Darktable 2.2.0 released (opens in new tab)

Since I moved to Linux as my daily driver, I've been using Darktable as prefered editor. I do have to say that I'm not a high demanding user, so you'll have to take my experience with a grain of salt. Coming from Lightroom there's a slight learning curve and it's not as refined as Lightroom. But once you get the hang of things, it's really a great editor. Definitely quick but also really usable. The interface can sometimes be somewhat confusing, I can recall several occasions at which I didn't really know how to use a tool or preset. Luckily I'm better at googling than photography. I don't miss Lightroom at all and as of yet have not encountered any missing features.

I was facing the same dilemma, and photo is a source of income to me. I made the jump, use Linux and Darktable every day, and experienced no frustration at all. I didn't try to run macOS in a vm though.

To answer your questions : it is quick, and I find it to be a very good replacement for lightroom. To me, it's actually easier to extend than adobe software, mostly because Lua is very simple and the documentation is crystal clear.

The best advice I could give here would be to give yourself a good dozen of hours of deliberate practice on Darktable, maybe more if you're into very advanced editing, but no more than a week.

I think Darktable fits the mold of a lot of other good free software in that it's well features and probably does what you need it too, but the proprietary equivalent(Lightroom in this case) is a more polished and easier to jump into, or at that's what I got from trying to introduce both(along with I think LightZone and a couple others) to my wife and she was just better able to pickup Lightroom. But if you want to move to Linux and take the time to get to know Darktable, I think it'll ultimately be a good replacement.

As a quick guide to trying it for yourself (it's cross-platform, free software) have a look at these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/harrydurgin/videos

He has the topics and modules covered in each video cross-referenced over at his website:

http://weeklyedit.com/

You're bound to find something useful.

It is very usable for editing photos. When I used to use it (a few versions ago), there were a few issues with library management, so I switched to Lightroom. Lightroom's workflow seems more "integrated", but I think Darktable has more photo-editing features. I would definitely recommend taking it for a spin.

I've just given it a hammering today and while I'd love to love it, DT is not going to give the LR team sleepless nights. It feels quick, but the interface lacks the silky refinement and there's a lack of coherence in the workflow. Plus the correction effects work poorly, such as shadow correction which affects regions outside shadows in one direction, not all shadows in another. The workflow coherence is based on the old Adobe RAW flow, which meant that all controls were to be applied from the top down in the order, starting with white balance and moving down. That coherence was diluted somewhat in newer versions of LR, but it is still good.

I too am shackled to OS X by LR, but I am a very demanding, heavy user of LR.

I run OSX in VM just for RAW Photo Processor, which in my opinion the best RAW converter out there developed by photographers for photographers. http://www.raw-photo-processor.com/RPP/Overview.html

Well, on Linux, darktable is incredibly much quicker than LR-in-wine ;-)

I also find DT more intuitive, which seems a bit weird considering the interface is so heavily inspired by LR (or did they just learn from LR's mistakes?).

The main reason to use LR is if you buy filter packs/plugins that are LR-only

I agree with you - Lightroom is the sizzle. But if you happen to convert Fujifilm RAF files on a regular basis, then there are image quality issues with ACP that might make the switchover decision easier for you.

If you go the VM route consider a Win7 guest instead. Much smoother experience than OSX.

Agree. I would add three more qualities to your list:

* Fully programmable, via a nicely document Lua interface: http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php -- you can automate all kinds of workflows.

* Truly innovative, with clever new features unavailable in other applications, including Lightroom. For example, five years ago they added a powerful new "equalizer" module: http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ (google "darktable equazlier" for usage examples).

* Always improving: I've been using it for years and the developers keep finding ways to make it better all the time.

Congratulations on another great release!

Definitely agree!

I make a substantial part of my income (just enough to pay rent) selling photography, and I recently dropped ps and lightroom in favor of Darktable. The change didn't happen in a day, but Darktable is so good I don't think I'll ever need to come back to Adobe. Notable plus, I can now spend most of my time on Linux, no more need to use my Macbook for photo work.

The interface is not really good for smaller displays and resolutions (adobe stuff was better on my 11 inch mba), but on anything with more than 1280 x 960 px, it's great.

Congratulations to the Darktable team for this 2.2 release!

> It's cross platform

Are there Windows builds? There was a guy that did but he stopped at 2.0.

