Below are the software products I can currently use and recommend, as well as a brief description as to why. Note: I'm solely using macOS these days.
Image Ingest/Browsing/Organizing
- FastRawViewer (macOS/Windows). US$24. FastRawViewer (FRV) isn’t quite as deep at the ingest and annotation capabilities as Photo Mechanic (PM), but it serves up a different set of options that are useful when browsing raw images: the ability to clearly assess exposure and even make some adjustments that the Adobe converters will pick up. Whereas with PM my concentration is on rating and annotating as fast as possible, with FRV my concentration is on dealing with exposure and setting issues while reviewing images. So yes, I have and use both products, just for different things. Like PM, FRV is a bit of a geeky tool. The features and UI are initially a bit overwhelming to novice users, but like PM, there’s a ton of user customization that’s available if you take the time to learn the full product. (Disclosure: one of the principals of the company producing this product is a friend, and provided me a copy for free; on occasion I’ve suggested changes or features for the program. That said, I have no financial interest in you buying the product; I get nothing for recommending it).
- Apple Photos (macOS). Free. Didn’t expect that, did you? As much as we all lamented the loss of iPhotos and Aperture from Apple, I think most people aren’t really giving the replacement, Photos, a real chance. The basic problem here is that Apple is thinking different, and if you don’t get on their wavelength, you’ll just sit there scratching your head wondering what you should do or how to do the thing you want to do. So let me recommend the way to deal with that: my friend Jason Snell’s book, Taking Control of Apple Photos. He’ll step you through learning Apple’s unique terminology and design. But yes, Photos will allow you to build a catalog, browse it, and even develop/process images in it. On that later bit, one of the key developers behind Apple Aperture has a Photos plug-in that works well (and works as a standalone product, too): Raw Power (US$40). Raw Power will definitely give you a set of tools that help you get your images looking the way you want them to. You can find other Photos plug-ins that do that, as well, but I’d say start with Photos and Raw Power and you should have a Lightroom Light for a lot less money. You just have to learn Apple Speak and Photos Dialect.
- Lightroom (macOS/Windows). US$19.99/month (1TB Plan), but see first item in Raw Converters, below . What started as a simple program to help photographers with workflow has turned into a whopper of a do-all, slice-all, be-all imaging program. In fact, things have expanded so much that if you’re new to Lightroom, you’ll need help (I suggest Matt Kloskowski’s The Lightroom System video tutorial set, usually US$199, but often on sale). A lot of folk are turned off by Adobe’s subscription requirement, but frankly, US$240/year is a reasonable price to pay for a tool and storage that are kept current and keep adding useful features. And no, if you drop your subscription, your catalog doesn’t go away (though your cloud images will need to be downloaded first). Some of the things you can do with your images in Lightroom do go away without subscription, but Lightroom would continue to work for basic functions on your local images. And no, you don’t need to send your images to the cloud to use them (at least for Lightroom Classic CC); everything can stay local to your computer if that’s what you want. Lightroom is slow to ingest, can use lots of extra drive space if you’re not careful (e.g. previews to improve browsing speed), and has panels all over the place (left, right, bottom, etc.), but none of that really takes away from its power to organize and develop your images. Note that with Nikon Imaging Cloud, you can take advantage of that 1TB of storage reasonably directly: set your camera to push images to Nikon Imaging Cloud and Nikon Imaging Cloud to push them to the Adobe cloud. This allows you to do things like work on your images without having to ingest a card or carry a computer (you can use an iPad with Lightroom for images in the Adobe cloud).
I no longer recommend Photo Mechanic to new users because their pricing is now unrealistic to function. You can pay US$149 year to have a “subscription" to the product, or you can pay double that to get a perpetual license that really is only going to be good for a year, as it won't be updated after that. The UX of the product still is 1990's geeky and needs updating, features aren't really being added, which makes the subscription nature problematic, and most of the updates I've seen are simply keeping up with OS's, cameras, and bugs.
Raw converters and Photo Editors
- Photoshop ACR and Lightroom Classic CC (macOS/Windows). US$14.99 to US$19.99/month. Our longest-living raw converter, and one that keeps getting updated for new cameras while adding new features and capabilities (yes, latest new camera conversions tend to be preliminary for awhile, and not optimal). Adobe Converter Raw (ACR; and the LR conversion that uses ACR) has a few wrinkles that sometimes we complain about, but it’s also still one of the most reliable raw converters available. If you convert to smart objects, you can even keep Photoshop in the non-destructive mode for most everything you do. My suggestion has always been to avoid Adobe’s standard conversion and tune ACR to your camera and tastes, which fortunately, is a fairly straightforward project that you only need to do once for each camera. Some of the recent features, such as the Super Resolution one, expand the capabilities beyond what you might think ACR actually can do. And that’s sort of the point: ACR has gotten better with time. We may still complain about some small things, but the big things keep expanding and getting better, particularly masking. ACR is a solid working tool. I use it every day. And that puts me in Photoshop, which has advanced layering and masking tools I use all the time.
