Yes, there are apps that are comparable to Lightroom CC. If you’re seeking alternatives to Adobe Lightroom CC, compare.edu.vn offers detailed comparisons to help you discover the best photo editing and management software to suit your specific needs. Explore options with similar features and find the perfect fit for your photography workflow. Consider options with similar editing capabilities, raw image processing, and photo organization to Adobe Lightroom CC.
1. What Is The Best Alternative To Lightroom?
| Image | Product | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Skylum Luminar#1 LIGHTROOM ALTERNATIVE | – Great Value for Money – Super Fast – Fun to Use – Complex Edits made Easy | |
| On1 Photo RAWHIGHLY RECOMMENDED | – Easy to Use – All Skill Levels – Great Value for Money – Incredibly Flexible System | |
| Mylio PhotosBEST DAM FOR ORGANISING PHOTOS | – Slick Interface – Easy & Fun to Use – Completely Private (offline) – Unifies Photo Libraries | |
| DxO PhotoLabBEST FOR ADVANCED EDITING | – Quick Processing – Superior Noise Reduction – Haze Remover – Clear Interface | |
| Capture OneBEST FOR PROFESSIONALS | – Feature Rich – Interface Customizability – Excellent Raw File Conversion – Tethering Abilities | |
| DarktableFREE ALTERNATIVE | – Excellent Performance – User-friendly Design – Robust – Powerful and Comprehensive | |
| Affinity PhotoLAYER EDITING | – Affordable – Raw Editing – Flawless Retouching – Live Filter Layers | |
| Photoshop ExpressLIGHTROOM CC ALTERNATIVE | – Edit on the Go – Mobile – Easy Edits – Easy for Beginners | |
| PolarrONLINE ALTERNATIVE | – Fast – Powerful Portrait Enhancers – Entirely Online – Slick User Interface |
1. Skylum Luminar (Most Popular Lightroom Alternative)
Luminar is a top alternative to Lightroom, offering a one-time purchase option and AI-powered tools. It’s an excellent choice for those seeking powerful image processing without a subscription.
Pros
- Affordable one-time price
- Easy and fun to use
- Effective one-click presets
- Impressive AI tools
- Excellent portrait enhancers
- Fast RAW image imports
- Extensions (additional features)
Cons
- Limited photo management features
- Limited print and export options
- Disappointing mobile app
Luminar is consistently recommended as a leading Lightroom alternative. Its core RAW image processing tools are comprehensive, and the AI-powered features are unmatched by other competitors. This makes it appealing for those who want advanced editing capabilities without the ongoing cost of a subscription.
For photographers who don’t want to spend hours on complicated edits in Lightroom or Photoshop, Luminar is ideal. Tasks that might take an experienced retoucher hours in Photoshop can be completed in just one click. The image editing software is also refreshingly affordable.
With Luminar, you can replace the sky, modify facial features, remove unwanted elements, and add sun rays in seconds. No prior editing experience is necessary.
Even the latest version of Adobe Lightroom, which includes Generative Remove, has fewer AI tools than Luminar Neo. Much of the excitement surrounding Luminar is centered around its AI photo editing features. However, it is also a competent non-destructive RAW photo editor, offering the main tools required to enhance images.
Luminar is perfect for beginners, with user-friendly features and a simple learning curve. Existing Lightroom users will appreciate the similar tool layout, shortcut keys, and slider-based image adjustments. All the basic tools found in Lightroom’s Develop module are also present in Luminar, including advanced features like Curves and LUT Mapping.
When you import a photo into Luminar, artificial intelligence analyzes the content and suggests overall edits in the form of presets unique to each photo. This often eliminates the need for further adjustments.
Many Lightroom alternatives also feature presets, but they don’t tailor themselves automatically to individual images as they do in Luminar. This means you save time by not having to make additional tweaks.