I regret that I haven't really had the opportunity to explore Darktable very thoroughly. Every time I would try to point it at my library folder it would choke to death. Perhaps I should re-organize around Darktable, but right now I have other components of my workflow that are hard to imagine replacing, primarily DxO -- this was the main driver that got me to switch to a Windows host running a Linux VM and doing all my real work over SSH to the local VM, after years of struggling through painfully slow editing in a Windows VM on a Linux host. I resent that Windows's bad, less flexible behavior has forced me to make it my host OS. :'(

At the moment I don't have a good library app, I just browse the directory structure. I've tried Lightroom but it too struggles with my library folder, although unlike Darktable, it is marginally usable. I've tried Digikam, and while it's the only one that seems to handle the library in a semi-respectable fashion (with the experimental, now-deprecated MySQL backend enabled, which iirc took some manual massaging to even make compile anymore), it's hard to get the components I really wanted to work reliably (it's very important the my camera's GPS tags can be mapped and sorted; this is my main interest in a library manager and as of now, all such programs are too overloaded to do this competently or half-broken like Digikam's integration, and when I need GPS-based information I guess I will have to try to write a script that reads the coords out manually with exiftool instead of trying out Yet Another Library Manager).

Adobe is absolutely that 1k lb gorilla in the room that everyone is afraid to compete with. Add to that that photography programs are very difficult and complex work and it makes the field, particularly the field of volunteer developers who make contributions to a FOSS project, pretty limited.

For the record, the current size of my library:

    [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.CR2" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n"
    97,596
    [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.JPG" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n"
    177,785
    [me@my_host photos]$ du -sh --exclude=./.snapshots
    2.8T    .

.snapshots being the btrfs snapshot tree, which makes these numbers about 16x higher, but is a relatively recent addition (around the time I moved to a Windows host) so isn't the reason everything has choked historically. Hopefully stuff like Lightroom isn't trying to parse these directories as well. I guess I could blacklist them from sharing in Samba to try to get around it.

Open to any tips others may have.

Darktable stores 'catalogs' in SQLite tables. When I poked around for fun with sqlite3, the schemas seemed relatively straightforward. If the catalog data from lightroom can be wrangled into a reasonable format, it may be possible to convert it (famous last words).

It's really not that bad, you open your photo and it has a list of plugins you can use. Lightroom isn't the most complicated in the world either, I guess, so it's not going to be a very steep learning curve.

Maybe that could work:

"Allow to import/export tags from Lightroom keyword files"

(Release notes)

When I used RawTherapee I liked it, but I found the interface a bit opaque. The exported jpegs were not what I saw in the application, which in turn was not what I expected to see given the source and the modifications I had performed. I am absolutely sure there were good reasons for this, but I never took the time to figure out what they were.

In contrast, with Darktable, only once have the final output not matched my expectations, and then it was immediately obvious that I had accidentally changed the colour space of the output and my image viewer assumed sRGB – this was a two-click fix in the export tab.

RT has no real workflow, more a set of tools that you might apply somehow, GUI reflects that, seems unorganized. DT seems to have more advanced algorithms and tools. Both are excellent. Does not hurt to have both in your toolbelt.

I've tried Rawtherapee a few times and I haven't really learned to use it but I can easily recommend its documentation site (rawpedia) even if you don't use Rawtherapee itself.

> It's a pity most compare it to Lightroom

I don't think I can agree that it's a pity. Lightroom is the standard for photographers right now for pretty much everything but fashion photography (Capture One) and perhaps architecture photography (DXO Optics Pro). Everything, including the competitors you mentioned, is compared to Lightroom.

I think these applications (including DarkTable) need to be compared to Lightroom because the point at which they're competitive with Lightroom is the point at which they become seriously viable to many photographers (the kind that don't necessarily hang out on HN).

If the storage is recognized at the operating system level then Darktable should be fine with it. Because it maintains a database, Darktable doesn't need a constant connection. On the other hand, it won't mount a network drive all on its own since it doesn't expect to be running as root.

Or to put it another way, if there's a photo server on your network and the machine running Darktable knows about it, then it shouldn't be a problem.

As far as I can tell, file management is mostly beyond the scope of Darktable. You point it at a folder of photos, it stores the metadata in that same folder, and you export the edited photos somewhere else (another folder, or upload to services like flickr). Darktable doesn't do anything to take ownership of the original photos: no renaming or relocating.

> I tried Darktable but the lack of basic undo functionality kept me on Lightroom. Looks like this release has basic undo functionality. I'll give this one another try.

It's had undo functionality (on an individual-image basis) for a long time, albeit perhaps not in an obvious fashion. In the "darkroom" view, on the left sidebar there's a "History" widget. If you click on earlier numbers, it reverts the image to those, undoing whatever previous edits you've done.

It uses lensfun. See http://www.darktable.org/2015/02/on-lens-detection-and-corre... and http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04s04.html.php#lens....