Category: Photography

Is ON1’s Photo RAW ‘better enough’ than Lightroom Classic to be worth a switch? Lightroom Classic has become my standard against which others are judged. To be worth moving to another program, it has to have something pretty good going for it.

Capture One, Lightroom, PhotoLab, and Photo Raw have all been updated this fall. The question for me is whether or not these changes make switching from Lightroom Classic a good choice.

I’ve spent the last couple of months working back and forth between the raw processors Capture One, Lightroom Classic, PhotoLab Elite, and Photo RAW in an attempt to settle on just one going into 2024. Owning more than one is just too expensive and too complicated trying to keep edits and metadata in sync.

I’ve been working with PhotoLab Elite over the last couple of weeks re-editing some of my better images from the last few years. The more I work with it, the more I see the missing pieces yet to be included to make it a real competitor to Lightroom Classic, Capture One, and Photo RAW.

Over the years I have used many (too many) different image post-processing applications, even so far back as when Adobe Bridge was the only DAM available other than the Finder. When Apple’s Aperture first came out, I jumped on it right away, loving it until Apple discontinued it. That was a sad day, for me.