I see you recommend CaptureOne to replace Lightroom. My wife is currently trying out CaptureOne, and my biggest issue is that it has such a different UX.
I would love to ditch Lightroom, because I don't even use it for editing, I only use it for digital asset management/cataloguing, I do all my RAW edits from DxO Photo Lab, but I have thousands of raw images in my Lightroom catalog, just for this year so far.
Unfortunately, all the alternatives I try have such a fundamentally different UX, especially when it comes to the export/import flow for third-party editing tools, that I haven't yet been able to get anything to fit my workflow.
Yup, had the same problem and decided to bite the bullet with CO. The OSS alternatives weren't that good at the time I made the switch, but maybe they've improved?
I remember hearing something about Darktable splitting into two separate projects, one with a better UX? (I'm probably wrong re the details, on the phone atm)
Ironically importing 40k or so photos from my old catalog into CO took just a fraction of time needed by LR to do the same. That was one of the triggers to stick with it for a few more days.
I haven't yet tried CaptureOne myself, so maybe I'll just give it a go. My wife got her license included with her camera purchase. Do you happen to know if it's fairly fully functional in the trial period, or am I going to have to shell out for it and hope for the best? My wife is also on Windows, and I'm on a Mac, so I don't know if that will end up with a better UX or not.
I would really like to get rid of Lightroom. I pay right now for the CC Photography Plan, and I /only/ use Lightroom Classic and nothing else, and I only use it as a DAM, everything else is done in DxO Photo Lab or Photomatix anyway.
> Do you happen to know if it's fairly fully functional in the trial period,
Yeah, it should be! I'd say just give it a go and see. CO has also some interesting workflows for managing photoshoots, a more classic one similar to LR and a session-oriented one. The bulk update UI is not as nice as LRC imho.
lightroom's UI/UX is trash compared to captureone, your productivity will skyrocket once you get to know C1. the company has lots of good videos where you can learn the whole program in 1-2 days.
Please expand on why Lightroom’s UI is trash compared to CaptureOne. Just went to C1’s site and their vibe is more of a polished darktable than the polished golden turd Lightroom is.
Yeah, I got it with a discount (Black Friday IIRC). I'm still on an older version but it works perfectly fine with all of my cameras, I don't see a reason to update.
I understand not everyone is able to get rid of Adobe and their eco-system immediately, but I had the last straw after 1) they slapped a cloud integration on top of perfectly working offline softwares and labelling it Creative Cloud, fucking over existing customers who had prepaid offline licenses and 2) they got hacked and a lot of their customers's credit card info was stolen and many of them had fraudulent transactions on their cards (including mine). They didn't even do a proper disclosure until it blew right in their face.
I thought they would have changed by now, several years later. Turns out, they secretly modified the TOS to steal their customers' intellectual property - content the customers have invested 1000s of dollars into, simply because of the usage of creative cloud to train their AI models. That too, blew up in their face. I am not sure why anyone would even trust or use Adobe in 2025. Honestly.
I have since then switched to the Affinity Suite (serif.com) and never looked back. So, for what it's worth, fuck Adobe and I hope they burn to the ground with their scammy practices.
You forget content "moderation" with AI, which can result in getting banned from using Adobe products and reported to the authorities if their AI "thinks" you are breaking law.
Affinity Photo is amazing. I'll never switch back to Photoshop, but I also wish it loaded a bit more quickly (solid 15 seconds on a pc with an SSD and a 3950x. not that PS was much better or anything, but one can wish).
There's telemetry in adobe products that you can't just disable in the app instead of blocking it?
And if there is telemetry that they don't want people to be able to disable for whatever reason, then why would they even separate the servers for it? Why not then just have the license servers and the telemetry servers be the same endpoint so if you block it you aren't running the app at all?
You could still just proxy everything through a single endpoint. I honestly don't know why people would run software that phones home to function, yet are worried that it phones home...
I'm just saying large corps move incredibly slowly, especially across internal silos. A big effort just to deter a couple of users fiddling with their network settings.
Meanwhile at Microsoft: Hold my beer [1]! (I'm still looking for the button that disables Microsoft Telemetry, and we don't even know fully what data they collect).
There might be some legal aspect to it when licensing and telemtry are on the same server, but IANAL.
Can someone who knows something about this explain why they need about 3000 random gibberish hostnames for some simple “telemetry”? If my boss asked me to add “telemetry” to a piece of software I would send all the tracking calls to first-party-telemetry.companyname.com, and if I needed thousands of servers (!) for some reason, a simple load balancer or just round robin dns would do fine.
This BS on the other hand looks like they know these thousands will get blocklisted and they plan to just rotate to a new set. The only way this could look more like malware would be if they used random-looking domains instead of just the subdomains.
It's not enforceable, but EULA is still: "this is the software we made, here are our expectations for the software, this is what you should give us for the right to use the software". And by buying the software you say: "I agree to exchange our expectations about the software."
And a country's laws are "here are the expectations how companies should behave in our country", yet companies routinely violate those and write extortionate EULAs that ask for more than they legally can, using their team of lawyers to create a legal knot that they expect lay users to untangle.
Fuck them, and fuck the idea that contracts are morally superior to laws. We see how contracts (and EULAs) are used.
Like you've said, companies have lawers, so I don't think there's an EULA that's illegal. The volume and hard to read nature of EULAs is legal and it's actually not possible to write EULA in an easy to read language, because easy to use language is not strict enough to defend itself in the court.
You trying to fuck the company only shows that you're doing the same thing as the company does, only mirrored. Yet you're the one that's morally right?
> Like you've said, companies have lawers, so I don't think there's an EULA that's illegal.
They include terms in the EULA that are unenforceable, and let the users figure out which those are. Most users don't have teams of lawyers to go over every EULA for every minor purchase, so they are tricked into relinquishing rights even when the law forbids such terms.
> You trying to fuck the company only shows that you're doing the same thing as the company does, only mirrored.
Trying to hold on to my legal rights (in this case not getting spied on by a very expensive product) is not "fucking the company", except in an utterly backwards moral code where trying not to get scammed and exploited is equivalent to scamming, just because the former involves breaking a corporate-written piece of paper that reads "we get to scam, exploit, and spy on you, and you give up your right to sue us for it".
> The only winning move is not to play.
Meanwhile companies lobby for favorable laws (banning users from examining how stuff works, i.e. reverse-engineering, banning circumventing DRM even for use that is otherwise within your rights, allowing mere EULAs to relinquish your right to even hold the company accountable in court, i.e. mandatory arbitration, etc.) - they sure don't think just giving up is "winning". But they're more than happy to let you think that, while they stack the deck even worse. You are their ideal customer, that will just bow his head and take any abuse dished out, and the most they can fear from you is that maybe you'll instead buy from someone else next time.
I had been using Adobe since Photoshop 5.5, but ditched it a couple of years ago and I’ve never looked back.