It'd be _really_ cool if it's the Aperture replacement we've all wanted since that was shut down. Lightroom never really did it for me (for RAW photo processing and organization), and Photos is a pale echo of what Aperture used to be (missing such simple tools as multi-photo comparison views, the Loupe...).

Try RAW Power from https://www.gentlemencoders.com.

„Gentlemen Coders was founded in 2016 by Nik Bhatt, an 18 year veteran of Apple. His roles in the Photo Apps group included Senior Director of Engineering and Chief Technical Officer. He also led the RAW Camera and Core Image teams, as well as the imaging team for the Mac version of Photos.”

App supports RAW from some cameras unknown to Apple system: https://support.gentlemencoders.com/the-future-of-raw-camera...

How have I missed this all this time? RAW Power looks like exactly what I was looking for a few years back when I realized there was no non-subscription upgrade path from Lightroom 6, and I trialed just about the entire market, settling on the generally-fine Capture One.

Capture One continues to be generally-fine and it does at least still have an (expensive) upgrade path to the latest non-subscription version, but I will definitely have to look into RAW Power.

It really is a shame it didn’t appear Aperture had enough of an audience for Apple to maintain it. :( Very quality piece of software.

That page was not helpful to me.

I still have no idea if Photomator is something I should consider, having already purchased Pixelmator Pro.

What is the difference between Photoshop and Lightroom? Why don't they just exist as one product?

Photoshop is general image manipulation, layers brushes, all the power.

Lightoom is more for photography. Ingest workflow, applying small changes like colour adjustments and applying them on batches. Non-destructive edits, working with raw images without the need to "render" them into bitmaps.

After Lightoom 6 they moved to Creative Cloud, to a fairly expensive subscription. Furthermore, they did a revamp to become more inline with their mobile offerings, and started feeling even more sanded down.

Lightroom is optimized in a workflow sense for photographers, and is tightly integrated with its own digital asset management system (the photo “library”).