Opinions -- best non-subscription alternative to Lightroom and Photoshop?

As the title says -- looking for things to consider as alternatives to Lightroom and Photoshop.

I haven't decided to move away from them (yet) and I may not, but the subscription model really irritates me. Other than that however, I am comfortable with both and I like them both. The subscription BS is my only motivation to move.

For a LR replacement I am primarily looking for catalog management. Processing I can do elsewhere. Preserving keywords on my 20,000+ image library is almost a requirement (if I didn't have that I'd have to have a pretty compelling other reason to move).

For Photoshop, Affinity Photo seems like possibly the best runner-up, and I actually already own it (I got the package for Publisher and Designer and it came with) though I haven't played with it much at all yet. I'm finding some of the newer AI-based tools in PS pretty useful though, and though there was a time in the past where I would have said that PS was only a little ahead of its competition I think that lead may be widening considerably.

Thoughts?
Thanks!

You may well get a lot of opposing recommendations as people often prefer what they are used to. But FWIW:

The last version of Photoshop I used was CS6 (which I still have but never use now.) But when they went to a subscription model I looked at GIMP but found it a large learning curve. So then I ended up with Affinity which was much easier to learn after PS so now used that. The books by Robin Whalley helped at the start.
But no one piece of software does it all so I use Topaz Denpise, Sharpen and Gigapixel.

You’ll find those that love and those that hate Topaz just like you’ll find the same for DXO (which I also have as a Raw developer.) Best to test them out with a free trail.

No idea what to use for DAM as I am not a pro nor a prolific photographer shooting off thousands a month and prefer my own way to catalogue things.

Affinity for both the Mac and the iPad are great and can make for a terrific PS replacement for many users.

Unfortunately, there really isn’t a LR replacement, IMO. It’s been years since the folks who make the Affinity suite said that they were gonna make an LR replacement but it has never materialized.

If you're used to using LR & PS, then give Elements '23 a try. There's a free trial period, I like it a lot.

I do not do Windows since I have retired and there is no employer to require it.

I think that for raw development, the software provided free by the camera manufacturer is best. Since I have Canon cameras, I use Canon DPP. If I had a Nikon camera, I would download the free software that Nikon offers. For Sony, the free software comes from the software vendor if I remember correctly.

On macOS, Apple photos.app seems to me to work well, but I am more likely to use gimp out of habit.

On Debian Linux, I use gimp, graphicsmagick, hugin, GMIC, the GMIC plugin for gimp, rawtherapee, and exiftool. (Some of those I also use on macOS if the file is not on storage attached to my Linux computer).

I have used darktable in the past, but like rawtherapee better.

Most of this is personal preference and what I am accustomed to using.

I do not like asset management data bases and prefer to use the file system. I name directories with date or subject or both and save metadata in text files for easy searches.

I use the Unix shell a lot on both macOS and Linux. For example on my web server
"egrep -i -l "minolta" ~/public_html//.html"
will list all of the photo web pages where I mentioned using my 45 year old Minolta lens from a film camera. A similar search of the save exif text files would find other things.

If the keywords are in a file that exiftool can read, searching by keyword would be easy using a Unix shell. I have not tried using exiftool to search files produced by Adobe software because it has been many years since I used any Adobe software. If you do not want to use a command line, this might be helpful: blends.debian.org/imaging/tasks/imageorganizer

Also, www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4635622

I have been using Linux since Windows 8. I had used elements in the years prior to that along with Corel PhotoPaint. Since the dismissal of windows--- 10 years ago, GIMP has been my main go-to along with raw therapee and currently ---ART(another raw therapee)Which was the only Linux program that spoke CR3. Now A-R-T and GIMP are all I need . Zerene stacker will work on both windows and linux if you need a non windows stacker . There is life without windows and subscriptions but you sometimes have to root around to find it.

Depending on the needs, there maybe no alternative to Photoshop. For example, I need highly polished Lab and CMYK.

yes of course I understand--I guess I was speaking to common folk.

