And if you want an alternative to Adobe Premiere, I highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. Free for most features, then just a one off payment of $299. One of the industry leaders in colour grading and has a composition suite (acquired from DFX Fusion) built right in.

I started using Davinci Resolve a few years ago and its fantastic! It seemed too good to be true, and I kept waiting to find some dark secret or "catch" but nope, it's just really good software priced reasonably.

DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design. Such a pretty sounding set of names. It feels a lot more like the future I was hoping for.

I love Resolve/fusion, plus it has a Linux client

Thanks. I didn't know about DaVinci yet. It looks impressive (including their website).

Thanks for the hint! Any experience with high FPS footage? My old Premiere version I still have around works fine for regular 30/60 fps footage, but 240 FPS stuff it just can't handle properly.

Good question, but sadly I don’t know. I know there a way to optimise your clips for editing to keep performance up. A bit like Proxies but I think simpler. Not sure if that applies to high FPS footage.

Since it doesn’t cost anything, it might be worth giving it a test.

Gave it a try and it works really good (though my old computer seems to reach it's limits). Thanks again!

Resolve is pretty nice. It still has 4k/HighDPI scaling issues (it's based on QT5 under the skin) that make things too large on some screens, but other than that it's pretty solid.

Yup. Davinci is what we use for our VR video production part.

Seconded, I am not at all knowledgable about video editing but had to do some stuff which was beyond the capabilities of iMovie and was impressed by Resolve. It’s fairly complex and the UI is pretty non-standard (true of many “creative”/media applications) but fairly logical and there’s loads of help online. Plus it’s free if you don’t need larger than 4K export!

I would love a real alternative to Lightroom. I'm stuck on version 6, since I refused to go to the rent it model.

I think Capture One Pro is superior to Lightroom in everything but the library system that is offered with Lightroom, though what is provided in Capture One Pro is still very good.

https://www.captureone.com/en/store

I always found the library system in Lightroom to be painful only because of how slow it is. It's hard to imagine enough features to make up for a UI that routinely takes >1s to render images onto the page.

That's what got me to switch off Lightroom, and Capture One's excellent other features kept me on the latter. Highly recommended.

I never got into the catalogs/sessions way of managing my library but Capture One is my favourite processing tool. So I use digiKam to manage my library and Capture One to process the individual photos.

Interesting. Capture One is a non destructive photo editor: how does that not force to use Capture One for managing your library as well? Is digiKam able to access the post-process images from Capture One?

I don't care as much about seeing the unedited thumbnail previews in digiKam as long as I can find what I'm looking for, and then edit and print from Capture One.

Capture One looks great but it's way more expensive than Lightroom. Lightroom is $120 a year. Capture One is $500 and $150 for an upgrade between versions or $240 a year.

Note that you can buy edition that are limited to one maker (Fujifilm or Sony) for quite a bit cheaper than the whole package. Combined with semi-regular sales/promo code (check the fujirumors or sonyrumors website), you can get a perpetual version for very interesting price: I reckon having bought the Fujifilm edition for about 125$.

You do have to commit to camera brand though.

This. I got my Sony license for $50.

I was just about to post Capture One!!

Same, recently heard about Darktable, planning to give it a shot now that I don't have Lighroom anymore

https://www.darktable.org

Darktable is abysmal, sadly. It is my go-to example for the failure of f/oss to fulfill common professional software needs.

Affinity is "thinking about" a digital asset management tool.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when...

If they do make one, it may or may not have editing features built in (vs shipping you out to Affinity Photo).

But I'm in the same boat. Stuck on CS6, couldn't stand DarkTable, haven't bothered trying any other alternatives.

(I'm building a DAM: check my profile if you'd like to be part of the closed beta!)

I'm interested, but whatever DAM I eventually move to will in large part be driven by how well it can import my years of Lightroom library (including edits out of the xmp sidecar files and at least approximating Lightroom's RAW rendering). I know that's a big ask, don't suppose it's on your roadmap?

The current version added support for importing sidecar metadata. It does not apply LR edits to the previews it shows, though (which would require re-implementing swaths of LR...).

If you see something you want when you try the beta, please tell me!

I imported a 70k item library into mylio and it ingested it fairly well, along with the xmp sidecar files. I try to avoid doing edits on my images, so I haven't tested how well it imports throughly although.

I recommend Luminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_83opqLxyU

I can't quite recommend Luminar over Ps/Lr because i've never used the latter, but Luminar seems good enough, and it also seems to be getting better.

I've been getting into photo editing recently, and searched online for a few hours to learn about the differences between the various options. From what i gathered, Luminar (which is a pay once for a lifetime license that you can have installed in up to five machines at a time) is a serious contender to Ps/Lr even at the professional level, let alone at the amateur/occasional user level.

I moved from Lightroom to Capture One Pro and eventually settled on Darktable.

It took a bit of getting used to (still not a fan of the UI and its obsession with "film rolls" every time I import something) but once I did it's quite nice. Images come out looking good and it has a handy Lua scripting environment and CLI with which you can automate many tasks.

