I have mentioned here that I'm cutting my numerous ties with Google in every way possible. As it happens, I'm also dumping Adobe. Two days ago, I finally canceled my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. So I'll no longer have Lightroom or Photoshop in my toolbox. I never used Photoshop much, and to be honest, although once upon a time I was very fond of Lightroom (mainly when I was shooting hundreds of portaits over at the Dallas Arboretum and had thousands of photos to process in a hurry), the truth is, in the last two years, I haven't used Lightroom much either. It's clear that I won't Adobe much.
Less clear is what will become my go-to photo processing app.
ON1 Photo Raw has some terrific features but it's often more trouble to use than it's worth. I like a couple of things about Luminar but it just doesn't click with me. And I keep going back to DxO Optics Pro; wrote a piece a year or two ago entitled "Why I keep DxO Optics Pro in my toolbox." OpticsPro is a great raw file converter and its automatic lens corrections are without equal. The biggest problem with Optics Pro is that it lacks localized corrections.
Not any longer, it doesn't. Well, DxO Optics Pro is now old news, having been replaced by DxO PhotoLab. And PhotoLab (finally) has a powerful localized adjustment tool, plus a tool for graduated adjustments. The localized adjustments in PhotoLab are a result of DxO buying the Nik Collection from Google. That's a brilliant move. The Nik Collection of apps (including Silver Efex Pro, my all-time favorite black and white processing app!) is nerdy in some of the same ways that DxO's software is. They're perfect for each other.
I am hoping to publish a review of DxO PhotoLab soon and will mention it here when it goes live.