How to get people to migrate from Lightroom to RapidRAW

[ast43989we23]

Timon, great project - it is something that has been missing so far in the open source space.

I thought about what is holding people back to move away from Lightroom. If I look at my own journey, Lightroom was the last application for which I still had to operate a separate Windows PC, otherwise the entire family had been running on Linux. I have since migrated to Linux also for photo processing and I am currently using RawTherapee as a raw processor and digikam for photo management. That combination works well for me now but it took significant effort to move from Lightroom to RawTherapee given how complicated the UX/UI is (and yes I also tried darktable but prefer RawTherapee). Also, I put in quite some effort to create LUTs from my LR-preset library to be able to use existing LR-presets as a basis in RawTherapee.

I assume given my own experience that people are held back by 2 things to move away from Lighroom (at least in the hobbyist space):

1. Simple efficient workflow and tools that are straight forward to use
2. Library of presets

You are currently addressing 1) with RapidRAW introducing a simple way to edit photos; e.g. simple, Lightroom comparable tools for color and great features such as AI-driven masking. It probably also requires to address 2) to get people to move. However, addressing 2) could be a game changer for open source raw processing software. What that would probably require is:

1. Being able to convert (most) LR-presets to RapidRAW sidecar files. Also it might not require to convert all settings but things that most presets use like curves (overall, RGB), color, basic exposure settings, details, ... I am probably missing a couple of settings here.
2. Being able to process/load Adobe dcp files since most presets build upon pre-loaded dcp files for the respective camera providing initial tone curves.

This comment is meant to trigger a discussion not to propose a solution or suggest a specific way/UX to implement that. If people could re-use or convert their existing LR-presets that would make migration away from LR incredibly easier for a huge number of photographers and could really push the adoption of RapidRAW in the photo community.

Cheers