Adobe Lightroom is a photographic powerhouse, but not everyone can justify spending £100 on photo-management and image-editing software. Ben Pitt investigates the free competition
There are four reasons why Lightroom is our favourite software for processing photos. Its image-editing tools are superbly tailored for making photos look their best. In addition, all its edits are performed non-destructively, so the original files are never overwritten, and edits are stored as an edit history – essentially a list of instructions as to how to process the image. That makes it easy to go back and tweak or undo edits at any time. The third reason is the superb cast of supporting features, from image library management to map plotting, printing and photobook design. Finally, Lightroom has comprehensive support for cameras’ Raw files and profiles for hundreds of lenses. Shooting Raw unlocks the full potential of a photo, but only if the software you use can read the files.
If we’ve convinced you to pay £100 for a copy of Lightroom (or £60 if you’re eligible for the Student and Teacher version), you may as well stop reading. However, not everyone wants to spend that kind of money on photo software. That doesn’t mean you need to accept a life of disorganised, badly presented photos, though. In this article we look at the free alternatives and find out what they can and can’t do.
RAW POWER
We tend to gloss over Lightroom’s photo library management in our reviews because it hasn’t changed a great deal since the first version. It’s still a crucial part of the workflow, though, especially if you work with Raw files.
Raw files’ versatility comes from the fact that they contain the image data captured by the sensor before any kind of processing has been applied. That ensures the highest level of flexibility for processing in software.
It also means Raw files can be a headache to manage. Each time a new camera is launched, editing software must be updated in order to fully support it. As a result, operating systems and many low-cost image editors don’t bother trying. Windows Explorer doesn’t show thumbnails of Raw files, and it’s quite likely that double-clicking them won’t be much help either.
If you shoot Raw, you’ll need software just to be able to browse your photos. It’s worth bearing this in mind even if you don’t shoot Raw or if your camera doesn’t give you the option. If you might ever capture Raw files in the future, it’s worth choosing software that can handle them. This is especially true for photo-management software, where a lot of time might be spent cataloguing photos so it’s not so easy just to switch to another application if your needs change.
Picasa
It may seem unlikely that the home-orientated Picasa (picasa.google.co.uk) can compete with Lightroom, but the reality is that it has many of the same strengths. It combines library management, mapping, editing and online sharing in a neatly unified interface.
Library management is much simpler than Lightroom’s, but it’s also much faster. Powerful face recognition automates the otherwise time-consuming task of tagging people. Search results appear instantly as you type into the search box. There’s no need to worry about which metadata you’re searching for – whether it’s keywords or tagged faces, file or folder names, file extension, camera or lens model – just type it into the Search box.
With the exception of its Retouch tool for removing blemishes, all edits are performed non-destructively, so there’s no risk of doing irreparable damage to the original files. In this instance that doesn’t mean it’s possible to readjust any existing edit at any time. Instead you must retrace your steps through the undo history. However, unlike most editors, the undo history is still accessible after closing and relaunching the software.
Picasa will have a go at opening virtually any Raw file, but it doesn’t always get it right. Files from yet-to-be-supported Panasonic and Sony cameras had a strong purple tint. The software has no idea what to make of Trans-X sensors, as used in Fujifilm compact system cameras and premium compacts.
Where Picasa falls down is in the precision of its colour correction. There are controls to boost midtones, brighten highlights and darken shadows, plus basic white balance controls. They’re enough to rescue photos that are underexposed or lacking contrast, but they’re too crude for subtler adjustments. Various creative filters such as Soft Focus, Cross Process and Vignette are available, but the scope for customisation is fairly limited. Still, if you mostly shoot JPEGs and just need something to manage a sprawling library, Picasa is an excellent choice.
Zoner Photo Studio
For a more business-like environment, check out Zoner Photo Studio Free (free.zoner.com). It’s responsive, packed with useful features and comes remarkably close to matching Lightroom in the way it brings together library management, geo-tagging, editing and export options into a unified environment.
Library management is a bit patchy. It’s easy to browse photos by folder, so if your photos are already neatly organised it’s fine. Photos can be given star ratings, colour labels, a title, description and keywords. These tags are compatible with Windows, Lightroom and various other software, so you won’t lose them all if you move to different software at a later date. You can also inspect metadata such as the camera make and model and its exposure settings. Filtering and searching by metadata, labels and ratings isn’t so elegant, though, with a pop-up dialog box that’s fiddly to use. Searching across a large library is extremely slow, as Zoner doesn’t build up a database of metadata when importing photos.
Even so, we prefer Zoner’s slightly clunky five-star rating system to Picasa’s single-star ratings. It provides a useful way to identify the best photos in a folder, first by awarding one star to all the half-decent photos, filtering out the others, upgrading the best ones to two stars, filtering out the others and so on until there’s just a handful of the best photos left.
Zoner is a destructive editor, so changes must be committed to by saving to hard disk. There’s a Save As option, but by default the original JPEG file is overwritten. It’s possible to restore the original JPEG at a later date, but only from within Zoner. There’s no option to retrace your steps through the edit history.
The Editor tab houses some powerful tools. Its Quick Filters are a range of tasteful creative effects with names such as Lomo, Sunset and Cinema. Elsewhere, there are tools to crop, rotate, remove red-eye and clone. There’s even a Deform tool for pushing pixels around, similar to Photoshop’s Liquify tool and beyond anything offered in Lightroom.
