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Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

darktable.org

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Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#11

Post by Someone1234 »

I'm glad Darktable exists.

Adobe letting Lightroom "Classic" sit and rot for years, along with increasing the price substantially has really opened the market up to competition. I'm currently using PhotoLab 4, but that's mostly because workflow wise it is "good enough" while offering killer features like DeepPrime and ClearView+ (that neither Lightroom Classic nor Darktable have an answer to yet).

Long term though I suspect Darktable will be the final victor if they can find a consistent group of contributors. The biggest limitation right now is lack of proprietary plugin support, for example if they had PureRaw Plugin support I could use Darktable instead of PhotoLab 4 today.

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#12

Post by porphyra »

Darktable is awesome.

However I wish that more modern cameras and lenses would be supported.

Darktable depends on the nearly-abandoned lensfun library [1] which doesn't support many cameras and lenses, and has open pull requests that have inexplicably not been merged despite being open for years [2].

Also, the process of contributing calibrations to lensfun is a mess. First, the only way to gain access to create calibrations is to email a single developer, Torsten Bronger [3]. Second, it requires a highly manual and technical workflow primarily documented via a screencast video [4]. Oh, and you may possibly have to compile a custom version of Hugin by copying a patch from the documentation file.

So it is no wonder that few volunteers are willing to contribute calibrations!

By the way, this is not meant as a jab against Dr Bronger or any other maintainers of lensfun. I am deeply appreciative of the work that these guys have done. It's just that, despite the great work, it's not nearly scalable enough to keep the project going in an effective way.

[1] https://github.com/lensfun/lensfun [2] https://github.com/lensfun/lensfun/pull/912 [3] https://github.com/lensfun/lensfun/blob/master/tools/calibra... [4] https://vimeo.com/51999287

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#14

Post by ISL »

notjustanymike wrote: post #3

"Should I use this instead of Lightroom?" If you have to ask, the answer is no. Like learning VIM instead of using VSCode.

It is free to try; my recommendation to anyone who is curious about it is to give it a try and see if it works for you.

I use Darktable exclusively for all of my photographic work, and have for years. It continues to improve year after year and the backward compatibility has been wonderful; anything I edited in the earliest days with Darktable still renders the same today.

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#15

Post by nvllsvm »

adgud wrote: post #4

I've used and I loved it, but then I upgraded my camera and this software does not support new Canon CR3 RAW files yet... Sadly I'll switch to Lightroom until it does...

ART, a fork of RawTherapee, works great with the CR3 files from my EOS 90D.

https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/wiki/Home

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#16

Post by omoikane »

Someone1234 wrote: post #11

I'm glad Darktable exists. Adobe letting Lightroom "Classic" sit and rot for years, along with increasing the price substantially has really opened the market up to competition. I'm currently using PhotoLab 4, but that's mostly because workflow wise it is "good enough" while offering killer features like DeepPrime and ClearView+ (that neither Lightroom Classic nor Darktable have an answer to yet). Long term though I…

I am also on PhotoLab and have been very happy with it, the killer features for me are the spot removal tool and the perpetual license model. Darktable would have been able to satisfy both of those features, but when I tried it years ago, I had to go back to the menu to select the tool for each spot I wanted to remove and it was just not workable. Darktable had many interface annoyances of this sort and I am not sure if it has improved since.

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#17

Post by unicornporn »

Since darktable introduced the scene referred workflow I would argue it's an extremely steep learning curve for anyone coming from display referred software (Lightroom, Capture One etc).

Scene referred is very much a cine-thing and I know of no other still image software that uses it. dt v3.6 made scene referred default.

Aurélien has been one of the driving forces behind the switch to scene referred and his hour long explanations of the new modules can be found on his YouTube channel[1]. Boris has a YouTube channel[2] which is quite the opposite. You watch him edit in silence and you will pick up the craft.

darktable is made up of modules. The Filmic RGB module takes a central part of the editing workflow in scene referred. This is where to go if you need help getting started: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/lets-learn-filmic-rgb-your-one-st...

RawTherapee has a more traditional, display referred, approach. If you want local adjustments (which you will want), you need to use nightlies until 5.9 is released.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbDlOwmmQnkRmcb2_5WERg

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#18

Post by jseliger »

Someone1234 wrote: post #11

I'm glad Darktable exists. Adobe letting Lightroom "Classic" sit and rot for years, along with increasing the price substantially has really opened the market up to competition. I'm currently using PhotoLab 4, but that's mostly because workflow wise it is "good enough" while offering killer features like DeepPrime and ClearView+ (that neither Lightroom Classic nor Darktable have an answer to yet). Long term though I…

I'm using Capture One—I tried darktable (I think they like the "no capital d"), but on MacOS it is a nonstarter, or was when I attempted it.

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#19

Post by nighthawk454 »

unicornporn wrote: post #17

Since darktable introduced the scene referred workflow I would argue it's an extremely steep learning curve for anyone coming from display referred software (Lightroom, Capture One etc). Scene referred is very much a cine-thing and I know of no other still image software that uses it. dt v3.6 made scene referred default. Aurélien has been one of the driving forces behind the switch to scene referred and his hour long…

In case anyone else is looking for a tl;dr on "scene-referred" this link has a very simple diagram. https://www.filmriot.com/blog/scene-referred-vs-display-refe...

gist is whether you do your color grading in the camera's original color space (scene referred) or after transforming to display color space (display referred)

Re: Darktable: An open source photography workflow application

#20

Post by vaidhy »

I recently started on my photography journey and is just starting with darktable. My biggest challenge is around multiple modules with apparently very similar functionality. It has been very hard to figure out what should I do to get to the end goal I have in mind. FWIW, most of my work is in underwater photography and what I really want is adjust exposure, white balance and change the de-saturate aqua and blue in masked areas and I got struck with filmic, RGB and a couple of others, with none being easy for a beginner.
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