With Adobe raising their subscription prices, has anyone else recently migrated from Lightroom to Darktable for processing RAW camera images? All I need is to be able to crop as needed, adjust exposure and lighting so the colours look natural, and make sure I’m not losing any detail in shadows and highlights. And export jpgs that meet iNat’s requirements. I’m sure Darktable can do all that and far more, but after a quick look I’m a bit overwhelmed at the vast array of adjustments and controls it offers, many of which sound very similar to each other. I would be very interested to hear what workflow and modules others have been using.
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I am using Photolab 8, but also have Darktable.
I find darktable userface very complicated.
I’ve been using Darktable for a few years, but I only use it once every few months so I forget how to use it a bit between each time… I’ve only used Lightroom briefly a long time ago.
Here are the modules I have favourited for basic editing:
I find the differences in options between the different software confusing, maybe partially because I don’t understand them at a technical level. Like none of these options on Darktable have a slider for “brightness”, whereas Irfanview only provides brightness and contrast sliders with no exposure/highlights/shadows sliders.
I’ve never used Adobe and never will, my image editing is mostly done through darktable with some things (things that involve painting and composite images) done in Gimp.
Now to workflow: Firstly I have my Darkroom modules set to “Modules all” so your module layout may be different depending on what you select. The modules I use the most (roughly in order from most to least) are: Tone curve to adjust local exposure levels (eg. pull up shadows); Colour balance RGB to adjust global saturation, contrast, shadows and highlights; denoise; Chromatic aberrations; RGB levels and crop. I generally don’t touch the exposure module and correct exposure with the tone curve and RGB levels.
Example below with a reasonably low level of editing.
Example of a RAW with a lot of editing (note that the Contrast, Brightness, Saturation module no longer exists).
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Thanks, @felix-insects. This is a good start, I will explore those modules. I have hastily processed some pictures for the City Nature Challenge but I don’t feel like I got the best out of them. I’m sure it will come with practice!
Definitely takes practice I’m only just starting to be happy with my RAW processing.
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I don’t know how to denoise well with darktable, which I use for my RAW photos because I can’t afford Lightroom.
As you probably know there are a bunch of denoise options. Denoise (profiled) is probably the easiest (single click for low noise) but worse noise generally requires the other modules or sometimes even several at the same time! Raw denoise makes images rather soft at the default level so a lot of pulling and pushing the “strength” curve is required (if the image is too soft drag it down towards “noisy”. Astrophoto denoise can be handy for reasonably noisy images in general (not just astrophotography).
Personally I’m still leaning to get the best results in some situations so you’ll likely have to experiment quite a bit.
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