It's not exactly a fair comparison, since AP directly competes with Photoshop, not Lightroom, but that was what made it an immediate non-starter for me when it comes to photography.

Affinity Photo starts you in a "Develop Persona" when you open a RAW file, and allows you to develop your RAW file. Before you can use any of the common editing tools, you need to leave that persona by committing your changes. You need to make a choice to bake these RAW adjustments into a "RAW layer (embedded)", "RAW layer (linked)" or a "Pixel layer". It's not very obvious what these are and how they work.

Most of the common editing tools then work destructively. Once you use them, you can't go back and change any of the RAW adjustments. There are some very limited tools available that can work non-destructively, but again, it's not very obvious which ones those are. And use of the wrong tool can immediately turn a "RAW layer" into a "Pixel layer" without warning.

It's all very confusing, to be honest. It may be a case of the RTFM, but I did so when I tried this a couple months ago, and came to the conclusion that AP simply isn't capable of a non-destructive editing workflow yet, except for a few very basic cases.

But the bundle price was worth it for me for Designer and Publisher alone. So I hope in due time they'll launch a fourth product to compete with Lightroom, on photo cataloging, culling and a non-destructive workflow.

The current commercial alternatives for Lightroom unfortunately are still lacking, last time I looked at them (Capture One, DxO Photo Lab). And the open source ones (darktable, digiKam) are ... not good. I'm keeping my eye on "Ansel" though (darktable fork by an ex-dev, anger-driven development), the author's rants sum up very wrong what's wrong with darktable, and why its community is so dysfunctional.

Genuine question, how do you find DxO PhotoLab lacking when compared to LR?

I'm an old-time LR user and due to Adobe's licensing shenanigans exploring alternatives. I am having a pretty good time with trial version of DxO PhotoLab7. So far I haven't come across something that I could do in LR (as a hobbyist) that I can't achieve in PhotoLab7. And, I'm loving the built-in DeNoising algorithm in PL7.

It's mostly their "no catalog" approach that irks me. From what I understand they use a model that doesn't use a catalog, and requires you to import photos, but instead allow you to point it at any filesystem location, and work on those photos.

Fair enough, but for me the question then immediately becomes how and where the data that I generate in PL7 is stored and managed - and I was struggling to find any comprehensive information on this.

If it doesn't have a catalog, where does it store edits I make to my photos? Does it actually modify and write down some information in RAW files (that would be a non-starter for me)? Does it litter the filesystem with XMP sidecar files next to the originals? How does it keep (and repair) associations between original RAWs and their edits/metadata if they get moved on the file system outside of PL7?

It allows to search/filter photos by metadata attributes "across your whole computer" (according to their tutorial video on organization). So it must keep some index somewhere, otherwise that would be dog slow. So how and when does that index get updated? Do I get any control over when that happens, any UI feedback when its happening and I'm potentially working with outdated metadata, etc..?

LR's catalog approach has some drawbacks, but from an engineering standpoint, it seems to me that's the much simpler and robust approach to implement this. The LR catalog is a simple SQLite DB, and backup is trivial: Backup my originals and the catalog, done. Follow the simple rule "Don't modify originals behind LR's back" and you'll be good. (Or be prepared to do it in a very systematic way, and fix references in LR afterwards).

The catalog approach definitely has its limitations and issues, but I find it very easy to reason about. No surprises. PL7's approach seems to require much more magic behind the scenes, which makes me quite uncomfortable.

In terms of denoising, I have to agree - the DxO stuff is miles ahead in terms of quality for some algorithms, and denoising is one of them. I use NikCollection (as a PS plugin) for those 1 out of a 1000 photos that deserve some serious editing.

The manuals for Affinity products are pretty good, and I agree on the price being worth it for the quality and usefulness of the software.

For me Publisher fits a good niche. Since V2 I use Designer for planning woodworking projects and it’s quite competent for that task (they’re simpler 2D plans and diagrams to track my cutting sheets).

One more Lightroom alternative for you to consider would be RawPower, which actually does a great job handling different raw formats. I know the devs have a new app but I haven’t tried it.

Maybe not as feature-rich as some of the heavy hitters, but it looks to be very focused in both its feature set and its UI. And it seems to hit that sweet spot where it does both cataloging and RAW processing competently.

This is the most promising alternative I've seen so far for what I'm yearning for, so thanks again!

As an enthusiast or professional photographer you really need both, preferrably in the same application, or at least in tightly integrated applications.

I started with Lightroom 1 beta3, and while it was dog slow, the speedup in workflow to cull and edit thousands of photos after a shoot was revolutionary at the time. In the beginning it only supported global edits, which was enough anyway for 95% of photos. But you could sync and apply these edits in bulk to other photos, and get through hundreds of them quickly.

Capture One certainly is the closest. But switching costs are huge. My catalog contains tens of thousands of images, professionals will have hundreds of thousands. If I'm to switch, I need to be certain that every single Lightroom edit is, in principle, supported too, and will be converted faithfully on import.

And their pricing is weird. In the beginning they required you to pick a RAW edition - you could have support for Canon, or Nikon, but not both. That's gone now, and as you say, I think it has come a long way. But their perpetual license now is nowhere competitive in price with the Adobe Photography Plan ($9.99/mo, infamous "Annual paid monthly", for LR+PS). The $300 for Capture One is for one major version, for the price of 2.5 years of Photoshop and Lightroom.