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.
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I use darktable, it’s open source and good for my needs, but indeed bit rough.
Darktable is incredibly powerful. Like, the question is not if it has feature parity with LR/C1, but if those will ever reach feature parity with it.
But all that power is stuck behind a user interface that has never seen the loving touch of a UX engineer. Which really is a shame.
There’s also RawTherapee. I’m not a professional photographer, so they both work fine for my needs. Worth a shot, in case RawTherapee is better for you than DarkTable
There’s also RapidRAW, a much newer FOSS project with a much more focussed goal of actually being a simple lightweight Lightroom replacement. There are a lot of basic features still missing but it’s worth following.
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 🤘🏼🏴☠️
So I can’t comment on capture one, but I do want to recommend Darktable.
Its floss, and IMO a much better workflow than the rest.
Available for Linux, MacOs, and Windows.
I’m not sure I agree. I did move to DarkTable but the organization side is much rougher than something like Lightroom.
That said I would never go back. Switching to darktable’s scene-referred workflow was almost like switching a chemical process. People looking for a 1:1 with LR or C1 will be disappointed, but darktable’s tools and masks can do so much more than either of them. I feel limited working with LR now. I also don’t use AI at all in my work so I don’t care about those features
If the saves are cloud based you pay or you don’t get access. This wouldn’t be something a crack would help with unless the company doesn’t give a fuck and let’s any “activated” software talk to the cloud server.
Otherwise If it’s all local just stop worrying and love the crack.
Heh. 🫣
You could run the crack in a vm without networking if you want a safe way to test it, although even if it appears to work I’d personally prob just keep the program in the vm to be safe
Man, this was almost the answer! I didn’t even think of a VM. I’m on a Mac though, so I’d need to get a Windows VM. At that point, it descends into loony die on a hill territory (running pirated Windows software in a Mac VM to avoid a subscription) and I have to just pay them :D
I guess I am confused what what is actually going on.
All your photos should be stored locally first. It looks like Capture One provides some form of cloud based access if you want to edit with a mobile device but you should still have the raw (possibly RAW format) files yourself?
So the only thing you are “risking” is your most recent batch of edits that you haven’t exported/finalized yet. So if you are actually a hobbyist… who cares?
As for whether you should crack it:
- If you are relying on cloud storage, this is a deeply stupid idea. They will have logs of your data store being accessed and will have logs of you not having a valid license. A paralegal can pound out the lawsuit over lunch.
- If you are less a “hobbyist” and more running a business (what it sounds like): You are inherently playing with fire if you use pirated software for profit. Up to you but my general rule of thumb is that if you are making enough to do something professionally then you are making enough to buy a seat for the industry standard software (or to take the time to learn something jank but cheap)
Yeah, so it’s subscription software. If you don’t pay yearly, you can’t use it. You need to sign in to activate, just like Adobe Cloud.
I’m not running a business. I’m just a guy who takes photos.
Without answering every post individually, people asked why I don’t just switch. If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos. Hundreds of hours. And, there’s a lot of knowledge and study that went into learning how to do it, so if I switch, I’m starting over with a new app. There are open source ones, but they’re honestly pretty bad. I tried them all.
The crack blocks the activation server in my hosts file and then patches the app to think it’s activated. You can’t update it then, but I don’t need to.
My larger question is if that type of crack is just… a risky thing to do from a system security perspective.
Like… this is a piracy forum. That’s why I’m asking here :)
Did you try darktable? Pretty decent open source alternative to lightroom
If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos.
And you export them when you are finished? So you have the unprocessed photos AND the finalized processed once? And you just have the ones that were in flight that are… in flight.
But it sounds like you think this is worth using. If you think you understand the crack and understand the risks then go for it? Just understand that piracy of media and games is very different than piracy of productivity software and the risks and liability go up drastically with the latter.
I am totally ignorant about this kind of software, but it seems like the ultimate solution is to extract your data from it. Has anybody done any work around cracking their data format? Or what about Adobe’s? Could their be a path like having Abode import your data from Capture and then use some Abode export crack to get it into some more open format?
Can you export your photos and just use a free program?