There is https://rawtherapee.com/ and https://www.darktable.org/

Have you tried AfterShot Pro by Corel? I don't use it, but that's just because I still use (and love) Bibble 5 from 2011, which is the software that was bought by Corel and turned into AfterShot Pro. I had a quick glance at the manual of the latter, and it seems like the batch processing and other things are still intact, so I'm hopeful it still might be worth checking out.

I actually feel Adobe’s Photography Plan is pretty good value. LR Mobile on iPad is excellent, worth it for that alone

Indeed. I used to use LR Classic on my Mac, but since the new LR got more and more features I switched to using my iPad almost exclusively. I don't think I used LR on my Mac in months.

Have you tried ON1 Photo Raw?

Have you considered Polarr?

That appears to be just the editor part. The asset management in LR is really what I use most.

There's also a sale currently on Affinity Photo if you go to https://www.ephotozine.com/article/50--off-affinity-photo-so...

They usually do a black friday sale but you can get it here for half price.

Hmm. How good are they with the "grunt work" stuff for professional print design? Color profiles, PDF export, scripts for text formatting, files loading a gigabyte worth of photos, etc? I'm desperately waiting for a proper Adobe replacement but they're sitting on that segment, not with flashy, new features but with a solid-as-hell base of tried and tested background functionality.

Affinity convert on Windows here.

Profile support is fine, compatible with ICC profiles, does soft proofing and black point compensation. You'd have to go into more depth about your use cases as I know Adobe let some wild stuff happen, but if you just need to use and embed profiles and soft proof, you can do that.

Its PDF export is good, not great—again, Adobe allows for extreme granularity in PDF settings so I'd need to know specific use cases to advise. PDF import and placing PDF docs is surprisingly good, in some case shockingly so. If you're publishing books built from scratch in Affinity Publisher, there's nothing off the top of my head that I had to fundamentally change about my workflow in shipping 4-color books with layered artwork and columnar text with sidebars to prepress. If you're editing PDFs or converting from INDD, you can get away with a lot but you need to be careful since there are a few feature gaps (see the next paragraph in particular) that don't convert well or at all.

What you'll miss the most falls under what I think you mean by "scripts for text formatting". Publisher doesn't do grep styles or anything similar enough to replace that. It's the biggest feature I miss regularly. You'll miss the level of automation complexity and droplets in Photo too if you use those regularly in Photoshop.

I don't have any problems with large or complex layouts loading huge amounts of data for artwork, or massive text docs.

What I get that I didn't have in Adobe, and especially InDesign: pretty much full access from any of the component apps to vector drawing tools, raster and vector brushes, and shape tools, all of which behave consistently across the suite. No more having to flip my brain from Illustrator's vector drawing to Photoshop's to InDesign's, they all just work with each other and the same way, copy and paste across each other without any fuss, edit within each other easily when necessary, etc.

I miss some power features, especially around styles and Photo automation, but I've adapted, and I appreciate the hell out of how well-integrated the three apps are with each other in interface and functionality.

The forums are a good place to ask about or research feature implementations and requests, especially https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature...

I use Affinity Designer all the time. I bought Affinity Photo but when I actually had to do real work a small nit made me go buy a Photoshop license. That nit was I had several hundreds PNG files I needed to edit. In PS I double click the PNG in the Finder/Explorer, the file opens in Photoshop, I edit, if I added layers I Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-E to collapse them then Cmd/Ctrl-S to save and it saves back to the .PNG. Affinity can only save to non Affinity file formats via "Export" which is brings up one or more serial dialogs and save as file selector. That minor difference was enough to make it worth it for me to pay Adobe $120 to save me from hours of tedium. I mean $120 is not "that" much money and so it was worth it for me to save me even a little frustration. Others have complained about this workflow issue to Affinity but I think so far it's fallen on deaf ears.

I know it's a minor nit and few people will probably care but it's annoying enough for people used to being able to more quickly edit screenshot .PNGs and or .JPGs that I hope Affinity listens eventually. Because of that though I've never gotten used to Affinity Photo where as I'm pretty happy with Affinity Designer

Agreed, across the board it's the automation features that I miss the most. Macro recording is about all they offer, and while you can do some batch runs I haven't been able to replicate anything but some pretty simple actions.

They seem to be focused on Photoshop plugin compatibility over other features at the moment, which is good for some specialized workflows, but I really want better automation in the whole suite.

I'll at least say the lack of automation has finally pushed me to learn more about what I can do with the likes of imagemagick, but the feature-specific use cases like you bring up will be a gap until they fortify those automation features.

Thanks! I'm starting to warm up to the idea of actually giving this a try!

Been using both designer and photo for about 2 years, to replace Photoshop mainly. While mostly great, some features are missing for vectors which makes layers broken down into tiny bits instead of groups.

The only way to solve it is to open the file in illustrator and save it as an .ai file to fix it. I've been told it works in Corel draw as well.

Not affected now, but being non-US is not a guarantee. Many European companies would like to trade with for example Iran, but can't since they also have a big market in the US, so they can be targeted.

If only it ran on Linux... I hate having to reboot to Windows to edit photos.

