Darktable(darktable.org) |
I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.
Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.
I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.
With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.
I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
I struggle with Darktable's workflow, but it works without issue on Fedora with Wayland (including with my monitor's color calibration), so I'm sticking with it for now.
If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.
Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE.
And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.
I was super into darktable and had fun using it. The UI and UX was not an issue for me. Loved the masks. But over time it got harder and harder for me to get decent color grading from it. I don't know what changed. When I tried to communicate that on forum and git I got rather harsh responses.
Maybe I should try it again.
>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.
What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.
I had folders based on dates YYYY.MM.DD - Eventname. No need for cli.
I still do the same now for CaptureOne to be honest.
OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.
Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.
The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?
If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pipeline in the metadata for each file such that it could be reproduced reliably across software versions and even forks. Like a sequence of shaders.
* Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name. * over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.
Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep .
Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare.
Makes me admire Linus Thorvalds even more. He is super smart, opinionated by also was able to keep a huge community on track for decades.
No subscription cost either.
A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.
I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).
In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.
If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.
In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.
This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.
>Ansel has not published a stable release yet and there is no ETA for one : a new release is published when the list of all bugs have been cleared, so we know the software and stable. So far, Ansel only publishes revisions, which are intermediate states of the sourcecode.
Instant pass.
Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.
Edit: I finally found a reference. It's a separate project that has nothing to do with the photography stuff. Right?
It's a way to search the docs?
(Yes, still better than Krita).
But this is all a digression, as Lightroom/Darktable are not Photoshop/Gimp replacements. Not even the same category.
Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)
Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.