There are good reasons why you might not want to use Lightroom. And among them might be the cost. It’s not an inexpensive app once you factor in the subscription.
While Adobe’s Lightroom Classic is the biggest player in this space, it’s not the only one. And for various reasons — maybe being put off by the subscription model or perhaps wanting a feature or quality setting that Lightroom doesn’t offer — it might not be the best option for every photographer.
There are some excellent paid Lightroom alternatives that I’ve covered separately.
Capture One, Luminar Neo, Exposure X7, and ON1 are all strong contenders, and if you’re looking for the closest competitors to Lightroom, those are good places to start. But while they all take different approaches to the photography workflow aspect, something they all have in common is that they’re paid apps. And some of them aren’t cheap.
But what if you want something free? And maybe even you prefer open source?
What are the best free Lightroom alternatives?
It turns out there are some impressive free apps that offer similar functionality — at least in part — to Lightroom. And it’s those apps that I’m focusing on here.
Just to manage expectations, the reality is that there aren’t many — it’s really down to two or three apps. But what’s most surprising to me is that these are as full-featured and as impressive as they are considering there’s no financial incentive driving them. They might not keep up with the paid apps in every way, but they can still generate impressive results.
But the biggest caveat I have relates to compatibility with newer cameras and lenses. The reality is that these free apps tend to be slower to incorporate compatibility with any new proprietary RAW formats from newer cameras. So that might be a dealbreaker in some cases (a potential workaround in that case is using Adobe’s DNG converter to convert the RAW file to DNG; more on that below).
But so long as the app has compatibility with your camera’s RAW image files, these are the best free Lightroom alternatives I’ve come across and are well worth a look. I’ve put all of them through their paces in order to get some practical feedback on their strengths and weaknesses.
Darktable
My pick for the best free Lightroom alternative is Darktable.
Aside from being free, it’s open source and cross-platform.
Of the free Lightroom alternatives here, it is the most polished, well-rounded, and full-featured.
It uses a built-in database for image management and includes a very deep toolbox of settings to edit the images. There’s scripting support (LUA) for customizing aspects of the software, as well as some specialized bundled tools such as HDR compiling and astrophoto denoising.
And, like Lightroom, Darktable also has a map module (and geotagging support), a print module, and tethered shooting support.
Overall, while it’s not as polished and user-friendly as Lightroom Classic, and it lacks some of the basic functionality such as third-party plugin support, publish services, and a companion mobile version. Despite that, Darktable comes the closest among the free Lightroom alternatives available.
I have a more detailed overview of Darktable separately.
There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can download it here.
RawTherapee
RawTherapee focuses tightly on its RAW image processing. Instead of a database digital management system, it relies on a file browser that’s directly accessing your hard drive’s native structure. (But RawTherapee plays nicely with the asset management app digiKam (which is also free).)
But when it comes to RAW image processing, RawTherapee is very strong. Albeit in a very technical kind of way. It makes available a huge number of very granular settings, so you can tweak the processing to your heart’s content.
The downside of that is that it’s not especially quick or intuitive, and there’s a pretty steep learning curve involved to get the most from it. It feels much more like a very large toolbox of tools, but it’s mostly up to you to figure out how to use them.
In general, I’d recommend RawTherapee for technically-minded photographers who are inclined to milk every last drop of image quality out of their RAW files and don’t mind spending some time finding the right combination of settings to do that. Of course, it can be used by less technically savvy photographers, but the steep learning curve to get the best results might well put those users off.
I have a more detailed overview of RawTherapee separately.
There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can download it here.
digiKam
digiKam is specialized digital asset management software.
While it can do some basic processing of RAW files, that’s not where its strength or focus lies.
Instead, its emphasis is on powerful catalog-based organization and filtering.
It allows you to use albums, tagging and keywords, as well as geotagging. And it works well with very large collections of images, making searching, finding, and sorting of them much more manageable.
It can also be used alongside other apps, which was the traditional approach before Lightroom came along and combined RAW processing with catalog-based organization.
There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can download it here.