Adding realistic sun rays and repositioning them is simple – note how the rays pass ‘behind’ objects]
Another advantage over Lightroom is that Luminar’s image library mirrors your hard drive. This means that if you move or rename images or folders outside the software, it automatically adjusts its catalog. You can even drag and drop images directly from your computer into Luminar.
This makes image management easier, as you can use OSX Finder or Windows Explorer to organize your folders.
Luminar Extensions are a new way to enhance the Neo software further, allowing you to upscale photos without losing quality, turn city lights into starbursts, and sharpen subjects. The extensions can be purchased separately, but the most cost-effective way is to buy Luminar on the Pro plan, which includes them all for an affordable subscription fee.
Regarding overall performance, Luminar imports RAW images much faster than Lightroom. As it references files on your hard drive, there is no long import sequence. Images appear in Luminar immediately.
Luminar runs natively on the Mac M1 chip, conserving your MacBook battery even when running processor-intensive tasks. However, Lightroom is still quicker at performing batch edits of multiple large RAW files. Performance depends on the size of the original file and your computer hardware. Luminar may not be a viable alternative to Lightroom for wedding photographers or anyone needing to edit thousands of RAWs quickly.
Overall, Luminar is better than other Lightroom alternatives due to its simplicity, core editing tools, powerful AI features, and affordable one-time pricing. A subscription is also available, giving access to the Luminar Extensions and other tools.
For certain complex editing tasks, Luminar is superior. However, for image management, it falls short. You can use it as a plugin alongside Lightroom to get the best of both worlds.
Luminar is available for Mac and Windows and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
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2. ON1 Photo RAW (Great All-In-One Lightroom Alternative)
ON1 Photo RAW combines image organization, RAW file processing, and layered editing. It stands out as a comprehensive alternative to Lightroom, suitable for advanced users.
Pros
- One-time purchase
- Layer-based workflow
- Great file management/organization
- Support for lots of cameras/lenses
- Useful snapshots feature
- Powerful AI features
- Excellent presets
Cons
- Slightly confusing interface
- Steep learning curve for beginners
- Occasional loading delays
- Needs powerful computer
ON1 Photo RAW is a favorite Lightroom alternative, with the latest version introducing new features. Unlike most Lightroom competitors, it combines an image organizer, RAW file processor, layered editor, and effects app all in one. It’s like having both Lightroom and Photoshop in one place.
The user interface is not as simple as Luminar, and there’s a higher learning curve. However, ON1 comes with features that advanced users appreciate.
The excellent photo management and library system is browser-based. Like Luminar, there’s no need to import images, but ON1 stands out with its extensive search features.
You can locate images by searching by keyword, metadata, date, and even the time the image was taken. This is crucial for those who depend on metadata for managing photos. You can also create custom camera profiles with the new X-Rite Camera Profiler.
While it doesn’t have the options for backups or the flexibility of Lightroom’s catalog system, it’s expected in a database-style image editing software.
The develop module is structured much like Lightroom, and it’s a bit more complex for those new to image editing. However, ON1 has all the photo adjustments expected from a Lightroom replacement, including new AI features.
One handy tool unique to ON1 is AI Match, which takes any custom settings used in-camera and matches them with a RAW conversion rendered by the software. This is useful if you shoot in black and white or using custom film looks.
ON1’s Effects module includes proprietary filters, including ‘Weather’, which lets you add rain or snow to an image.
ON1 Photo RAW 2022.5 has added new AI features, including NoNoise AI, Sky Swap AI, and full integration of the ON1 Resize AI software, useful for upscaling photos with minimal degradation. AI Quick Mask is another impressive tool, saving hours when making multiple selections.
Many Lightroom alternatives come with layer functionality, and ON1 is no exception. These work much the same as Photoshop and inPixio, with masks, blend modes, and an easy way to merge layers.
Both Lightroom and ON1 have HDR and Panorama options, but ON1 also has Focus Stacking. (Neither Capture One nor Luminar has HDR or Pano.)
While not everyone uses these features, if you do and want an all-in-one editor, ON1 has an edge over the competition.
