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Hi, Kendra,
The answer to your question isn’t as straightforward as you’d like it to be. There are a few questions that you need to answer before the big question can be answered. I just went through what you are going through when my 2010 Mac Pro reached the point where it was no longer economical to keep it running and its inability to run the latest versions of macOS meant it was losing the ability to run the photo apps that I was using, which included LR6.
I ended up replacing my Mac with a new one and discovered that I could no longer run LR6 at all; not because it wouldn’t actually run,but because Adobe had removed the ability to authorize it on any machine that couldn’t run 32-bit software, which includes all of the modern Macs. This leads to some of the questions that you need to answer in order to make some decisions.What Mac are you using? Which macOS version are you using? How much RAM does your Mac have, and when do you anticipate replacing your Mac with a newer one? The most important question to be answered by someone moving away from LR is below.
Given that you are basically replacing LR6, the major question to be answered becomes whether or not you’d like to keep editing the images that you’ve worked on in LR6 without needing to “bake in” all of your edits by exporting those images as jpegs, for instance, which you then open up in your new photo app of choice. If the direction that you’d like to go is the export and reopen in a new app with your LR6 edits baked in as the starting point, then you can basically use any app that reads whatever format you export the files in.
If you’d like to use your files with the LR6 edits as the starting point, but with the ability to modify those edits without starting over, there are basically only 2 ways you can go. Neither method, unfortunately,is cost free. The first is both the least preferred and the easiest. It is to “rent”Adobe’s CC software using their Photography Plan which costs about $10/month (with a discount if you pay/renew for a year in advance). I detest rewarding Adobe for their actions but, ultimately, I decided that the yearly cost for that plan wasn’t much different from what I was paying to regularly upgrade software anyway, so I gave in. The big advantage is that Lightroom Classic (in Adobe CC) works exactly like LR6, reads your LR6 catalog and gives you access to all of the edits that you already had performed. But, that comes with all of Adobe’s baggage that you are committing to.
The alternative is to move to ON1 Photo RAW. This app is trying to be a complete alternative to the Adobe LR/Photoshop universe. They get closer to achieving that goal every year. Last year’s version of the app came with the ability to read the LR catalog and convert most (but not all,yet) of your edits into equivalents in ON1’s world. It does not operate as a method of syncing LR and ON1, but it is intended to be a one-time move away from LR and into Photo RAW. After making the move, they expect that all further edits will be done in Photo RAW and if anything is now being done in LR, it won’t be reflected in Photo RAW. As mentioned, they don’t yet have the ability to recreate all of your LR edits in Photo RAW, but they keep getting closer.
The major benefit is that you own ON1 Photo RAW and don’t need to pay a monthly (or yearly) fee in order to use it. Pay once and you own the version that you purchased forever (or at least for a long time!). You can, if you want, pay each year for the latest and greatest version if you feel you absolutely need some of the “improvements”, but you don’t need to do that if the current version meets your needs. I can say that if you do a lot of masking in your editing and a lot of local edits, it’s worth looking at Photo RAW because their masking and selection tools are pretty amazing. There is a learning curve involved, but there is a huge number of tutorials and videos covering use of Photo RAW and new ones are being produced constantly. All of that being said, I have found enough new stuff in it to have paid for an upgrade each of the last 4 years.
Sorry for the length of this, but I hope it helps. If you have any questions on any of this stuff, let me know and I’ll try to answer them. Good luck!
Last edited by subsea; 04-22-2021 at 11:22 PM.
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Originally posted by tduell 
Post #11 by subsea
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