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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?