Experimenting with Darktable
I’ve been leeching an Adobe subscription from someone I know for a couple of years now, and it’s getting more and more awkward to press the “Sign out xxx” button whenever I want to edit some of my photos.
I’ve been experimenting with Lightroom alternatives for a while now, but most of them I just don’t get. They either go full AI, which I don’t want, or try and make things too easy, meaning I could just as easily use an Instagram filter instead.
For all its faults, billing-wise, Lightroom does manage to hit the mark between automated (selections, fill, etc.) and a manual workflow. It’s hard to part with my matsimitsu01- matsimitsu09 presets that make my photos look “mine”.
I’ve installed, removed, and re-installed Darktable a couple of times now, but this time, I’m making an effort and have been watching a bunch of YouTube videos to try and get the hang of it.
Basically, you get a bunch of super-specialistic tools that assume you understand the underlying logic/algorithms, and it’s up to you to combine them into a photo workflow.
You’ll have to understand what terms such as “Local contrast”, and “Sigmoid” mean in order to make the best of Darktable. Speaking of order, the order in which you apply each specialized tool also has an effect on the outcome, making things even more difficult.
It must be said, though, that the automatically applied defaults already take care of a lot of things for you. I’m planning to edit a couple of photos every week to build up my pre-sets and get the hang of every option I'm interested in.
(The original photo both tools had to work with)