Regarding portrait editing, ON1 has long been at the top of the field for its price point. Portrait Mode automatically finds faces and creates a separate mask/adjustment panel for each one. From there, you can adjust the skin, eyes, and mouth individually.
ON1 also has built-in presets, over 100 new looks, new backgrounds, textures, and skies, although the sky replacement feature isn’t quite as accurate as Luminar’s.
For those who want prints, ON1 Photo RAW has a print module that adds functionality to the app. It comes with a number of templates, including options for individual prints, contact sheets, and tiled package prints. It also lets you add watermarks before you print.
Other new features include SmugMug integration, better noise reduction, an excellent map view mode, timeline albums, and a focus mask overlay so you can tell which photos are in focus. If you want to invest further, there’s even a new ON1 cloud sync service and ON1 Photo RAW for mobile.
Aside from the slightly complicated user interface, a small downside is the sluggishness in performance of some of the processor-intensive AI tools.
All in all, ON1 Photo RAW is the only real ‘one-stop-shop’ photo editor available right now. It’s faster than Lightroom, offers more search power than Luminar, does photo merging, has print options, and even allows for text to be added. Best of all is the price of ON1 – it’s great value for money, especially when compared to a Lightroom subscription.
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3. Mylio Photos (Best Lightroom Alternative for Organizing Photos: DAM)
Mylio Photos excels in photo management, offering offline access and device-to-device syncing. This makes it ideal for photographers who prioritize privacy and organization.
Pros
- Completely private (offline)
- No reliance on Cloud/Internet
- Great way to ‘rediscover’ forgotten photos
- Slick interface
- Easy & fun to use
- Facial recognition is entirely offline
- Excellent Map, Calendar and people organisation
- Unifies photo libraries across multiple devices/platforms
- Duplicate photo finder helps save space
Cons
- Can’t be purchased outright (subscription-only)
- Devices need to be on to sync
- Inaccurate import times (speeds were actually faster!)
If you’re looking for photo editing software with no subscription to replace Lightroom, Mylio Photos isn’t right for you. It’s not exactly a Lightroom equivalent, per se.
However, if you want the best photo management app on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, keep on reading.
Mylio Photos uses local media storage and device-to-device syncing to allow you to connect multiple image libraries together and access them in one location – all without the Internet or the Cloud.
This means it’s entirely private – a huge benefit for any photographer who feels uncomfortable about storing and sharing personal images online.
You choose to ‘share’ any photos or videos across your devices (or those of your family) via your own secure WiFi connection. As long as the devices are connected and active on the same WiFi network, the apps will sync your chosen videos and photos.
With Mylio, since you upload nothing, all your data remains completely private, and in this day and age of hackers and online piracy, that’s very reassuring.
Mylio also helps you find images faster via smart organization and search features, as well as offering handy image editing tools too.
While you won’t find many advanced editing tools like some of the other Lightroom alternatives, what it does offer is enough for most photographers needing to make their images look better.
RAW image processing is non-destructive and can be performed on any device. The mobile app is fast and responsive since all images are reduced, much like a Lightroom Smart Preview.
You’re even able to transfer the full-resolution image from your ‘Vault’ to any of your devices if you need it.
A key benefit of Mylio Photos is that it can be used across different platforms, meaning if your laptop is a Mac but your phone is an Android and your tablet runs Windows, you can still use it. This makes it great for families and small businesses where people are using a mix of products and platforms.
You can store and organize an unlimited number of photos and videos. The only limitations are the capacity of your devices. To optimize storage, photos are optimized to approximately 5% of their original size.
With Mylio, since you upload nothing, all your data remains completely private, and in this day and age of hackers and online piracy, that’s very reassuring.
The user interface is well laid out and easy to understand, making it great software for beginners or anyone who just wants a simple way to organize and edit photos.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy it outright, but there is a free trial to see if you like it. After the trial ends, the standard subscription pricing options are $99.99 paid annually or $9.99 paid monthly.
