Is this better than Lightroom?
Darktable
41–50 of 183 posts
Re: Darktable
#42Darktable is one of the few Apps that I loved and advocated for, only to land back on a pirated copy of CaptureOne. Which is I think the only pirated software that I still have installed.
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.
Re: Darktable
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. They got beef!
Right?! And the rest of the README continues like that. Must be some juicy history here
And I think this was a few years back. Imagine still having that in your readme.
Re: Darktable
#44https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
> Meet Chantal, your image processing AI librarian Instant pass. Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.
It's just an ordinary search engine for the specialized topic. Aurelien Pierre is being overly dramatic here, it's in his character.
Re: Darktable
#45Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.
Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ: >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 th…
When I still used it, I only ever opened the folder with the files I wanted to edit.
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.
Re: Darktable
#46I am switching soon. I hear a lot of people complain about the catalog management. What solutions have you found?
> What solutions have you found?
* Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name. * over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.
Re: Darktable
#47To me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same. 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 pi…
>How do the FOSS alternatives handle this? 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.
I just suggested a different way. Embed the pipeline’s actual code in the metadata.
This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.
Re: Darktable
#48https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
I haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?
I don't know, but it's interesting to see a bunch of people stop developing features and fix bugs straight for 4 years.
Re: Darktable
#49Is this better than Lightroom?
Depends on what feature of Lightroom you use. Give it a try and see for yourself.
Re: Darktable
#50I highly recommend people try out Capture One. After using Lightroom for years, switching to Capture One a few years ago felt like someone turned the lights on. Far and away the best photo and media mangement software I've ever used by at least two orders of magnitude, and reasonalbe license cost and generous free tier.
Not getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.
Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €. Lightroom is the more expensive one if you plan on using the software more than 2 years and 2 months.