RAW Power is developed by Nik Bhatt, who worked for years at Apple on the Aperture team. It piqued my interest since it’s cheap (around €30), runs natively on Apple’s new CPUs, and looks similar in spirit to early versions of Lightroom and Aperture. I didn’t consider them because they tend to have limited macOS support 3, a steep learning curve, and questionable usability 4.įinally, after reading this review of the Apple ProRAW format, I discovered a small macOS and iOS app called RAW Power. There are a few open-source options too, such as Darktable, RawTherapee and LightZone. They also don’t include a library browser or manager. While they can do some RAW development, and have some great features, they’re closer to Photoshop in spirit. I also got Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro, each for around €50.

Apple’s own Photos app (included with macOS), which I tried briefly, but I don’t want to import my photos from my archive folders on external drives and into their Photos Library I hear the development tools are a bit limited too.

Photoscape X (€44), seems marketed for the Instagram crowd but could be powerful anyway.

Darkroom (€88, or a €22/year subscription), seems to integrate with the Apple Photos library and provide a bunch of tools in a nicely designed package 2.

Skylum Luminar (€90 standalone, €150 with their new “AI” tools), which was slow when I tried it a few years back but might have improved since.

Exposure X6 (€110), which seems interesting.ON1 Photo Raw (€102), not a good option for my M1 Mac 1.DxO PhotoLab, more affordable (€130) I’ve heard some good things.Capture One, the priciest option for pros (around €500).I still do, but they probably don’t install on current Macs, and Adobe made it hard if not impossible to get a license for the current Lightroom Classic app without paying 20 euros per month. Only problem: I didn’t have any photo management and development software I’m comfortable with.

Still, I have a few thousand pictures, some edited and some not at all, that sit in my archives, and I’d like to edit and publish at least some of those. I’m still amateur level, I think, and haven’t shot much in the past 7 years or so.

I used to dabble in digital photography, even attended a series of workshops for a year.

Darktable import from apple photos