Modern alternative to Adobe Lightroom (without a sub)

[Rockmeister]

Affinity imports RAW files to a seperate area. You are free to process them there and then return them to the base PP room where they can be worked on/saved/exported in any format you wish.
What infinity does not have is a library and photo organiser.

 

[tuga]

I've got a paid for copy of Adobe LR5 and I've recently found out that LR without the cloud services is not available anymore.

I'm keeping an old iMac with macOS 10.14 for that purpose (I bought a physical copy of LR6 a few months after Adobe ceased selling perpetual licenses).
It's recognised by the Creative Cloud app and I am allowed to download a free copy of Bridge.

 

[JTC]

I recently upgraded Affinity Photo 1 to the full suite v2 but don't have any experience on using it for photography work (I use it more for layer work when putting thumbnails together for Youtube videos mainly) but it's clearly a very capable app. More akin to Photoshop than Lightroom however. On my machine here, I have LR, PS, Affinity 2 and On1 RAW 2023.5. Perhaps because I'm used to it I do 90%+ in On1. It lags behind PS in terms of the fancy AI remove stuff, and On1 is VERY slow with 40MP+ RAWs (especially the ones I've put through DxO PureRAW 4, which generally more than doubles the size of the DNG files). But it is mostly now very stable and I'm still way quicker using it than LR/PS for my photos. I daresay any of the options could work well.

DxO PureRAW is a great app btw. It's surprising just how much better fine detail looks when processed through it over directly into On1 or LR. However, you do have to make sure that On1/LR doesn't do further processing of the file by default, as it can then look a bit over-sharpened/weird.