I bought Affinity Photo long before investing in a camera (for freelance marketing purposes)so I’ve been using that to learn Photo editing. I’m probably going to invest in Lightroom soon, it seems more suited for editing a bunch of photos at once. Affinity has similar tools but is much closer to Photoshop than Lightroom.

It is a nice one time investment tho

The easiest fit a beginner is going to be Lightroom because it is the most widely used by magnitudes, and that means there is unending help and tutorials. You go the road less traveled and there’s little help available outside a small circle of users.

I miss the days of buy it once yours forever, not this rental plan. Like buying a car, tires sold separately . Still use my old Photoshop. No worry’s about fees or anything.

First thing I would check is whether your camera maker offers an editing tool.

Nikon has NX Studio which I use to import the raw files and do the general stuff (tweaking exposure, white balance, lens corrections, that kind of stuff.) Then I use GIMP, RawTherapy, and Darktable. All of these will be difficult for a beginner photographer but there are tons of videos online. Review a few of the ones at the GIMP site to get a feel. Darktable is not for the meek but it does great stuff and excellent video tutorials.

Canon also has free editing software, I think. I don’t know about other makers so do your homework there.

I still like Affinity Photo, though it’s more of a Photoshop workflow than a Lightroom workflow

Serif created a workbook that’s pretty decent to get a sense of the workflow working with some projects. Unfortunately I don’t think they’re going to be updated with 2.0. There’s plenty of online tutorials, too

I tend to use Digikam for library organization. It gets the job done for me. But I don’t need a ton of features

Lightroom. Tons of YouTube tutorials and the actual modules in the program are great too.