For anyone who values privacy above all else, Mylio is a great solution. The fact that it’s so good at managing multiple libraries of images is just a bonus.
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4. DxO PhotoLab (Great for RAW Processing)
DxO PhotoLab stands out with its RAW processing engine and noise reduction capabilities. It is a strong contender for photographers who prioritize image quality and detailed editing.
Pros
- Can be bought outright
- Includes 2 or 3 activations
- Excellent RAW processing
- Best-in-class noise reduction
- Excellent lens correction tool
Cons
- Elite edition is expensive
- Basic photo organization features (DAM)
DxO PhotoLab is an image editor app that some photographers choose over Lightroom due to its powerful RAW processing engine.
Available as two different photo editing programs: ‘Essentials’ or ‘Elite’, you’ll definitely want the Elite version if you’re a professional photographer to take advantage of all the amazing new features of version 5.
DxO is best known for its impressive RAW processing tools, which automatically apply lens corrections and all the default processing adjustments when you start browsing a folder of RAW files.
A handy feature is how DxO can automatically look up any missing camera and lens correction profiles that are required to provide the best RAW processing. However, most of these are already included in the software.
The user interface is similar to Lightroom and can be customized to mimic it further. All the basic editing functionality is there, with more advanced editing tools ready for you to take full manual control.
Smart Lighting is another feature exclusive to DxO, applying highlight and shadow adjustments to a RAW file to produce a more balanced image with increased dynamic range. This is especially useful to apply to a series of images and a real timesaver for landscape photography.
For editing particular areas of your images, the local adjustment tools are powerful and intuitive. Similar to Lightroom, you can apply them with a graduated filter tool and a manual brush.
Unique to DxO PhotoLab, you can also try your hand with a control line and control point tool to make local selections too.
The non-destructive editing is smooth and fast, and the latest versions bring with them a number of useful features, including:
- DeepPrime: demosaicing and denoising technology based on artificial intelligence and trained with deep learning.
- Support for Fujifilm X-Trans files: apply the same film looks to your RAW files as your Fuji camera does with JPEGs.
- Smart Workspace: dynamic interface with a simpler workflow with batch renaming.
- Advanced History: editing history tool to scroll back to different moments in the editing process.
- Selective Copy Paste: synchronizes the settings of several similar images by applying individual edits from one photo to another.
- Instant Watermarking: add watermarks directly to your photos.
You can do many of the same things in DXO PhotoLab as you can in Lightroom with regards to image management and editing individual images, but for any non-destructive layer-based edits, you’ll need to resort to other software such as Photoshop.
In addition, while metadata management in the Photo Library is a new feature to modify, categorize and search for images using EXIF and IPTC and add keywords, DxO still lags behind Lightroom for bulk photo organization and management.
However, for professional photographers or perfectionist pixel peepers who want the best noise reduction and RAW processing, DxO is hard to beat.
5. Capture One (Lightroom Alternative for Professional Studio Photography)
Capture One is tailored for professional photographers, offering advanced RAW file conversion and tethered shooting capabilities. Its robust features make it suitable for studio environments.
Pros
- Excellent RAW file conversion
- Tethered workflow second to none
- Powerful adjustment tools
- Customizable interface (can be made to look like Lr)
- Layer-based editing
- Powerful colour adjustment tools
- Annotations feature useful for teams
- Generous student discount
- iPad app now available
Cons
- License is expensive
- Complicated for beginners
- Lack of 3rd party plugins
- Limited file organisation
Capture One is a powerful software reserved more for professional photographers. It’s got a steep learning curve, and it’s geared more towards a tethered shooting/collaborative workflow as used in studios or teams.
Having said that, if you’re a pro who’s looking for something with better imaging capabilities than Lightroom and the other photo editing software available right now, Capture One is the tool to use.
With its latest release, Capture One offers exceptional RAW image file processing, image cataloging, layers, local adjustments, keystone adjustments, and just about all the features one would expect out of a pro image editing app.
