I’ve tried to use Darktable (and Rawtherapee) for a few times without success. Both have tremendous count of features but compared to Lightroom they lack of simple UI. I wish there will be option for only one panel with reasonable set of settings available. I feel that amount of features there for casual photographer like me is too much.
BTW, I loved how old Google Picasa worked - Darktable/Rawtherapee could think about that tool.
Oh, I can fully recommended giving it one afternoon with some video tutorials. After that, you should be comfortable with the basics functionality. If I remember correctly, you can customize the interface to show the panels that you like.
I switched to Lightroom a while a go, mostly, because my most powerful machine was a Mac with Mac OS. I had trouble finding things in lightroom for a while and thought that darkroom is organized more logically.
I’ve used Darktable for many years now and I find the UI to be really great. It is preciously what you need without being too complicated. It is geared towards professional use. Use a couple of hours with Darktable and you’ll be right at home. It is easy to configure a set of features and only use those.
To date, I’ve been using Shotwell for managing photos and ufraw (via gimp) for the editing. (See example output.) With gphoto2 for import. It’s… pretty clunky, but I’ve been using ufraw for a while. Looks like it’s time to try switching again—anything to get out of shotwell’s limitations!
I’ve tried to use Darktable (and Rawtherapee) for a few times without success. Both have tremendous count of features but compared to Lightroom they lack of simple UI. I wish there will be option for only one panel with reasonable set of settings available. I feel that amount of features there for casual photographer like me is too much. BTW, I loved how old Google Picasa worked - Darktable/Rawtherapee could think about that tool.
Oh, I can fully recommended giving it one afternoon with some video tutorials. After that, you should be comfortable with the basics functionality. If I remember correctly, you can customize the interface to show the panels that you like.
I switched to Lightroom a while a go, mostly, because my most powerful machine was a Mac with Mac OS. I had trouble finding things in lightroom for a while and thought that darkroom is organized more logically.
I’ve used Darktable for many years now and I find the UI to be really great. It is preciously what you need without being too complicated. It is geared towards professional use. Use a couple of hours with Darktable and you’ll be right at home. It is easy to configure a set of features and only use those.
To date, I’ve been using Shotwell for managing photos and ufraw (via gimp) for the editing. (See example output.) With gphoto2 for import. It’s… pretty clunky, but I’ve been using ufraw for a while. Looks like it’s time to try switching again—anything to get out of shotwell’s limitations!
You may already be familiar with this subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FOSSPhotography/
But I’m mentioning it in case anyone else isn’t.
It’s nice that they ported darktable to Windows, even if it’s still an incomplete port.