Originally posted by beholder3 With Booth darktable and rawtherapee we have zwo fantastic alternatives, so that is ehrte I will go once my LR 5 ever ends working, but that is not on the horizon as it Works with all Most Recent cameras and lenses.
Surprisingly the speed of development of all other non Adobe software providers is much higher as well.
In some cases even with a single developer. One wonders of Adobe only contracts the least bright staff available on this world.
I don't know about relative intelligence, but most everyone else is still trying to catch up with Adobe, hence this thread.
And while I like and use RT, it's basically an alternative to ACR, which is fine. It does an excellent job at that. In other words, most of these are niche products. They can concentrate on say demosaicing since they don't have to make a bunch of people happy who complain they wanna publish to FB or have the latest lens profiles, plugins, publish services, synching to the cloud, mobile versions, etc.
And as for speed of development, might wanna talk to all the people complaining about the absence of the promised DAM components to Photo Mechanic, Luminar, and Affinity Photo. All at one time or another issued kinda sorta claims have having said capability in the works, with zippo to show.
Finally, as sqrrl noted, Adobe's products in this area are the industry standard. And even the prosumer standard. If you go to classes at your local schools, or camera shops, or camera clubs or even just to YouTube it's all about "well, here's how you do that in Ps...." I think it breeds a kind of resentment, and even though most other products mimic Lr and Ps some, and even though the underlying priniciples are kinda the same (a layer is a layer and ditto for mask), it still can be more difficult to cobble together the tools and workflows one needs, even if they are but a tiny fraction of what Lr/Ps does. But it can be done, even WITH free use of Adobe products: one can use Bridge, or even Lr without Develop and Maps and get all those organizational goodies, while using RT in lieu of ACR and GIMP in lieu of Ps.
BTW, if one does night sky stuff this is a good comparison of the programs with example shots (apologies if already posted):
I Tested 10+ Photoshop Alternatives to See How They Stack Up