UKH

I have a second hand MacBook Pro (from 2011) which came with Photoshop on it, I think a little bit naughty possible. 

Adobe have finally caught up with me and I think they will soon disable it, so it is finally time for me to dig deep and pay up. 

I don't do a lot of fiddly post-processing but I do shoot RAW (Canon EOS600D) and mostly just make global adjustments in the Photoshop/Bridge raw editor (mostly good but I have found it a bit limited in that it seems to only let you do global adjustments, not local, and although it has nice skew and tilt "corrections", you can't rotate in small increments to straighten stuff). 

Will Lightroom (the basic £9.99 per month subscription) solve those niggles and possibly open up a world of nicer workflows for me, or should I be considering some alternative?

Thanks

Yes it will, but you also might be able to still get the old Lightroom classic (one off installation) with no ongoing fees if you look around. Yes it doesn't have the latest updates, but its still very good. I think I paid £80 for my copy 3 or 4 years ago

I used  Photopad for non serious editing in JPEG when I dfigitalised my slides, I assume it works with RAW too. You could rotate the image any way you wanted in increments of 1 degree, perfect for straightening. 

it had also all the other basic features for editing , retouching, balancing colors, exposure, cropping, etc.

it was a good learner tool.

I paid a one off fee of about 16 £. used it for years. Still in my desktop and rarely used but still working perfectly.

Thanks but from their site it doesn't look like it supports raw
"Load JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP, and other popular image formats"

 

NB I am not looking to "penny pinch", it is about time I supported the software developers after years of dicking around with freeware or slightly cheeky installations!

Also to be clear regarding the £9.99 subscription model - I pay for a flickr pro account already so I don't need Lightroom's storage, unless someone wants to recommend dropping flickr for Lightroom Cloud? i kind of like Flickr. It is old and familiar and simple. 

I moved from Lightroom Classic desktop to Lightroom CC, and put everything on the cloud with Adobe storage. I really think it's great, super easy to sync and good basic tools. I'm a firm believer that if it needs more than a straighten, white balance correct, maybe some exposure correction it's probably not a very good photo to start with, and Lightroom CC has a nice easy workflow to do any of this. 

Have a look at Affinity Photo.
Under £50 one off payment and you can try it for free:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

Lightroom is great for organising and 'fixing' your shots, straightening, stitching panoramas etc, I don't use Photoshop that much at all now - mostly for detailed cleaning up of images. I wasn't keen on the subscription set up in the beginning but I like it now, I pay £350 a year (tax deductible!) for Lightroom/Bridge/Photoshop and InDesign and appreciate the fact it is always up-to-date. In the past you had to shell out a grand plus every year or two, and if you missed an update you soon fell behind,

Chris

Thanks all. 

I'll test out trial versions of Lightroom and Affinity and see how I get on!

There’s also completely free Darktable 3.something on the table. I’m seriously pondering moving to it from my LR5.

I think it’ll over 90% of What LR offer. So might be ”worth” the charge (of Nothing)

Digikam, darktable (if you shoot raw) and gimp can do the majority of what you're looking for.

There's also https://rawtherapee.com which I've found a little bit crashy on my Mac but I don't do much photo processing so I can live with it. 

Yes, just go for the 20GB Photography Plan at £9.98/month and use 'Lightroom-Classic' = desktop LR.

You also get desktop-PS and 'cloudbased' LR (but with only 20GB online storage). I don't use the cloudbased-LR.

https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/photography/compare-plans.html?promo...

I also find the £9.98/month plan works really well. Lightroom for straightforward edits; easy linking into Photoshop for anything more difficult. Also give the option to view or edit any of my 30K photos via tablet, phone or laptop when collections are synced 'online' which only uses mB of the 20gB storage allowance.

I have recently tried Luminar 4. It works really well and I manage to produce the same results as in Lightroom. It is a one-time payment, which I like about it. 
However, I ended up keeping the Lightroom plan because of the ease syncing across my devices. I  do a lot of editing on my iPad, so having the photos I import on the PC magically appear on my iPad and phone is something I am happy to pay for every month.
 

edit: Luminar also works fine as a plugin to the desktop version of Lightroom, which I use sometimes for quick atumatic fixes that would require a lot of fiddling around in photoshop