Background: photography is a hobby. I abandoned Adobe Lightroom after 10 years because they’re slime and went to Capture One. But that was dumb, they’re owned by private equity and jacked the price even higher. Now all my edits are in there and I’m stuck.
I found a site with a crack for my specific Mac version. But, I long ago stopped pirating software due to not wanting to install a frigging keylogger. That is not the same as downloading media. I can’t know what a crack is doing.
If you want to send me good sites for recent Mac versions of Capture One, lol hey great. But really, my question is if I’m right that it’s kinda risky to crack software here in 2025.
I hate to pay this scum company again so they can extract rent for another year just to see my own photos.
I use darktable, it’s open source and good for my needs, but indeed bit rough.
Darktable is incredibly powerful. Like, the question is not if it has feature parity with LR/C1, but if those will ever reach feature parity with it.
But all that power is stuck behind a user interface that has never seen the loving touch of a UX engineer. Which really is a shame.
There’s also RawTherapee. I’m not a professional photographer, so they both work fine for my needs. Worth a shot, in case RawTherapee is better for you than DarkTable
There’s also RapidRAW, a much newer FOSS project with a much more focussed goal of actually being a simple lightweight Lightroom replacement. There are a lot of basic features still missing but it’s worth following.