“darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.”
I like Darktable but found RawTherapee to be more usable. For me Darktable 4 was way too many clicks for what should be a one click - everywhere. But it is very powerful. Just the ui gave me headache
Anyone using this as their main program over Lightroom or Luminar? Would be interested to hear a pros and cons take
I’ve tried to main it on a few occasions most recently on 4.1. It’s immensely powerful and I really think it surpasses Lightroom on ability to create pleasing tones. I have it installed on my home and laptop photo editing setup and I do use it on occasion.
Uortunately, even as an Adobe hater, I still use Lightroom CC 99% of the time. Why? Because speed and cross-platform compatibility. CC is less powerful* but I can do all of my editing in 30 seconds per photo and I have roughly the same experience accross Mac, Linux, and Android.
Darktable is slow to update, you have to be methodical, and there are so many ways to do the same thing. I know the devs are trying to make the best tool possible and I think they’ve built a gem. But I’m not invested enough to learn best practices for my photo editing software. I want a tool which gives me the happy path to the basics.
*ai masking, ai noise reduction, and ai object deletion are insanely useful. I feel bad every time I use them… But I do. Darktable doesn’t have these
Thanks, that’s an interesting overview. I guess it might be worth checking it out, but like you say, I like the simplicity of Lightroom CC and 85% of the time you only want 5% of the tools, auto correct and basic histogram adjustments.
The AI tools are honestly so useful though…
I use it over other tools, but I haven’t used the proprietary tools so I can’t provide a comparison.
If anyone replies to this, please ping me so I see it, too. Thanks!
ping
Thanks!
Personally, I’m grateful this tool exists. I have used Adobe Lightroom 5 the one you could get on a disc, like, when owning things was actually possible. Adobe has systematically pissed me off over the last decade. Lightroom was great, non-destructive edits, import into year with sub directory sorted by months. Quick copy and apply edits. Lr5 was great.
I’m just a hobbyist photographer, I’m not doing pro level anything or charging anyone anything. I would love to use the student edition. I refuse to though, because it requires Adobe to upload them online, use them for ai training, it’s not private. I take photos on a camera to NOT have them on the Internet. To be honest I’d be upset if a photographer used any ai or cloud storage for my personal photos. Sadly, it’s so baked in a photographer might not even know. Not everyone cares or is tech savvy(which is totally fine) it’s not their fault the company is shady.That was a first issue, second they won’t support the version I have any longer, ok that’s how software/hardware works, but it’s a subscription model now and that sucks. I upload 6 months of photos at a clip, I didn’t need a monthly sub. Because of that I’m tied to an old laptop that’s on death’s door to edit my pics.
Darktable provides everything I need that Lightroom did, sans a small bit of import magic to organize photos, and it’s a little tricky to use but after about an hour, I understand how to get things going. Anything has a learning curve. With darktable I know my pics are mine, they are on my laptop, I won’t be paying a subscription. That small amount of frustration is worth it to tell Adobe to piss off.
Check out digiKam for the library organization. If you enable sidecar file use for all raw in both and tell each to check for changes it’s pretty seamless to roundtrip stuff that overlaps (basic metadata, keywords, star ratings). The only thing like that that doesn’t roundtrip is color categories. That setting in darktable is only saved in its database.
I will absolutely check it out. Thank you. So far all I stumbled on was scripts to do it for you.
Oh nice! I’m stoked about the background sidecar operations, that will speed things up considerably
Definitely, and the progress bar at startup. I wondered what the delay was (besides my slow pc).
Maybe check that link again. Something isn’t working
Works for me, no idea what you’re seeing or talking about
Ok, but what is DarkTable? The link is a to a changelog. Worthless.
Dang if only you could click the “about” link at the top of the page to find a comprehensive explaination of the software…
Too much work. If somebody is that excited about posting a new version release they should consider tossing in a blurb about what it does so I can tell if I even want to click the link.
If you know Adobe Lightroom, it offers similar functionalities. Typically professional post processing of photos.
