As a former Aperture fan, who switched to Adobe Lightroom when Apple abandoned Aperture, I was curious to try out Photomator.
It’s a similar product to Lightroom. The big differences?
- It uses Photos (the Apple app) for the library. So, if you import your RAW files, it’ll import them into Photos first, and you go from there.
- No “Dehaze” slider. It’s on the roadmap, though, so I suppose we’ll see. Dehaze is a great tool in Lightroom, so it’s missed in Photomator.
- Lifetime license available. I happen to be in a place where I was able to pay for the “Lifetime” license for $99.98, so I did. You can subscribe annually for $29.98, as well. Adobe Lightroom requires a monthly subscription (with an annual option as well). Adobe did away with a “permanent” license way back in version 6 (before the “Dehaze” feature).
It does have AI-powered automatic photo adjustments. Supposedly it’s been trained on a library of professional photos, so I suppose we’ll see.
The interface is pretty granular, and allows for manual correction for just about anything you’ll run into. The spot-repair feature works as advertised, as well.
I suppose we’ll see if it pans out, and doesn’t get abandoned by the developer.
Anyone else giving it a try yet?
I’m skeptical about using anything that locks me into an ecosystem. I’ve already fallen into that hole using Lightroom. I want something like it, but I want to host it where I want it without weird catalog issues.
