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- Hacker News
- I don't edit RAW too often so haven't invested the time and effort into Darktable. I have been very impressed by digiKam for organization and catalog management though. I refuse to be sucked into another proprietary database (e.g. Lightroom) and utilities like osxphotos made it easy to turn Apple photos into regular files that digiKam serves up nicely. My goal is to have access to the entire 'archive' on my NAS.
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?
by redmaple892 - I've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization use case?
Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it.
by olooney - Darktable 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.
by Mashimo - It's kind of shitty to pirate Capture One. The full, non-subscription price is only $350, which is less than most cameras, and not a bad price for "pro level" software.
I agree that it's a lot better than Darktable and RawTherapee, but if you don't want to pay for it you should settle for one of the open source tools. They're not so bad they're unusable, and editing RAW photos isn't exactly something you need to do.
Extra shame if you're using it commercially.
by jlarocco - Pirated copies seem like a blackbox of potential malware, even if virus scans fail to find any problems (and they often give 10-30% false positives on most keygens/cracks). Even if the code is hosted in github, there has been plenty of cases of malware/viruses being hosted there too.
- I have tried to get used to Darktable for more than 2 years but finally gave up and went back to Lightroom. For some reason it never clicked with me and made me almost lose interest in photography . And the AI stuff like masking in the latest Lightroom versions is crazy good.
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
by vjvjvjvjghv - A rather less positive view of Darktable than msny of the opinions in this thread:
https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
by andyjohnson0 - Some needed context is that article is over 3 years old.by sbarre
- I 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.by kkukshtel
- Private equity owed proprietary Mac and Windows exclusive. No thanks.by tokai
- Capture One in my opinion has much higher output quality, better defaults, and specifically for supports Phase One backs better than anything else. I have not done a scientific study or anything comparing the outputs (maybe I should!), but it’s just really good at producing gorgeous photos.
Media management though is IMO much worse than Lightroom? No keyword search, the catalog gets extremely slow over 10k images, and no filters for different cameras or lenses, as far as I know. I use peakto instead to manage and search my 40k RAWs then open them for editing only in C1.
by buildbot - Not getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.by wmfiv
- If Capture One or any other buy-once commercial offering worked at all under Wine (or, in a dream land, had a Linux build), I would happily pay for it. But unfortunately, I've had no luck getting either Capture One or DxO PhotoLab running on Linux.
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.
by willbicks - 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 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.
by drdexebtjl - 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 path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.by akersten
- >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.
- Darktable editing workflow is centered around modules. Exposure, denoise, various color adjustments, etc are all separate modules. Dynamic range compression (and other common operations) has several implementations: base curve, filmic, sigmoid, and AgX. They all essentially do the same thing but have effectively superseded each other as they were added to newer releases.
Darktable keeps the old modules around but hides them, opening a file processed years ago will still go through the pipeline with the base curve module and come out the same. As a bonus, it is possible to use "obsolete" modules that may handle certain images better, achieving a particular look, or you are comfortable with the older module and prefer not to use the new replacement.
by muti - > The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
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).
by throwup238 - Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.
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.
by ryanjshaw - Ditched 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.by randomstate
- Pretty sure Darktable only supports openCL and not Metal for MacOS.
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.
by pnut - 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 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.
by ghostly_s - I've kept an eye on Darktable for a while. I do high volume photography for high school sports so while Lightroom Classic (LrC) is the final editing tool before exporting the images that go to the clients a more critical app for me is Photo Mechanic (PM) to cull down from 6,000 images to the 300 keepers from an event (a process that only takes about ten minutes on PM). The last time I tried to run Photo Mechanic on Linux (using Wine) I was able to get it to load but it crashed hard every time I tried to actually use it. If there's a capable competitor to Photo Mechanic for Linux I might take a serious look again at switching. Then again, the speed from the Apple Silicon CPU+RAM+GPU processors means that even if I could get comparable hardware for Linux it wouldn't be any less expensive than a new MacBook Pro M5 Max. Definitely keeping an eye on this space but it's not where I need it to be for my workflow.by mikece
- > It is forked on Darktable 4.0, and is compatible with editing histories produced with Darktable 4.0 and earlier. It is not compatible with Darktable 4.2 and later and will not be, since 4.2 introduces irresponsible choices that will be the burden of those who commited them to maintain, and 4.4 will be even worse.
lol
by jdubs1984 - I found Darktable absolutely amazing, although the learning curve is incredibly steep.
Some ex-maintainers hated the direction of Darktable and thus made their own fork, namely https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
by thatxliner - Original founder of darktable, hanatos, went and made vkdt which fixes a bunch of my pet peeves with darktable:
https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt
* Vulkan instead of OpenCL has way better performance.
* Graph-based editing akin to Blender. This fixes the issue of it being annoying and weird to reorder modules in darktable
It is, of course, still early on in its development and way less mature and featureful than Darktable.
by dllu - 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 for my own post-processing needs.
by erksa - > 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.
by BeetleB - I have a pet peeve that darktable-cli requires the GUI darktable to not be running. It would be nice to export photos using my script without having to disrupt my editing workflow...by dllu
- Consider sidecar-only mode, and use whatever external organizing tool you like. This is not documented as such, rather it's the CL option
--library ':memory:'