If you are on a desktop, you can dedicate a graphics card to windows and run it with PCIe pass through into a VM. Best of both worlds.

What's wrong with GIMP? Are there special abilities and features in Photoshop GIMP does not have?

Yes, there's a lot of stuff the GIMP doesn't have, but mostly it's just the annoying UX. I'm sure half of it is just that I'm used to Photoshop, but I'm also pretty sure the other half is GIMP.

I'm not sure how I haven't seen these before. Those apps look great! I've tried sketch, but it just feels too far from the adobe world I'm used to, especially for raster graphics work.

I own a copy, but it doesn’t handle plugins not nearly as nice as photoshop.

Have you tried Publisher? How does it compare to InDesign?

I bought it and use it, yes.

It's missing some features that InDesign has and is a little slower, but it's a solid workhorse for laying out books and documents. I don't miss InDesign at this point.

Interesting. The near universal use of Microsoft Office--along with the later various SaaS products--really hollowed out the publication layout market between word processors that were pretty mediocre at layout and high-end design tools that mostly meant InDesign.

(And Scribus always seemed a steep learning curve too.)

I don't have a need at the moment but good to know there are still some tools that may make sense for more casual users.

Disagree. Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator. I'm still on CS6, the last version before CC. Even that version, released in 2012, is superior to today's Affinity Designer.

I haven't explored the other ones as deeply but from what I have done, the features seem quite limited. For example, there's a translator for Photoshop plugins to work on Affinity Photo. Very very few plugins work with this translator. Why is there even such a middleware? Because the Affinity plugin ecosystem is very weak.

It's an alternative, not a "decent" alternative. It's the equivalent of Google Docs vs Microsoft Word. If you need something barebones, it gets the job done, and there are a few things it does better. But if you need just one feature of the better software, forget it.

I have Affinity Designer and Photo and disagree with your assessment. You're right that Affinity apps do not match all the features of Adobe's apps, but Designer and Photo are well above "bare bones" in comparison. I'd say that Photo's biggest missing feature is an equivalent to Photoshop's smart object feature.

As a former user of Illustrator, there's nothing I miss from that app, certainly not the clunky Illustrator UI. (Unfortunately, Designer also has some clunky aspects to it's UI.)

Anyone, who wants to make up their own mind about the Affinity apps can download a free trial from their website - the apps work on both Windows and Mac.

Also, take a look at the 'spotlight' section of the Affinity website to see some of the work possible with the apps.

https://affinityspotlight.com/articles/recent/

> Anyone, who wants to make up their own mind about the Affinity apps can download a free trial

Because the discussion is not whether Affinity apps are good or not, but whether they are good relative to Adobe, anyone that wants to make up their own mind also can download a free trial of CC apps.

> Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator

Where does it fall short for you? Out of interest.

Pantone swatches, image trace, artboards, plugins are the 4 biggies. Especially plugins, of which I have a large variety and many custom scripts.

One other thing that stands alone and is absolutely critical, that would seem to work in Designer but doesn't, is export for embroidery. It is a quirk of my local shop but there is no vector export format from Designer that my shop can use. They end up importing ("digitizing") a jpeg. This causes many more steps in the approval workflow. With Illustrator I just export an eps and they import that and it comes out perfect basically the first time. Obviously Designer can export eps but the software on the other side doesn't like it. (And even though their software can handle native illustrator, import of that doesn't work either. Has to be eps, from Illustrator, not Designer.) I'm 100% sure it's their crap embroidery software (I mean, they are using win95 if that indicates anything), but it is what it is. It's especially odd because embroidery is very low resolution. jpeg should be perfectly fine!! I just get way better final results with the eps flow.

That embroidery issue doesn't come into my evaluation of the goodness or not of Designer as a standalone tool. I just mention it because it does affect me and I think it's an interesting point to bring up. I'm sure many many people are dependent on Illustrator for similar workflow/pipeline issues. It doesn't make the software good or bad, but does create the dependence.

I think the issue people have is they get insulted when you say the software they enjoy to use is not very good. But there are 2 kinds of good. Absolute and relative. Relative to Illustrator, Designer doesn't compare. That is my critique.

There are some things I do like very much about Designer. Personas. Slices. SVG support is much better (keep in mind tho I'm stuck on CS6). These things, however, do not begin to challenge Illustrator.

I understand why Serif would want to stand apart with their own feature set, but now I find myself using 2 tools. Oh how I, and many other non-professional users, would love to replace Illustrator.

Keep in mind, I believe I am in the target demographic for Designer. I am an occasional user, not a daily use professional. The price and pricing model is perfection. The ease of use is perfection. I dare say that the online userbase/forums and free tips and help you can get are much much better. But the lack of features is saddening.

It's interesting because Serif (the company) does not compete with Adobe (the company), even though at a surface level they would appear to. The cost difference between Illustrator and Designer is worlds apart. Maybe this is why they don't work on feature parity. They don't want to be on Adobe's radar.

With Catalina, I'm soon going to have to bail on Illustrator. I'll probably have to invest some time in Inkscape. I could pirate CC or I could use CS6 in Windows VM (again, technically pirating although many would justify it), but I'm not that person.