I'm one of those common folk. It's very difficult to get detailed tone variations on a strongly coloured subject (like a blue, yellow, or red flower) without Lab, CMYK, and channel blending.

But for a Photoshop user this can help:
www.moderncolorworkflow.com/dan-margulis

Iliah,

Thanks for the Dan Margulis link. I had lost track of him.

Saint or devil, he certainly cut a large swath in the pre-press world. In the early and mid 90s when color management was still a crap shoot and every printing house had their own idea of what a CMYK image should look like, based on their knowledge of their own presses, it was a nightmare. Even he didn't help much as his global advice about CMYK color space and color correction wasn't based on anything but his own seat-of-the-pants experience with presses he had access to. He even fought against using ICC profiles and workflow. He insisted that RGB to CMYK conversion could be done on monochrome monitors and that color correction was a numbers juggling exercise that anyone could be trained to do without seeing the original or final color result.

Trying to get printing houses to even listen to the concept of developing profiles for presses was a nightmare.

As Adobe successfully (and thankfully!) incorporated ICC workflow into Photoshop in the late 90s he screamed that they had "broken" color management.

I'll have to get his latest works and read them.

Rich

I learned a lot from Mr. Margulis, but mainly how to read numbers, see the image potential, and to perform channel blending.

On a side note, I've met many talented (and even more less than talented) practitioners who fight facts, progress, science, technology, experience of others, everything they think is useless for them, in a lot of cases because "why spend time on new when the old looks good, works well, and brings money".

That said, ProfileMaker 4 was a nightmare, even with Spectrolino and Spectroscan.

For cataloging: iMatch
Photoshop replacement: Photoshop Elements with ElementsXXL plugin

Thought I should mention ACDSee, which has support for importing Adobe Lr catalogs. From what I've seen, its Raw conversion is not best in class.

Given your requirements, I think you are stuck. 20,000+ is fairly large and keywording is often not cross-compatible.

For cataloging take a look at free/open source DigiKam.

Iliah, what do you mean by "highly polished"?

If your keywords are embedded in your images (XMP or IPTC)** I can heartily recommend 'XnView MP' which has the best search engine on the planet.

The simple Editor is tolerable but certainly not up to GIMP standards ...

** if they are not ... good luck with your 20,000+ images !!

Perhaps Photoshop Elements which includes a fully featured DAM might be worth trialing. It has a 30 day free trial period.

If you also get the very budget friendly 3rd party add-on Elements XXL, you end up with a large chunk of the full PS for much less cost.

Both PSE and Elements XXL are non-subscription and both have free trial periods.

How is it better than the DAM and search engine in Photoshop Elements?

Some of the 80s scanners had only monochrome monitors. The scanner operators did a great job correcting the colors based on numbers. But it took a ton of training and experience to get to that point. The argument that you don't need WYSIWYG is, I think, celebrating a flaw.

I remember talking with the guy who fixed my cataracts about what kind of correction I wanted after the operation. I was thinking minus 3 or 4 diopters, so that I could just take off my glasses to do close work. He said that was like somebody with atrophied legs arguing that it gives him more room in coach class. We settled on -1 diopter, and I'm glad we did.

Although I stills use LR/PS, I have both On1 and the plugins for LR/PS. On1 is reasonably priced and pretty much a fully system. Do a trial and you will get a discount coupon which makes On1 pretty inexpensive. I run mainly LR/PS but On1 is my "backup system" and it will read and catalogue your LR catalaogs and setup its own database. If Adobe raised the price significant on the Photographers cloud I would switch fully to On1. Only issue is that you have to change any Gh6 still files to DNG because there is something in the coding of the Gh6 still files that On1 doesn't like.

I do most of my work in PhotoLab, with some things done in an old version of Photoshop. But I have been looking at Gimp in Windows recently. It seems to have a lot to offer, including a large histogram window, with a steep learning curve, though not as steep as Photoshop.

David