81–90 of 183 posts
I found Darktable to have very steep learning curve while RAWtherapee felt perfect immediately. Never used other software like that before besides some Photoshop.
I've been liking Darktable
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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.
"If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.
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> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. 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.
You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything. Also, an aside. I…
But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.
I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*
(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).
In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.
It has improved vastly over the years. I love the new additions like AgX!
However I tried out the new AI denoise and it still isn't great. I also wish there was a way to manually correct barrel distortion (eg for vintage lenses) -- currently it only supports embedded metadata or lensfun profiles.
I also find the OpenCL implementation to be rather slow. It would be better if it were something more modern like Vulkan.
To 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…
Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a pat…
I struggled a little to get this import workflow setup nicely, any tips on settings and config to achieve nice import workflow?
Once I’m dealing with duplicates I start to wigg out!
I do miss macOS system controls like zooming in and out via touchpad. In general though, I'm not doing a ton of editing and for my large library, digiKam is working nicely. I tried capture1 for editing but it was more than I needed. I'm glad Darktable exists for folks needing raw editing. I wonder if it produces the Fujifilm specific colors as well as C1?
Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE. 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 fo…