Top 10 Best Lightroom Alternatives For Free in 2025

Are you facing complications in using Lightroom due to its expert-grade editing style and too much cost in spite of its advanced level non-destructive editing, batch editing, and skin smoothening tools? Don’t worry! Not all doors are closed; there is another option for your satisfaction, and that’s Lightroom alternatives. There are dozens of the best photo editing software that’ve editing capabilities, ease of use, and user interface similar to Lightroom. 

I’m a master in photo editing skills and have tried a wide range of editing tools, so I can easily mention the names, features, pros, and cons of those tools that share their abilities with Lightroom. After the experience of almost 10 years, I’ve decided to highlight the best alternatives to Lightroom by mentioning their features, pros, cons, and supported platforms. 

So stay with me to acquire in-depth knowledge of the top 10 best Lightroom alternatives within a few minutes because I’ll not waste much of your time and will describe only worthy points. So, after reading this article, you can select the best Adobe Lightroom alternative for free within a few seconds. If you get bored on trying different editing apps, take a break and play the game Drive Zone Car Simulator Game.

Adobe Photoshop, one of the most powerful graphic designing and photo editing software, is accessible for all kinds of operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, and iPad. It offers a wide range of tools, including Clone Stamp Tool, Healing Brush, Crop Tool, Color Balance, Blending Modes, Pen Tool, Vector Mask, etc. 

All these tools play an important role in photo manipulations, adjusting image appearance, removing unwanted objects, and creating seamless edits. All its tools and filters perform their function in a non-destructive way, and that’s why it has become the favorite of professional web designers, photographers, graphic designers, and illustrators. 

It’s not only the top-notch choice for professionals but is also preferred by hobbyist people who are just trying to get their foothold in the photography field. Its other features, like editing through layers, RAW file editing, and a history panel, are also performing wonders to satisfy its users. It offers a free trial for 7 days; then, we need to pay US$22.99/mo to get full access even to Photoshop Express for mobile devices.

Capture One, designed for image organizing and editing, is one of the best Lightroom alternatives that’s suitable for both professional as well as studio photographers. But one feature that differentiates it from Lightroom is editing through layers because Lightroom doesn’t have this capability but its pro-grade image library is similar to Lightroom. It can also be used for tethered shooting as well as collaborative workflow in studios and teams respectively. 

It supports RAW file editing, keystone adjustments, transition, image cataloging, layers editing, and more. If you’re looking for the best Adobe Lightroom alternatives for Mac or Windows, then this one is the perfect selection for your editing needs on a large display screen. It strongly emphasizes on enhancing the quality of images and accurate color rendering. If you’re looking for a workflow and tools similar to Lightroom Classic & CC, the Capture One Pro might will be the nearest substitute. 

Its tools for studio photographers and tethered shooting were recently introduced for iPhone and iPad. Moreover, it has also upgraded its system work and perpetual license at the beginning of 2023, and its publisher has announced that it’ll not receive any update in its new perpetual permit, that’s not good news for its users. It provides a spectrum of eight colors instead of the standard six and allows users to edit specific colors in their images. 

Luminar AI, as the name suggests it’s fully AI-powered software, so all its tools can automatically make adjustments, so it requires less time, effort, and skills. Its wide array of AI tools has instinctively fine-tuned the color, brightness, exposure, hue, saturation, and more. Moreover, its AI-supported tools let us enhance the quality of images and remove spots and blemishes from images without putting in extra effort.

It’s at the top list among Lightroom alternatives that offer full access for cropping, masking, and layering.  Moreover, it has a wide selection of tools to assist in the creation of super contrast in our photographs by adjusting the structure and composition. Similar to the presets in Lightroom, it also offers a wide range of presets with full customization options so users can easily modify them according to their editing requirements.

 Luminar AI is more fitting for landscape and portrait photographs. It’s compatible with all devices so that you can download the Luminar Android app from Playstore for iOS from the App Store. Moreover, its web version is also available for Windows & Macs with different subscription plans. One of its top-notch features is that we can use extensions to add new features for performing some extra functions.

DxO PhotoLab 7, the leader in noise reduction, is renowned for its color collaboration tool due to industry-standard color checker charts. It’s at the top list of Lightroom alternatives because of its local palette, including the HSL Color Wheel for fine-tuning certain edits, as well as its mask display, which helps in doing certain modifications. Moreover, it also performs wonders in white and black editing to introduce fine art in our images. It uses a superb file system for managing a massive photo library as well as offers a prime set of modules for lens and camera blending. 

Similar to Adobe Lightroom, it also proposes various categories of presets and allows users to analyze the preview of images after applying certain presets. Its noise reduction feature is so amazing that people integrate Photolab with its noise reduction algorithms to enhance the quality of their pictures and videos. Now you can easily understand that DxO has such powerful tools that professional photo editors prefer it instead of Photolab.

The most prominent feature of DxO PhotoLab 7 is its user-friendly interface because users can easily access its different tools and filters through its straightforward navigation system. Similar to the catalog system in Lightroom, users can assemble photos of the same category into project sections and can apply the same kind of filters on all selected images.

ON1 is a powerful photo enhancing and retouching software that offers advanced editing tools with AI-powered adjustments. One of its amazing features is its non-destructive editing, which enables users to retain their original images and avoid losing details. Users can do editing without any fear because they can easily reverie to the original photos. It can support files of various formats, including JPEG, TIF, PSD, PSB, PNG, and DNG, and can also power the raw images taken from more than 800 different kinds of cameras.

Similar to other mostly selected photo editing software, it also offers image organizational tools to make our photographs in the photo library. It also can correct the defects of more than 1200 different lenses and provides more than 100 presets according to the latest trends in the photo editing field. Moreover, similar to DxO PhotoLab 7 it allows local as well as global editing. 

