There is no doubt that Adobe’s Lightroom is the best known way to organize and personalize large photo libraries, but it’s not the only option. In spite of its popularity and versatile features, you are likely to find the best Lightroom alternatives in 2021 to better keep your precious moments and share with your friends and family members.

Related Reading: 10 Best AI Photo Enhancers for AI Photo Enhancement

Part 1: About Lightroom

 What is Lightroom?

Lightroom is a powerful and creative image-organizing and editing application developed by Adobe Systems. It helps you edit your favorite photos, organize them into albums, and share them with others. Nowadays, Adobe Lightroom has become a family of products comprising of Lightroom Mobile, Lightroom desktop and Lightroom Classic, which compatible with Windows, IOS, Android, Mac OS, and Apple TV.

lightroom

 What does Lightroom do?

Basically, Lightroom works as an image enhancer and manipulation tool. It is usually used for importing and saving, editing, tagging and sharing numerous photos. Besides, you can capture photos from popular DSLR cameras and create some incredible presentations and projects. It is quite powerful and deals with hundreds or even thousands of photos right away.

Although it has user-friendly interface, you need prior skills in image editing fundamentals and graphics designing. In addition, Lightroom is expensive since it requires a high amount of monthly subscription money. Fortunately, a lot of best Lightroom alternatives are available and some of them are even free of charge.

Part 2: 5 Best Lightroom Alternatives 2021

In this article, five best Lightroom alternatives will be recommended for you for powerful image optimizing, organizing, and editing, etc., all cost-efficient with their own unique strengths.

  Leawo PhotoIns

As a powerful and user-friendly AI photo enhancer, Leawo PhotoIns easily beautifies portrait photos instantly. It has a lot of portrait photo enhancement features, including retouching skin, removing freckles, enhancing eyes, adjusting lighting and more. Beside, it can automatically fix photo exposure issues, optimize photo colors and perfect photo tints, boost photo lighting and color quality, process RAW files and more. It has intuitive and simple interface, even a newbie can use this AI photo enhancer to optimize any photos with one click. Since it processes multiple photos as a batch, it works in high efficiency. You can click the link below to free download this software.

  • Photo-Enhancer
  • Leawo Photo Enhancer

    - Enhance portrait photos easily with advanced AI technology
    - Fix photo exposure and white balance issues automatically
    - Optimize photo colors and perfect photo tints
    - Make photos perfectly clear with smart dehaze
    - Boost photo lighting and color quality
    - Process RAW and JPG files

Features:

  • ◆  Support a variety of photo file types for input, including RAW, JPEG, BMP, PNG, etc.
  • ◆  Improve effect of your selfies, portraits, landscapes and other photos in one simple click.
  • ◆  Optimize photo colors and perfect photo tints.
  • ◆  Smartly dehaze photos to give images a clear and striking look.

  Photoshop

Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and MacOS. It is able to edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and it also supports masks, alpha compositing and several color models including RGB, CMYK, CIELAB, spot color, and duotone. In addition to raster graphics, it has many other features, making portraits pop and expressions more expressive, creating magical effects, transforming photos into flights of pure imagination and more. What differentiates Photoshop with other software is that it offers a function of convenient video and animation editing as well as supports many types of layers: type layer, image layer, vector shape layer, layer styles, smart object, smart filter, layer mask, adjustment layer, and background.

Photoshop-2

Features:

  • ◆  A great app for photo retouching and manipulation.
  • ◆  Combine photos, artwork, elements, and text to craft entirely new images.
  • ◆  Transform ordinary snapshots into something extraordinary with versatile editing features.
  • ◆  Capable of performing professional color grading.

  DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI

DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI is the ultimate tool to optimize your photos into amazing DSLR camera quality. Besides, it can upscale photos by up to 40 times their original size without any loss in quality, reduce noise in photos without losing detail, and remove motion blurs to show more details. It can work as a free Lightroom alternative since it offers 30 days’ free trial.

