Best Non-Destructive Editing Software for Photography

With so many editing / post-processing software packages on the market today, photographers might find it rather difficult to go through them all and compare their key features in order to pick something that would ultimately work for their needs. Many of us go through that stage, especially when starting out. What is the best software for photo editing? What features does it have? Is it easy to learn and how much does it cost? These are just some of the questions photographers seek answers for. While John Bosley and I have been working hard on producing our PL Level 1: Post-Processing Basics course, we have decided to share one of the charts that we will be including in the course with our readers, which compares the most popular non-destructive editing tools on the market. It took us a while to compile all this data, since there are so many different features and considerations one must go through to make a meaningful comparison. The chart has not been fully finalized yet, since we are currently looking for your feedback and ideas, so that we can hopefully make the chart complete and comprehensive enough for those who are interested in such a comparison.

We picked the following six software packages that offer non-destructive editing based on their popularity among photographers: Adobe Lightroom 6 / CC 2015, Capture One Pro 9, ACDSee Pro 9, On1 Photo 10, DxO Optics Pro 10 and Photo Ninja 1.3.3c. We recognize that there are many more out there, but we cannot include them all, since such research would take a lot more time and the chart would get massive, making it hard to read. If you disagree with our choices and would like to see other non-destructive software included, please let us know in the comments section below (note that we will be posting a separate article for complex / destructive editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Elements, Affinity Photo, PaintShop Pro and GIMP). To come up with all the data below, we had to install every software package on a single machine and run them all for some time, going through and testing out the features. It was a pretty exhausting task to say the least! Below is the software comparison table:

Feature	Lightroom 6 / CC	Capture One Pro 9	ACDSee Pro 9	On1 Photo 10	DxO Optics Pro 10	Photo Ninja 1.3
1Requires RAW file conversion first 2Subjective opinion based on personal experience of the author 3Based on export of 25 RAW / DNG images to full-resolution JPEG format in 100% Quality
Operating Systems	Windows / Mac	Windows / Mac	Windows / Mac	Windows / Mac	Windows / Mac	Windows / Mac
Database Catalog	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Import Tool	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No
File Management	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Color Management	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
RAW File Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fuji X-Trans RAW Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Tethered Shooting	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No
GUI Customization	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
4K / Retina Screen Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Dual Monitor Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
GPU Acceleration	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
Lens Corrections	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
Basic RAW File Editing (Crop, Exposure, WB, etc)	Yes	Yes	Yes	No1	Yes	Yes
Templates / Presets	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Selective Sharpening	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Selective Noise Reduction	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Advanced Color Adjustments	No	Yes	No	No	No	No
Distortion, CA and Vignetting Corrections	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Perspective Correction	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Merge to HDR	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Merge to Panorama	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Photoshop / Lightroom Integration	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Third Party Plugins	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No
Brushes / Masking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Layers	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Spot / Dust Removal	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Haze Removal	No / Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
Stability2	2/5	4/5	3/5	3/5	5/5	4/5
Speed / Performance – RAW Export3	64 sec	74 sec	57 sec	179 sec	173 sec	307 sec
Speed / Performance – DNG Export3	38 sec	53 sec	46 sec	74 sec	169 sec	262 sec
Learning Curve	Medium	Difficult	Medium	Easy	Easy	Easy
Update Frequency	5/5	5/5	2/5	4/5	5/5	2/5
Retail Price (MSRP)	$150	$299	$100	$110	$199	$129
Cloud Subscription Price	$10/mo	$15/mo	$79/yr (+extras)	$150/yr (+extras)	N/A	N/A

Please note that we did not list every possible feature and slider offered by each individual software package, as it would make the above chart unreadable. Instead, we decided to focus on the key / most important features and include additional data for consideration, such as Stability, Performance, Learning Curve and Update Frequency. Some of this data such as Stability and Learning Curve is rather subjective – it is based on my experience running the software, which might differ from other people’s experiences. So if you disagree, please let us know in the comments section below!

Based on the above chart, it is pretty clear that Lightroom, Capture One Pro and ACDSee Pro tightly compete with each other, while the others still have quite a lot of work to do. I personally use Lightroom and ACDsee Pro 9 quite a bit, but after testing out Capture One Pro, I realized that it is one heck of a tool that is absolutely worth looking into in more detail. Some of the features that Capture One Pro has are light years ahead of Lightroom – advanced color adjustments for example, which allow making selective changes to particular colors in an image, are simply amazing compared to the Hue/Saturation/Luminance (HSL) adjustments in Lightroom, which affect colors globally. Capture One Pro’s masking tools also completely slaughter the slow and buggy masking capabilities of Lightroom. And let’s not even bring up Layers, which Lightroom has never had. While many Lightroom users have to use Photoshop for things they cannot do in Lightroom alone, I can see how one could solely rely on Capture One Pro for editing, especially for portrait photography. However, it is not perfect – unlike Lightroom, Capture One Pro is not designed to be a full-featured catalog with built-in file organization / advanced file management tools. Its interface is a bit busy and some things take harder and longer to achieve when compared to Lightroom, making it a bit difficult to use and get used to, at least from the perspective of a long-time Lightroom user. Lastly, its biggest deterrent is the steep price – at $299, it is the most expensive of the bunch. It was surprising to see how well ACDSee Pro compared to both Lightroom and Capture One Pro in terms of features. However, its rather buggy interface and constant annoying notifications might not be something many of us would want to deal with. Also, when looking at straight RAW to JPEG conversions with camera profiles applied, images from ACDSee Pro looked a bit worse compared to those from Lightroom and Capture One Pro.

One of the most interesting tests was the Speed / Performance benchmark. For this one, we selected a group of 25 DNG and 25 random RAW images from different cameras. We timed how long it would take for each software to extract full-size JPEG images in 100% quality from both batches of files. The tests had to be repeated 3 times to make sure that there were no other factors involved and the numbers were then averaged into a single number. As you can see, each tool varies in performance greatly and the clear winner here is Adobe Lightroom, which generally outperformed pretty much all other software, with the exception of ACDSee Pro 9, which did a bit better in extracting RAW images. For a professional who needs to extract thousands of images quickly, the winner is clear here. However, performance is not going to be the primary criterion for many photographers, so one must look at all of the above to decide what is more important for their needs.

We would love to hear your feedback regarding our chart and the commentary above!

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