The Lightroom only plan is US$14.99 month, and includes the basic Lightroom (and 1TB of cloud storage). If you also want Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, you now have to subscribe to the Photography Plan at US$19.99/month, which is getting pricey (strangely, Photoshop by itself is more expensive, go figure). I wouldn't blame you for looking at other options if you don't have a grandfathered original plan (which had less cloud storage, but is currently still effectively US$9.99 a month if you pay annually). - Affinity Photo 2 (macOS/Windows). US$70 (sometimes discounted). The poor man’s Photoshop. Almost literally. Affinity has done a tremendous job building out near clones of Photoshop, Illustrator, and inDesign. Those of you still stuck on Creative Suite 4 probably ought to be using the Affinity products instead, because they’re better than the Adobe CS4 versions, though perhaps not quite as good as the current CC version (at least for Photoshop). No subscription, no elaborate licensing scheme, product doesn’t expire, updates happen regularly. Just like it used to be when we had to walk ten miles through the snow to school ;~). You can even buy a very nicely done physical book that’s sort of half manual, half inspiration, should your need for a paper trail of help arise. The one thing I’d caution about is that Affinity Photo doesn’t extend into the latest/greatest stuff Adobe has been doing—e.g. Super Resolution, the new AI masking, or AI noise reduction capabilities—and raw support for a camera that was announced today doesn’t exist and won’t for awhile. But Affinity Photo does have HDR, panorama, and focus stitching support, plus it even does Smart Objects, which is why I say the CS4 folk ought to move on: Affinity is now starting to supply things you won’t ever get as your CS4 installation grows weeds and cobwebs. And it runs faster and more smoothly.
- DXO PhotoLab 8 (macOS/Windows). US$229 (sometimes discounted). If what you’re looking for is a solid raw converter that is more approachable than the Photoshop behemoth and that produces really nice images without a lot of geeky work on your part, I’d suggest DxO PhotoLab. It’s not the fastest raw converter (particularly if you use their excellent Prime noise reduction). It’s also not the best choice for batch processing a lot of images. But it has a lot of automatic capability, and it produces excellent output without a lot of extra work on your part. DxO tends to release a new major version yearly (for which upgrade costs are lower, currently US$99), which is pretty much the old software pricing model (e.g. not subscription).
- Your camera company’s free product. They all have one. They’re all kludgy, missing features, don’t have much performance, and sometimes can be buggy. But they’ll all net you a raw conversion that looks a lot like the JPEGs your camera creates, and if all you need is a raw conversion every once in a while, this is probably the option you should look at first.
CaptureOne is no longer recommended, partly because their pricing is now unrealistic to the competition. Their basic subscription price is equal to Adobe's Lightroom Plan without the cloud storage, and CaptureOne has not kept up with Adobe in terms of features, nor does it offer the mobile options without paying even more. You can buy a perpetual license for US$299, which gives you one year worth of updates, but the updates recently have been pretty mild.
Plug-ins
Oh, plug-ins. We used to love you, then you went away. Then you came back. Then you became full products sitting on top of full products. Then you spun back into specific plug-ins again. Sadly, in the confusion, we’ve lost a few excellent players along the way (I miss Piccure+ the most, but even Skylum’s Creative Kit plug-ins are missed). Still, I can point to one set I still use regularly:
- Nik Suite (standalone/Photoshop/Lightroom/DxO). US$149 (sometimes discounted). First independent, then part-owned by Nikon, then bought by Google, then sold to DxO. Fortunately, these plug-ins are still available and have been updated, which is a good thing, because several of them are solid keepers that should be in your workflow. I regularly use Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro. I sometimes use Dfine. Some of you should be using Vivesa rather than PS/LR sliders and brushes. Perspective Efex I’m still trying to figure out if it provides something I can’t do otherwise (I think it does). Solid suite, with plenty of useful tools that extend Photoshop/Lightroom.
TopazLabs products I previously had in this list are no longer recommended because they have been end-of-lifed. TopazLabs appears to be all in now on their Photo AI preprocessor, which puts raw conversion decisions into automation that I don't want automated. TopazLabs has basically gone all in on the AI decision making for everything. While you have some ability to adjust those decisions, I don't find that to do what I need it to do any more. Worse, I can’t get as good a result out of Photo AI as I can from Photoshop and Sharpen AI or Denoise AI.
