Background: photography is a hobby. I abandoned Adobe Lightroom after 10 years because they’re slime and went to Capture One. But that was dumb, they’re owned by private equity and jacked the price even higher. Now all my edits are in there and I’m stuck.
I found a site with a crack for my specific Mac version. But, I long ago stopped pirating software due to not wanting to install a frigging keylogger. That is not the same as downloading media. I can’t know what a crack is doing.
If you want to send me good sites for recent Mac versions of Capture One, lol hey great. But really, my question is if I’m right that it’s kinda risky to crack software here in 2025.
I hate to pay this scum company again so they can extract rent for another year just to see my own photos.
I’d avoid cracking software. Every crack you download carries a nom-zero risk of infecting your PC with malware. I get your reluctance to switching to a different editing software, but it may be worth it.
I must’ve tried every free and paid photo editor out there, and none have feature parity with Lightroom Classic or Capture One. The thing most of them are missing is AI based tools like object masking, etc. Luminar Neo comes close, but I feel it’s only a matter of time before they go sub-only too. There’s a new free one called RapidRAW that has pitential.
If you only wany to retrieve your files, run the crack on a VM, it will probably run like shit, but you don’t need to do so all the time
With respect, you could omit the first sentence to improve the impact. Avoiding something that’s hard because it requires knowledge to utilize/enjoy is no lesson one should imply.
There are innumerable ways to acquire almost any corpo software one might find useful, and many of those steps are fairly straightforward, (some even have tuts, etc.) —to say nothing of the highly active communities that filter & vet content.
tl;dr: don’t turn your fellows away, inspire them to seek solutions 🤘🏼🏴☠️