Brand-specific RAW processing apps
Some of the major manufacturers also make their own RAW processing apps that are designed specifically for the RAW files produced by their own cameras. While the workflow and interface often always as refined and powerful as some of the other more general options, they can come with advantages, such as:
- They’re usually free.
- They can work very well for milking the maximum image quality out of the RAW files by drawing on proprietary data in the file.
- They can often offer support for new camera models more quickly than third-party software.
NX Studio (Nikon)
Studio NX is specifically for NEF files generated by Nikon cameras. It’s free, and there are versions for Mac and Windows. You can download it here.
Digital Photo Professional Express (Canon)
Digital Photo Professional Express is designed specifically for Canon RAW files (Canon uses multiple file extensions, including .cr2 and .cr3). It’s a mobile app for iPads. You can find more information about here.
Digital Photo Professional (Canon)
Canon also makes a desktop/laptop version known as Digital Photo Professional. It comes with Canon cameras. It’s free, and there are versions for Windows and Mac. Canon makes it surprisingly hard to find where to download it, but you can find it here after entering the model of your camera here, and you can find further directions here.
Imaging edge desktop (Sony)
This is Sony’s RAW processing and tethered shooting app. It’s pretty bare-bones, but is a good option to have if you’re shooting with a Sony camera. There are versions for Windows and Mac, and you can download it here.
Fujifilm X RAW Studio (Fujifilm X)
Fujifilm also makes their own RAW processor that’s designed specifically for Fujifilm X-series cameras. It does things a bit differently, in that it actually uses the the camera as the processing engine (but is still a desktop/laptop app). There are versions for Windows and Mac. You can download it here.
Other alternatives
LightZone is another free Lightroom alternative. It’s open-source, and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s a community-based project, and support is provided through its community forum. It’s best suited for tinkerers and those who’d like to contribute to a community-driven project, but it lacks some core features and updates that professional photographers need.
UPDATE: As a community-based project, development has tended to proceed in fits and starts (life has a way of interfering). The LightZone website has been abandoned, but as of mid-2023, it seems that there is still some development work going on, with the hope of a new version sometime soon. You can find the Github project page here.
Other related software
These aren’t Lightroom alternatives, as such, but they are free apps that perform some related, more specialized tasks related to working with RAW image files.
Adobe DNG Converter
DNG Converter is a utility for converting other RAW file formats to Adobe’s DNG format. Lightroom can do this as part of its import process; this extracts the tool into a standalone app with a single purpose. This can be useful for creating archival versions for long-term storage or as a workaround for compatibility issues.
ExifTool
ExifTool is a free utility developed by Phil Harvey that works with file metadata, including that encoded with RAW image files. It’s the gold standard in terms of the image metadata it can access, but by itself, it’s not the most user-friendly tool, so many users might prefer one of the versions that adds a more user-friendly interface on top, such as jExifToolGUI (Windows, Mac, Linux) or ExifToolGUI (Windows). It’s free and platform-independent, and you can find pre-compiled distributions for Windows, Mac, and Unix.
IrfanView
IrfanView is a long-time favorite photo editing program and is surprisingly powerful, although accessing that power isn’t always as user-friendly as it could be. It’s for Windows.
XnView MP / XnConvert
XnView MP is another long-time free favorite that is very powerful for opening and viewing a huge variety of image file formats. There’s now a cross-platform version that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. A related tool they put out is XNConvert, which is one of my go-to tools for converting image files between formats.
GIMP
This venerable app has long been a free alternative to Photoshop. You can find it here.
Things worth knowing
There’s one other solution that I haven’t mentioned here. It’s more of a RAW processing workaround than a full-fledged RAW processing app. And that is that cameras that can shoot RAW can also process RAW in-camera. So you can process the RAW file in the camera and output as something more compatible such as JPG (or, sometimes, TIFF). It’s not really a viable option on a large scale with multiple images, but it can get you out of a jam for individual photos if you’re on location.
Wrap up
While paid apps like Lightroom, Capture One, ON1, and Luminar NEO have the marketing budgets to get lots of attention, there’s a surprisingly thriving world of free RAW processing apps that offer not just relief on the wallet, but can also offer specific workflows or tools that other apps might not have.