If you moving from Lightroom, Capture One makes it a simple transition. You’re able to smoothly migrate your existing Lightroom files with an importer tool and even customize the interface so it mimics Lightroom.
However, despite all the helpful tutorials and documentation, there’s still a steep learning curve to using Capture One proficiently.
Thanks to color profiles that are tailored for every camera, any RAW file imported into Capture One will instantly look better than any other RAW photo editor. With Lightroom, for example, imported files have a more neutral starting point.
Capture One has more ways to manipulate color than Lightroom, allowing you to make color balance changes to shadow, mid-tone, and highlights, and a channel dedicated to skin tones.
Capture One’s Color Balance tool is more like color grading. Unlike most other editing programs, it doesn’t limit you to the 8-color HSL panel. The Pick Color tool allows you to pick any color or color range in the photo.
From there, you can adjust the affected color range, hue, saturation and lightness. The 3-Way option even lets you adjust the color tint separately in the shadow, mid-tone and highlight areas.
Need to smooth out skin tones? No problem. Simply choose the Skin Tone tab, select a color range, and adjust the uniformity sliders.
Unlike Lightroom, Capture One doesn’t offer different workspaces for different functions (i.e. library, develop, etc.). Instead, everything sits in one interface and you toggle through buttons to change functions – this mixed-asset management can be confusing at first.
Fans of Lightroom’s autocorrect features won’t be disappointed, since Capture One offers all of them, and actually improves their performance.
There are tons of adjustment options, many of which the average photographer would never use. If you thought Lightroom was tricky to master, just wait till you start exploring the capabilities of C1!
Tethering features in Capture One make it the obvious choice for studio photographers
If you’re a photographer who shoots tethered to a computer, Capture One is faster and much more reliable than Lightroom. This is no surprise since tethered shooting functionality is one of the main reasons the software was developed.
Like Photoshop, but unlike Lightroom, Capture One allows you to edit in layers. Lightroom only allows mask layering.
When you use layers in Capture One, you can make targeted local adjustments to your photos and still use the majority of the editing tools available, not just the ones in a given tool. This is a huge benefit for those who like a fine level of control over photo manipulation.
To use Capture One regularly, you have 3 options: a monthly and annual subscription, and a lifetime license, which at around $434 is rather expensive. You can also download a free 30-day trial.
There’s also a free iPad app. However, users searching for editing apps like Lightroom may be disappointed. It’s still lacking features and surprisingly, it’s not free.
In summary, if you’re a pro who needs the most accurate editing capabilities, or are lucky enough to own a digital MF camera, Capture One Pro will help you get the most out of every image.
For everyone else and especially beginners, however, it’s overkill.
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6. Darktable (Best Free Lightroom Alternative)
Darktable provides a full-featured, non-destructive image adjustment suite and extensive library management options. It is an excellent choice for users seeking a robust, free alternative.
Pros
- Lightroom alternative Free option
- User-friendly interface
- Basic file management features
- Open-source
- Multiple languages
- Powerful export system
- Repetitive tasks can be scripted
Cons
- Confusing interface
- Lacks keywording options
- RAW processing not very refined
Darktable is still the best free Lightroom alternative, offering a full-featured non-destructive image adjustment suite and extensive library management options.
It runs on Linux, Mac OS X / MacPorts, BSD, Windows and Solaris 11 / GNOME making it one of the few truly cross-platform image editors available now.
Darktable can import a wide variety of standard, RAW and HDR image formats, including JPEG, CR2, NEF, HDR, PFM, RAF and more.
It also includes RAW processing for over 400 cameras as well as look-up tables (LUTs) and tethered-shooting support.
Alike Lightroom, the latest version takes advantage of GPU-accelerated image processing, meaning most editing features are surprisingly fast.
As far as the UI is concerned, Darktable looks a lot like Lightroom, but the grouping of the editing modules still takes a bit of time to get used to.
