There's probably an opportunity to make better versions of these tools. Even their crown jelwels. If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market I'll cancel my creative suite subscription instantly.
That being said, my Adobe experience was heavy in Photoshop. Affinity Photo is more competitive there (their content-aware fill is impressive). Designer still has some ways to go to compete with Illustrator on level ground.
It's called Darktable. https://www.darktable.org/
I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.
What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far.
For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.
Just did the same thing last week.
As I've said, I didn't use LR for any significant amount of time. Its workflow may be smoother, but I don't prefer Adobe's software, though.
The last time I've tested Darktable was quite some time ago, but, on top of my head:
- dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
- pano stitching
- auto retouching; experts clearly don't care about this, but for a non-expert, it produces an easy base to work on (assuming it has a very solid implementation)
- I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
I'm sure all of the above "can be done" in any software (in particularly, the last one), but that's not really the point - the point is how easy it is for a non-expert to effectively use all of them. I remember just going through each panel, and applying effects by moving sliders. That's a great UX experience for non-experts - experts can use Photoshop.
> dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
Darktable has a dehaze filter and it works very well, but didn't compare with LR TBH.
> pano stitching
Didn't need it yet, so no comments here.
> auto retouching;
Darktable auto settings for some tools, but I didn't dig deeper since I don't use auto stuff much, TBH.
> I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
It's exactly the same in Darktable. Plus it has a very solid perspective detection and correction tool.
I'm not a photo pro. Just an enthusiast if you're eager to put a level. I explored Darktable exactly the way you've told. Just open an image, open a category and play with sliders, that's all.
I just do not use software that has no perpetual licenses except when required by client and client pays for it.
IIRC it's made by a small team of dedicated devs in Latvia (edit: actually it's their other l-neighbor Lithuania, just looked it up), and I love it.
DaVinci Resolve (now stewarded by Blackmagic Design) is a Premiere/AE replacement that is preferred by many in industry. It's also buy-once-ware (not subscription) and runs natively on Linux.
Adobe has nothing resembling a monopoly.
I only use Lightroom for its catalog, there is better software out there for editing RAWs with DXO Photolab and Capture One.