I finally found the app to justify cancelling my Adobe subscription

Published Jul 25, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT Jacob is a Senior Author at XDA with over a decade of experience in digital media. He's written for some of the largest names in the business, including Forbes, Tom's Guide, and Business Insider, and his work as been cited in Fox News and Futurism. When he's not tinkering with the latest PC hardware and optimizing settings in the latest games, you'll find Jacob scouring the collectible shops of St. Louis and forcing his lazy corgi onto walks. Sign in to your XDA account A small part of me dies every month when Adobe unceremoniously deducts $60 from my bank account. As someone who only really interacts with the big three Adobe apps — Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom — I've been searching for an excuse to finally cancel, or at the very least downgrade, my subscription. There are so many great alternatives available, after all, and they're cheap or even free. DaVinci Resolve can easily replace Premiere Pro, and Affinity Photo has cemented itself as the go-to Photoshop alternative. But Lightroom is a different story. Lightroom is hard to emulate. There are other editing apps that can process RAW photos, sure, but none of them with the simplicity and ease of Lightroom. That ease of use is important for photographers like myself, too. I'm often editing hundreds of photos at a time, so it's paramount that I don't get hung up trying to figure out how the application works. I've finally found an app that can go toe-to-toe with Lightroom on that front. It's ON1 Photo Raw, and it's finally given me an excuse to ditch Adobe for good with its lifetime license available for just $70. Standing toe-to-toe with Adobe ON1 Photo Raw allows me to cruise There are a lot of reasons I actually like ON1 more than Lightroom — outside the price — but the basic functionality comes first. ON1 Photo Raw is, at its core, a RAW photo processor. It takes all the RAW data from your camera and allows you to adjust the expose, saturation, and more, and it supports just about every RAW file type you can imagine. That's all I need for most photos. Bump the exposure by half a stop, lift the shadows, add some sharpening and saturation, reign in the highlights, and I'm good to go. ON1's basic layout is very similar to Lightroom, so if you've used Lightroom before, you'll feel at home in ON1. Plenty of other apps do that, but ON1 works because it's set up to deal with massive file imports. The app is largely split into two views, with a media browser in one tab and your editing tools in another. Lightroom technically has more, but you mainly interact with those two windows. ON1 allows you to create a catalog out of a folder, and they're scanned constantly. So, when you're working on a project, you can select the folder and restrict your editing to just that folder, even if you add or remove photos later. Within a few minutes of using ON1, I was able to cruise through an editing session without slowing down, which is far more than I can say about other Lightroom alternatives like Darktable. It's a bit different from Lightroom, where you properly import photos into the app and have them sync with the Adobe cloud. I much prefer the local file management of ON1, however. Especially after events like CES or Computex, I'm left with hundreds (if not thousands) of photos that I don't want to edit all at once. Rather than importing them piecemeal, I can move the files into a folder structure on my PC and easily pull up what I want when I need to do some editing. This is a pretty basic look at a photo editing workflow, but ON1 nails it. Small inspiration makes a big difference. The arrow keys allow you to navigate the bottom row of preview images, for example, and number keys assign a star rating, allowing you to organize the photos you actually want to edit. Within a few minutes of using ON1, I was able to cruise through an editing session without slowing down, which is far more than I can say about other Lightroom alternatives like Darktable. Going above and beyond (with AI) AI tools that actually feel useful I will die on this hill — AI tools are extremely useful for photo editing. What used to take upwards of hours of masking and retouching can be done in seconds with generative AI, and often give you better results in the process. It's not the right tool for the job in every case, but it's a damn useful tool to have at your disposal. And ON1 is packed to the brim with AI features that are actually useful. First, the high-level stuff. Just like Lightroom, you have AI filters for removing noise and adding sharpening, as well as generative erase and generative expand. What's great about these features is that they run locally, and you have some options for tweaking the output. With generative expand, for instance, you can use a local generative AI model, a non-generative AI model, or even enter an API key for Stability AI. The results are fantastic, too. Above, you can see an image where I used the generative expand. It just looks like a normal photo, but the aspect ratio should clue you in that it's not straight out of the camera. In reality, everything past my knuckle on the left is generated with AI. In the preview window below, you can actually see a duplicate photo I took at this same angle. ON1 goes further, though. One of my favorite features is sky replacement since it's something you so often have to do in outdoor photos. ON1 not only includes a full suite of blending tools, skies, and more, it also automatically masks the sky. You can see what I was able to achieve just by turning on the feature and selecting a different sky texture. That's a great result for no more than a minute of work. ON1 also provides a similar toolkit for portraits, which identifies and automatically applies masks to areas like teeth, eyes, eyebrows, and the face overall. These AI masks are available separately, too, allowing you to click an object and immediately generate a mask for it. You'll find AI plastered all over ON1. For instance, you can bulk organize your photos using AI, with a model looking through to find duplicate faces, locations, and more. Not all the features are useful — the Brilliance AI feature is somewhat of a one-click edit that doesn't look very good — but the vast majority of the tools are great. Even in Lightroom, the AI features feel hidden away like some dirty, experimental secret. With ON1, they're just a part of the workflow. They work so well that ON1 actually offers a lot of these features as plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom. Going layer by layer Photoshop who? ON1 Photo Raw is cheaper, just as easy to use, and comes with a handful of useful features that Lightroom lacks. Those aspects alone make it a worthy alternative, but what really sold me on ON1 is its non-destructive editing and compositing capabilities. In Lightroom, you just edit photos. Sure, you have masks and some warping you can do, but you can't actually layer anything. ON1 Photo Raw builds a layered editor into the interface. You can add as many layers as you want, each of them with their own blending and editing controls. Although it won't replace Photoshop, even having access to a basic layered editor with a RAW development app is huge. There have been countless times I needed to blend in a texture, or add a logo, or basically do anything else that I need a second layer for where I had to send my Lightroom edits over to Photoshop and back. With ON1, I can accomplish the same thing in one app. If you want to go further, too, you can. ON1 includes a ton of filters, just like Photoshop. I don't use them much, but I'm sure they'll come in handy at some point. That's the layered part, but the non-destructive aspect is important, too. Whenever you add a layer, ON1 automatically converts the file to its own non-destructive format. With it, you're able to completely undo any changes you make to a photo, ensuring any photos or other elements you used aren't ruined as part of a comp. ON1 Photo Raw is the only app that can read these files, understandably, but you can still open them in ON1 and roll back your changes, as well as send the edit to Photoshop or Lightroom. My key to freedom I've felt tethered to Adobe for years. It's true that the Creative Cloud suite offers certain advantages, from Adobe Stock to cloud storage to a laundry list of apps that are extremely stable. For my purposes, though, it's hard to throw $60 out the window each month, knowing full-well I'm only getting a tiny portion of the value available in Adobe's subscription. Now, with ON1 Photo Raw as a proper replacement for Lightroom, I can finally jump ship. Maybe I'll switch back in the future, but I'll happily spend my monthly fee for Adobe on an app that holds a ton of promise. ON1 Photo RAW