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Comment by xerxes777 | Hacker News Reader

How it compares to Lightroom?

Just like GIMP compares to Photoshop. All the tools are there, maybe there is even more of them. However something feels "off", things sometimes freeze for no apparent reason. The less you know Lightroom the greater the chance that you will like RT

> things sometimes freeze for no apparent reason

Fortunately for the alternatives that would describe Lightroom these days too, to the point that Adobe had to publicly acknowledge that performance isn’t good enough [1].

1: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/07/on-lightroom...

The last LR version I used was LR3 and performance was really not a problem. That was 2010, mind you. On an even then outdated dual-core AMD system with the images and the catalogue on some old hard disk.

So, am I correct to understand that Adobe managed to botch LR so badly that PCs with vastly superior processing and IO to what I used back then struggle on basic tasks?

Woah.

Yeah, it's not terribly performant nowadays. I haven't gotten many crashes, but it feels pretty slow in general, even on a beefy machine.

One explanation can be that they managed to botch it the other can be that size of RAW images increased significantly in the meantime. I had no problem running relatively recent LR on i5 with 16gb ram.

(I had problem with their pricing though, so I switched to another (non-OSS) SW that is performing similarly for ~1/3 of the price)

Talking about their licensing practice, I was about to buy a license for LR but their website prohibited me because I'm from their no- support/blacklisted country, so I can't buy. thanks for piracy and FOSS as well.

The image quality and detail level, presumably from the RAW decoder, is pretty poor compared to Lightroom, CaptureOne etc. The last time I gave it a try was about a year ago though.

To me it seems that Lightroom makes it much easier for users to get a decent quality due to a much better polished user interface and sane presets. You should be able to obtain the same quality with both programs but it takes oh-so-much work to get gradients, color, detail, denoise into the right balance.

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