, masks blemishes, lowers contrast, enhances eye clarity, and fixes discontinuities in skin coloring. You indicate the eyes and mouth, and the application will apply a selection of classic skin retouching filters. These automatically identify faces in your image. The AI-assisted portrait retouching tools are especially deluxe. The organization of panels and tools can be somewhat puzzling on the first trip through the app, but that initial unfamiliarity passes quickly. All tools are powerful, functional, authentic-looking, and well-designed for regular use.