Furthermore, corresponding to HDR, it empowers multi-shot techniques, panoramas, and focus stacking. Its AI tools enable users to enlarge their images, but the size-to-pixel ratio remains constant, and it saves images from blurring. It’s compatible with both mobile and PC devices, so you can install the ON 1 Photo RAW app on your Android and iPhone and can also use its web version on your Windows and Mac. Its price starts from $7.99/month and $89.99/year.

Darktable Photo Editor, a virtual darkroom for photographers, is an open-source workflow software. It can preside over our digital negatives in a database so we can organize images and search for our desired image from a collection by using certain parameters like tags or labels.  Moreover, it enables us to enhance the quality of raw pictures due to its excellent free raw converters and image enhancer tools. 

We can use it as the best Adobe Lightroom alternative because of its user-friendly interface and power of non-destructive editing. The masking effects of this amazing software are also amazing as it provides a wide range of masks in different shapes, including brush, circle, ellipse, bezier path, and gradient, so users can manually apply them to a specific area within the image.

It offers tools and filters for adjusting color, contrast, brightness,  highlights, hue, and shadows. Also, it gives options for plugins to do extra adjustments that are not possible through built-in presets. You can easily access its more than 30 modules for applying different filters and effects to your photographs. 

Moreover, similar to Lightroom it also offers to install and use presets to automatically adjust everything that we do using manual tools and filters. If you want to know how to import presets in Lightroom you can visit this page of our website.

Darktable Photo Editor is compatible with Linux, Windows, and Mac for free.

Snapseed, developed by Nik Software, was initially launched for iPad in 2011. Then, due to its growing needs, it was rolled out for iPhone within the same year after a few months. After that, based on the demands of users, it was also published for Android and Microsoft Windows. As we’ve discussed Snapseed vs Lightroom in detail, you can understand that Snapseed can be used as a Lightroom alternative. 

Let’s highlight its few amazing features that force us to use it in place of the Lightroom mobile app. By using this amazing photo editor, you can give your photographs a brighter and smoother look within just a few clicks.  It also offers selective tools that enable us to edit a specific portion of your image while the remaining part remains untouched. 

In Lightroom, we can clearly put focus on the subject by blurring the background, while Snapseed offers the same functionality through its vintage tool that allows us to recede the background to give a clear look to the main subject within the image. It provides pro-grade tools for tweaking color, brightness, contrast, saturation, highlights, shadows, and more. Moreover, you’ll get full vintage support as well as white and black balance editing features.

To apply certain filters and effects, you can either choose swiping gestures for manual adjustments or opt for automatic tweaking of color and contrasts, so the decision is in your court to choose the best one. To do wonders in the photography field, Snapseed offers some special filters like glamor glue, lens blur, drama, tilt-shift, center focus, gunge, and frames.

Affinity Photo, developed by Serif, is a top-notch choice for many photographers due to its wide selection of tools and filters. In its basic tab you can get access to a wide spectrum of tools and filters for doing minor edits in exposure, clarity, vibrance, highlights, contrasts, shadows, and more. But you can’t adjust the saturation and tint through this basic panel. 

In its lends tab, you can do modifications in vignettes, chromatic aberration reduction, defringing, and lens correction. In contrast, the details tab lets us do detailed adjustments, and noise reduction. By using its tone tab, you can do primary corrections, split toning, curves, and white and black editing. 

It also offers masking, multi-layer editing, and non-destructive editing and also gives the option to compress any file size by embedding a document or link externally. Moreover, it allows us to make certain modifications in the lighting of any existing normal maps. In the case of editing RAW files, it’ll enable only a few adjustments and editing capabilities. It’s compatible with Mac and Windows at a one-time price of $69.99.

One of the unique features that differentiate it from other Adobe Lightroom alternatives is its latest and classic color reconstruction algorithms including   AMaZE, DCB, AHD, EAHD, HPHD, IGV, LMMSE, VNG4, Mono and Fast. Additionally, it offers filters for handling color at pro-level from white balance to HSV so it’s the perfect choice for fine tuning the colors. 

By using its tone and lap curves we can effortlessly fine tune the highlights and shadows. It also offers a wide selection of denoising tools like luminance and chrominance. SImilar to the batch editing process in Lightroom it also offers the same kind of batch processing to edit a large chunk of photos in a few clicks. Moreover, its non-destructive export settings and RAW editing process is also similar to Lightroom.

Furthermore, you can synchronize RawTherapee to other softwares for doing additional customisation that’s also possible in Lightroom.It’s open source, so photographers can make modifications to its source code according to their editing requirements. It can empower monochrome cameras and film negatives for our photographs. It is compatible for all devices including Windows, Mac, iPhone, Linux, and Android for free. 

Corel AfterShot, an exclusive raw image processor and commercial software, was developed by Alludo. It offers streamlined photo management, powerful batch processing, and ultra-fast workflow.  Similar to the catalog system in Lightroom, it allows one to make a collection of images and to sort them by their name, date, or tag. It offers a wide selection of viewing filters and effects for editing and selecting the pictures, including Grid, Filmstrip, and Fullscreen views. 

Similar to other Adobe Lightroom alternatives, it also allows us to process RAW files as well as to identify the tone and quality of our photographs. It offers standard tools for tweaking color and tone as well as editing watermarks and metadata. Moreover,  Corel AfterShot also provides a small selection of presets that’re preinstalled in it and categorized based on similar functions.

Furthermore, it gives us access to Heal/Clone tools to create new layers and then sub-layers with each click. Similar to smoothening skin in Lightroom it also allows us to smooth noisy images without putting any digital artifacts. It’s compatible with Windows and Mac for almost 64$.