The Quick Edits tool combines white balance, seven exposure-related controls, saturation, vibrance and a tone curve, all of which can be tweaked in parallel before you commit by pressing Apply. These colour correction tools are highly interrelated, so this is the time that non-destructive editing is most valuable. It allows you to nudge each one back and forth as many times as you like until the desired effect is achieved.
With Zoner, it’s not possible to perform some colour correction, crop, clone out some blemishes and then go back and tweak the colour correction again. Instead, you’re forced to apply new colour-correction processing over the already processed image. It’s not a disaster, but repeated processing is liable to result in colour banding.
Zoner’s support for Raw formats is a little confusing, as the website states that Zoner Pro ($89, about £58) is required for Raw files. In fact, the free version can read Raw files too. By default it just reads the JPEG data embedded in most Raw files, but selecting Reload at Full Resolution from the File menu unlocks the Raw image data. It’s surprisingly capable in its support for new and less common cameras’ Raw files, such as the Canon 7D Mark II and Fujifilm X30. With this Raw data loaded, it’s possible to use the editing tools and save the results as a JPEG.
Upgrading to Zoner Pro adds features such as gradient filters, lens distortion correction, tilt-shift focus and a healing brush that matches colours when cloning from one area to another. It also adds a Raw module that includes noise reduction and sharpening and applies edits non-destructively. Raw processing quality is no match for Adobe’s, however, and Zoner Pro’s non-destructive Raw mode and its destructive Editor mode sit awkwardly alongside each other.
LightZone
LightZone (www.lightzoneproject.org) is first and foremost a non-destructive Rawprocessing application. It started life as a commercial software package called Light Crafts. Development ceased in 2011 but it re-emerged as freeware in 2012.
Support for new cameras’ Raw files has slowed since 2011, but that’s not necessarily a hindrance. The software had a go at opening virtually every Raw file we tried, and while colours were heavily skewed in some instances, we found that we could work with Canon and Nikon SLRs’ Raw output even if the cameras weren’t officially supported.
For example, opening a Raw file from the Canon EOS 700D made colours appear muted because the software lacks a colour profile for this camera. However, it wasn’t too arduous to create a colour profile manually. The ZoneMapper filter works in a similar way to tone curve filters offered by other software, with the ability to boost and lower the brightness at multiple points in the spectrum. Boosting highlights and darkening shadows restored the lost contrast, and a dash of extra Vibrance from the Hue/Saturation filter gave us something that looked quite similar to the camera’s JPEG output. Saving these filters as a Style makes them easy to apply to other photos. There’s also an option when saving the Style to apply it automatically to Raw files taken with the same camera.
As such, it took us only a couple of minutes to create a Raw profile for the EOS 700D. Admittedly, a DIY Raw profile might not be as expertly designed as the profiles found in rival software. However, the advantage is that the profile can be modified further or removed entirely as and when the need arises.
LightZone’s other filters include white balance, colour balance, blur, sharpening and noise reduction. The Relight filter is particularly useful, with highlight and shadow recovery plus a Details control that works in a similar way to Lightroom’s Clarity filter, boosting contrast compared to nearby pixels to enhance details. Noise reduction is less impressive, though, and only really useful for handling light smatterings of noise.
The Spot tool effectively removes small blemishes from photos. The Clone tool goes a step further, with the ability to draw a lasso around the offending area, select a clone source and modify the results until they look right. It’s a vast improvement on most other editors’ Clone tools, which are destructive and therefore often require repeated attempts with the help of the Undo command.
Filters can be limited to specific sections of the hue and brightness spectrums. This is perfect for bringing out the saturation in a blue sky or boosting the fidelity of details in darker parts of the image, for example. It’s also possible to draw a lasso to restrict a filter to a limited area of the frame. These lassos are easy to modify, both in terms of their shape and the amount of feathering around the edges. The net result is extremely precise control over colours, and a credible rival to Lightroom. LightZone falls behind for noise reduction and it lacks the profiles to correct for lens distortion, but otherwise its handling of Raw files is hard to fault.
LightZone’s library management is basic, with a tree view for navigating folders and options to sort the selected folder by file name, date and various other criteria. File management is unorthodox but it works well enough. After editing a Raw file, a lowresolution JPEG of the edited version is saved to disk. Reopening the original Raw file starts again from scratch, but opening the lowresolution JPEG loads the Raw file with the various filters still in place.
Overall, LightZone lacks the immediacy of Picasa and the range of features offered by Zoner, but as a Raw editor it’s highly credible.
Darktable
If you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves and running Linux, check out Darktable (www.darktable.org). It makes no pretences about where its inspiration lies, with lots of visual as well as functional similarities to Lightroom.
Library management is simple but effective. The Collect Images panel makes light work of filtering and searching the library by import job (known as a film roll), containing folder, camera model and various other metadata. Filtering by star rating is handled separately, and keyword tagging is nicely implemented.
All editing is non-destructive, so you can come back and tweak settings at any time. Colour correction is precise, with shadow and highlight control, tone curves plus the ability to modify the tone curve applied by default to Raw files. Noise-reduction quality is the most capable of any of the packages here, and chromatic aberration removal is included too.
A huge amount of deep-level editing is available, such as a choice of demosaic filters, lots of noise-reduction algorithms, dithering algorithms and various colour correction filters that achieve similar results in slightly different ways. It feels a bit unwieldy at times, but the interface does a reasonable job of bringing the most useful filters to the fore.
Ultimately, most people won’t want to install a new operating system just to get their hands on Darktable, but those who are already running Linux– or looking for a good excuse to do so – should get a lot out of it.