I used lightroom for years and professionally for a bit. Also, this was a while ago, so maybe it's fixed. I found Lightroom to be so slow when I was using it. I know lightroom does this now, but I have not played with it yet, so I can't judge this now. It has quirks and frustrations, but if you're tired of paying $15 or whatever to Adobe every month it might be worth checking out.Ī significant advantage Darktable had over Lightroom was using the powerful masking features. Read the documentation, and watch the developer's (very long) youtube videos on it.

You have to be really deliberate about learning to use it. You don't need like 30 different modules, you only need a handful, and copy-pasting settings across images requires a lot less tweaking. The new scene referred workflow was hard to learn, but now that it's clicked I'm getting better, more consistent results faster than I ever did with LR. I experienced far fewer issues this time around. You can tell that a lot of bugfixing work has gone into it. It's still not on the same level as Lightroom with its infinite budget, but it's perfectly usable provided you're willing to spend some time learning it. The UI has been overhauled, and it's fine now. I decided to give Darktable another shot, and was really pleasantly surprised. We had a kid recently, which has naturally pushed me to get my camera out again. I basically got out of the hobby for awhile. It was buggy, the UI was completely unintuitive, it choked on my library, it crashed a lot, and the countless modules left me confused and frustrated. I have ~100k photos going back decades, and nothing else, including Darktable, even came close to organizing & processing them as well. I switched to Linux several years ago for work, and the only software I missed was Lightroom. I feel like I have a duty to recognize that, so here's my experience. I've spent the last few years complaining about Darktable in various contexts, but recently I gave it another shot and holy crap has it gotten better.

How to use darktable with gimp