Once you get used to the user interface you can fully customize Darktable, setting it up for just the editing tools you want to use.
You can set up automatic scripts in Darktable to streamline your workflow and make repetitive tasks fast and more efficient. It is a unique feature that Lightroom nor any of its alternatives offer.
Darktable offers a powerful image export system, which supports Piwigo web albums, disk storage, 1:1 copy, and email attachments. It can even generate a simple HTML-based web gallery for simple online album creation.
Darktable also allows you to export to low dynamic range (JPEG, PNG, TIFF), 16-bit (PPM, TIFF), or linear high dynamic range (PFM, EXR) images.
In terms of support, Darktable comes with excellent, multi-lingual documentation. Even the app itself is available in 21 languages.
Being open-source, there’s a whole host of user support forums, video tutorials, and instructional posts too. It’s also continually being updated, with many talented programmers working to improve it.
Professional photographers might have an issue with Darktable’s less-than-Lightroom ability to recover shadows and highlights, but most users won’t really notice the difference.
If you have a library with over 10,000 photos, it’s better to run another image management program alongside this app. (Most open-source folks choose Digikam).
Overall, Darktable is the most developed of all the open-source free Lightroom alternatives and is well worth trying out.
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7. Raw Therapee (Open-Source Lightroom Alternative)
RawTherapee is a free, cross-platform, open-source RAW image processing app for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s a popular software for beginners or anyone who doesn’t want to invest in an Adobe Photography Plan to edit their images.
Pros
- Free
- Quick importing
- Support for Windows, Linux and Mac
- Decent colour adjustments
- Open-source
Cons
- Lacks advanced editing tools
- Lacks Digital Asset Management (DAM)
- Lacks printing options
- Confusing user interface
- RAM intensive
RawTherapee is a free, cross-platform, open-source RAW image processing app for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s a popular software for beginners or anyone who doesn’t want to invest in an Adobe Photography Plan to edit their images.
RawTherapee has all the standard editing features needed in a RAW editor and even includes advanced color controls and lens corrections.
Among its strong points are exceptional demosaicing, multiple denoising methods and batch processing.
The RAW processing in RawTherapee is impressive for a free app, and it has a strong, devoted Fujifilm user following. (Fujifilm RAW files are notoriously challenging to render well.) In fact, many users prefer RawTherapee’s outputs to the other free Lightroom alternatives.
There’s also what seems like an infinite ability to fine-tune adjustments in RawTherapee. This can get in the way if you need to edit quickly (i.e. use a single slider), but if you want full control it actually has even more options than Lightroom.
RawTherapee is available in over 25 languages and will soon have more, thanks to a very active community of open-source developers who keep the software updated with the latest camera and lens profiles.
Documentation and tutorials are scarce, but the online manual can be downloadable as a PDF and contains most of what you’d need to get started.
However, it lacks file management features and printing options, making it unsuitable for professional photographers.
Still, with the recent releases providing “hundreds of bug fixes, speed optimizations and raw format support improvements,” RawTherapee is still one of the best free Lightroom alternatives of the year.
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8. Photoshop Express (Free Adobe Lightroom CC Alternative)
Photoshop Express is an excellent choice for users looking for a free, mobile editing app with basic tools and easy-to-use features. It is available on iOS, Android, and Windows.
Pros
- Free
- Easy to use
- Fun layouts and collages
- Powerful RAW editing tools
- Available for iOS, Android and Windows
Cons
- Limited editing tools
- Not for professionals
Photoshop Express is a freely downloadable mobile editing app and a worthy recommendation for anyone looking for a Lightroom alternative for iPad, iPhone, Windows or Android devices.
(It even works on Windows desktop computers and in web browsers too.)
While you can’t work on more than one photo at a time like you can with Lightroom batch editing, it offers all the RAW editing tools that many photographers will ever need.
Some of the features include resizing images, cropping, exposure adjustments, shadow/highlight/contast adjustments, red-eye removal, noise reduction and more.
