Hi y’all. I’ve recently started looking at getting back into running Linux again as a main OS. With Proton and Steam all my gaming works fine. And with so many web apps those are all cross-platform anyways.
However the one application which I have not yet found a good alternative for is Adobe Lightroom. I’ve found Lightroom to be simply the best experience for managing a large (100k+) catalog of photos. I’ve really tried to get into using Darktable but while it can do a lot, I’ve found the UX to be incredibly bad and painful to use.
Is there a photo workflow app which is relatively simple, efficient and easily usable that lets me manage my photo library, can do some basic editing (levels, crop, etc.) and runs on Linux? Thanks.
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Darktable.
I recommend sticking with it and customizing the visible tools to your liking. Especially if you’re not trying to power user, there’s not that much to it.
It’s not super “discoverable” meaning it’s hard to just sit down and use it if you have never done it before, but it IS effective.
There isn’t one that does catalog management too.
RawTherapee is OK for RAW editing, but that’s all it does. It’s a bit slow too at updating when you change things, it’ll take like half a second after moving a slider instead of updating right away as you move it.
DigiKam is OK for cataloging, but it’s very slow and you have to open photos in external editors, and then RAW edits you do don’t show up in DigiKam unless you export to some other format first, it’s a huge mess and hassle to use.
Darktable does both, but it’s so insanely difficult to use that I gave up after seeing people suggesting really long tutorial videos to learn how to do basic stuff. The photo output from Darktable also never looks right compared to other programs I edit in. It also has the same slowness issue as RawTherapee.
Really? I’m a super-casual Darktable user - like, once or twice a year when I get around to actually doing the (for me) boring post-processing stuff, and I don’t find DarkTable confusing or hard.
What sorts of things do you think it does poorly? Maybe I just don’t do those things.
Just basic exposure and black/shadow/highlight/white levels usually.
In lightroom opening a RAW file I can basically export it with no tweaks and it looks just fine, so the effort is really minimal. Darktable doesnt seem to be pulling in the camera processing and applying it to the RAW or something, because each photo needs a lot of adjustment to be usable.
Also darktable just doesnt have black/shadow/highlight/white sliders that I can find.
That’s a good point. I stopped using RAW shortly after switching to Fujifilm cameras, and realized the jpgs coming out of the camera were categorically better than anything my tweaking could produce. I do mess with color temperature and light adjustments, and a lot of conversion to B/W. Shadows and highlights adjustments occasionally. But while jpgs from my Canon were not acceptable and I ended up mass processing ever RAW I imported, with the Fujis it’s the rare photo I have to tweak for an effect.
However, the light and color adjustments are pretty straightforward?
Oh yeah if you’re editing JPEGs then it’s going to be way easier, as you start with something that looks fine.
The sliders are there but they don’t seem to work like I’d expect, so far I have not been able to replicate Lightroom results in Darktable.
Darktable
Digikam was my replacement for photo management and tagging. And darktable for editing. You can launch darktable from the Digikam catalogue, so it’s pretty smooth.
It took me a while to get used to darktable, especially the masking, but I genuinely prefer it to lightroom now.
You can also use other editing apps, like Gwenview, etc for quick and dirty edits. The only thing I’ve had no luck with are things like Topaz and DxO. They won’t run on Linux and don’t really have equivalents.
Same here. DigiKam and darktable.
Getting color balance with raw in darktable took quite a while for us. It was helped by using a Color Checker Passport in a few shooting conditions to use for reference and calibration. Once we got past that darktable has been great.
Is there some explanation as to why Darktable is different from every other RAW editor out there? It’s so complex to use even for the most basic stuff, and nothing ever looks quite right.
My understanding of why is that it relates to their change to a scene-referred workflow. Up to v3, darktable used a display-referred workflow like other programs. In that model the image you start with is mapped on a tone curve from the start where 0 is pure black and 1 is pure white, and the midpoint is set to midway between. This is all from the standpoint of what your display can render. The scene-referred workflow in v4 doesn’t do that. All the tones are mapped in an unbounded and uncurved way. So images look flat, but you’ve retained maximum data, so you have more to work with. The developers assume that you want control and maximum fidelity. There’s a better explanation in the intro of the documentation. This impacts everything - especially the color balance.
One of the problems is that all of the display-referred tools remain as modules in the interface, and some are even used in the base processing, but you’re not supposed to use them. At least if you want to do things the ‘right’ way. We created a custom panel that has 90% of what we regularly use (shared UI with my partner). That plus creating some presets that work well with our cameras has made it very quick to get a satisfying output in a minute or less.
Honestly, if you want to do minor tweaks to a RAW and mostly want what the out of camera JPEG looks like, there are much easier tools. If you at least occasionally deal with really challenging photos, or you want to get creative in the processing of some of your RAW images, darktable opens up a lot of possibilities, while being free and open source. So I think it’s worth the effort to learn. Shooting with a colorchecker helped us get the presets we wanted for a variety of shooting conditions.