DVDFab-Photo-Enhancer-AI-3

Features:

  • ◆  Optimize your photos into amazing DSLR camera quality with a click.
  • ◆  Enlarge photos by up to 40x and enjoy excellent image quality.
  • ◆  With denoising features to identify and intelligently remove all kinds of noise.
  • ◆  Sharpen photos that are blurry.

  Let's Enhance

As one of Lightroom alternatives welcomed among so many users, Let’s Enhance software is an excellent AI tool used to improve photos resolution without any quality loss. It uses cutting-edge Image Super Resolution technology based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to dramatically increase photo or image size without losing quality. By using Let’s Enhance, you can provide high resolution content that can be printed and exhibited on large-size canvases. But Let’s Enhance software has no other editing features. No effects for photos can be applied. And you can not manually edit your photos.

lets-enhance-4

Features:

  • ◆  Provide an online storage space to store data.
  • ◆  Support photo editing, including crop, resize, transform or edit multiple photos instantly.
  • ◆  Convert photos to better quality with high resolutions.
  • ◆  Automatically enhance photo online (on Windows, MacOS and Linux in browser).

  Wondershare Fotophire

Wondershare Photophire is also one of adobe Lightroom alternatives. It is known as amazing desktop image editing software that gives complete photo editing toolkit with a bunch of innovative features. It is intuitive and easy-to-use tool to perfect photos in just a few clicks for both personal and business use. It integrates with Photo Editor, Photo Cutter and Photo Eraser so that you can easily edit photos, crop or cut photos, and remove unwanted objects from your pictures with ease. What you should notice is that its advanced features are only limited to paid users.

Wondershare-FotoPhire-5

Features:

  • ◆  Integrate with Photo Editor to fix photos’ poor lighting, crop and adjust your saturation and add creative effects.
  • ◆  Integrate with Photo Cutter to deduce the edges of objects.
  • ◆  Integrate with Photo Eraser to remove anything that spoils your photo.
  • ◆  Zoom in your pictures without quality loss.

Part 3: Comparison & Conclusion

Definitely, you have got much information about the 5 best Lightroom alternatives here. All of them have their own features and work independently to perfect your photos in different way. According to your requirements, you may need to choose a free Lightroom alternative to optimize your photos simply or select a multi-functional alternative to enhance your photo from various aspects. Here comes the comparison chart that helps you make a wise option.

Products Leawo PhotoIns Adobe Photoshop DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI Let’s Enhance Wondershare Fotophire
With advanced AI Enhancer to perfect photos automatically Y N Y Y N
AI Photo editing features Y N Y Y Y
Process RAW files with auto lens correction, eye enlargement, etc. Y N N N N
Remove unwanted elements from photos Y Y Y Y Y
Adjust the blur, sharpness and other elements Y Y Y Y Y
Optimize photo contrast for better visual effect Y Y Y N Y
Increase image resolution without quality loss Y Y Y Y Y
Most of photo types supported Y N Y N N
Fix your JPG images issues caused by compression. Y Y N N Y
Tiny software without occupying much ROM Y N Y Y Y
Price $9.95/Year $239.88/Year $79.99/Year $51.99/Year $39.99/Year

It is unaffordable for some users since the annual plan of Lightroom costs $119.88 and that of Photoshop $239.88. That’s one of the reason why Adobe Lightroom alternatives are required in a way. After trying some Lightroom alternatives offered in this post, you may find that 5 best Lightroom alternatives can work perfectly to optimize your precious photos due to their excellent features. Considering the versatility and specialty, Lightroom and Photoshop may attract you to quite an extent. But in view of practicality and cost efficiency, Leawo PhotoIns would be the best choice. Photoshop is a complicated and professional photo editing tool that is not friendly to non-professionals. And it only supports limited export formats. DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI has strong ability to enhance photo resolution, but it only offers free trial for 5 photos and only works for Windows. Let Enhance offers good output quality powered by AI. However, it can’t manually edit the photo or apply any effect. Wondershare Fotophire is praised for its editing toolkit but cannot support RAW. In a word, Leawo PhotoIns is the best one that has intuitive interface and a number of editing features. Powered by AI, it can enhance photo intelligently and automatically.