Since Express is, at its heart, a Photoshop derivative, it also offers layer-based editing features such as a text editor, stickers, frames, a collage maker and even a handy watermark tool.
Fans of presets won’t be disappointed either, since Photoshop Express offers over 100 ‘Looks’, which are a one-click solution to make your photos look better.
Photoshop Express offers a handful of surprisingly powerful editing tools, including face-aware liquify, selective edits, auto-masking and even a replace eyes feature that opens up closed eyes.
One thing to note is that Photoshop Express doesn’t offer non-destructive editing like Lightroom. You’re always working on the original file unless a PSD file is saved – a function unique to iOS devices.
If you usually use a mobile device to take photos (don’t we all?!), Photoshop Express provides Templates to make fast edits, overlay text on your photos and have some fun with special effects – you can add bokeh overlays, light leaks, cutouts, smoke, noise, flares, borders and raindrops to your photos.
Another neat trick is the ability to generate scrapbooks and create custom stickers with your photos.
For beginners who want to improve at photo editing, the new Discover feed lets you see how other users created a look, and then apply the same edits to your own photos.
Clearly, Photoshop Express isn’t a replacement for Lightroom, but rather, a fun, simple and completely free photo editor that includes many of the basic features of Lightroom CC and some others that LR doesn’t have.
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9. Snapseed (Lightroom Alternative for Android)
Snapseed is a free photo editing app developed by Google, available for Android or iOS. With over 100 million downloads in the Google Play store, it’s the most popular mobile photography app you’ll come across.
Pros
- Free
- Simple user interface
- Basic and advanced tools
- Snappy to use
- Available for Android and iOS
Cons
- Lack of recent updates
- Lacks advanced tools
If you’re wondering what app is like Lightroom but free, here’s your answer.
Snapseed is a free photo editing app developed by Google, available for Android or iOS. With over 100 million downloads in the Google Play store, it’s the most popular mobile photography app you’ll come across.
Featuring 29 tools and filters, including healing, brush, structure, HDR and perspective, Snapseed is remarkably comprehensive for a free app with no ads or paid upgrades.
You’re able to work on JPG or RAW files, tuning each image with various basic and advanced editing tools to make your images look better.
The selective ‘Control Point’ tool is particularly useful for selectively adjusting various aspects of your photo. You place up to 8 points on the image and assign seaprate adjustments and enhancements, with the Snapseed algorithm doing the rest.
Snapseed’s allows you to do things like remove dust spots, powerlines and any other unwanted element from your photos with ease.
However, the latest update of Lightroom mobile has Generative Remove, which allows you to simply circle around distractions to remove them with ease. Also the Quick Actions that speed up fine-tune adjustments are difficult to match.
Something that Lightroom can’t do is add text or annotations to photos, but with Snapseed it’s simple.
Then there are all the various looks that can be applied to each image to get them ready to be shared on social media – grunge, grainy film, vintage, retrolux, noir, black and white and our favourite, the double exposure features that allow you to blend two photos much like in Photoshop.
For selfie lovers, the face enhancement and face pose tools are fun and useful for doing things like sharpening eyes, adding face-specific lighting or smoothing skin.
The only downside is the lack of updates, with the last version released back in April 2020.
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10. Apple Photos (Free Lightroom Alternative for MacOS)
Apple Photos offers seamless integration with the Apple ecosystem, providing a free and intuitive photo management and editing tool for Mac users.
Pros
- Free
- Slick user interface
- Plugin support
- Face recognition
- Visual look up
- Mobile app integration
Cons
- Mac only
- Lacks lens profile corrections
- Lacks layer-editing
Apple Photos, aka ‘Photos for macOS’ is an often overlooked free Lightroom alternative that comes bundled with every Apple computer.
Over the years, the Photos program has evolved into a fully-fledged non-destructive editing program and photo management tool with both basic and advanced tools for all levels of photographers.
