I’m growing more and more impressed with its capabilities the more I use it! Wrapping my head around its approach to masking, and its “scene referred pipeline” took some time, but now that I’m getting the hang of it, I think I can say I genuinely prefer it to Lightroom.
Combined with digiKam, which is excellent for photo collection management, I’m a very happy photographer :)
Got recommended it from the other site a few years ago when I couldn’t justify the expense of Lightroom anymore. Agree when you say you prefer it to Lightroom. But I don’t use it nearly as much as I ought to. It is very good though isn’t it?
One of the programmes where I am happy to drop a few quid towards the developer, even if I don’t have to.
I moved from Windows to Linux, and I just couldn’t get Lightroom working on Linux. If I could have, I’d probably still be paying Adobe money, but instead, I was forced out of my comfort zone, and I’m thankful for it!
Same here. I’d never want to go back, Darktable is so customizeable, I realy prefer it to Lightroom.
I’ve been using it for around a year and am really happy with the program.
I also want to make the switch away from Lightroom and it looks like that you here might have the solution for my problem. The Lightroom feature, where I can import everything on my PC and then sync these “smart previews” to their cloud and then hand out a link or just a tablet to my wife, friends or anyone, makes everything so much easier. They can then decide which photos they want to keep or be deleted and also label those, which I should develop first. Is there a FOSS (or at least non-Adobe) solution that would give me similar possibilities? I’m not afraid of hosting something myself.
We rsync the jpgs (not the RAW files) to our self hosted photoprism instance. Not for the same reason you do, but it could easily be used the way you describe it!
Alternatively, if you don’t shoot in jpeg+raw, or if you want to reduce the size of the jpegs before you sync them, digiKam has a batching tool that would let you automate exporting smaller versions of all of your files as part of the import process.
Ideally I would love to have the votes synced back to digiKam, especially if it’s about sorting out hundreds of photos. But that sounds like a workable solution until I found or developed a plugin, that can do this. Thank you!
We don’t sync back so I haven’t tested it, but as long as you have a gallery that writes back to a sidecar file, digikam can work with it.
Digikam has direct integration with Exiftool as well as batching, so anything you can get in to a sidecar file, you can get out with Digikam, and then stick in custom albums/categories etc.
Some quick searching turns up a tool called Piwigo (which I haven’t tried) that has the ability to run contest modes via plugins. Assuming it can write the votes/results back to the sidecar file in some manner, you should be able to get to it in Digikam
Thank you that is really helpful! I’ll look into it! It’s probably a bit of work until it is a smooth workflow but I’m willing to try it. Maybe then I can finally ditch Lightroom :)
Same here, that’s my favorite feature. If you don’t find anything, I might be able to help develop it
Thanks! I don’t know how plugins for digiKam work but that would probably be a good point to start. Though I think I have not enough time at the moment look at this more thoroughly. Sometime maybe :)
The big workflow gap for me is culling. Thankfully I have a legacy license for Photo Mechanic, but their new pricing structure is very unappealing.
I just got an OM1-MkII, which has a “pro shooting mode” that basically dumps the last 2 seconds to the card when you press the button. Useful for sports and animals. But it makes culling a whole job!
So far, I’ve been using digiKam for that, and it is working, but I definitely don’t have that workflow optimised yet…
As an OM-1 MK1 dabbler, I find my hit rate much higher if not using one of the SH modes. Not sure if procap is available with ‘regular’ ES. But you’re right, metric tons of photos to cull. I’ll have to give digiKam a go. All I use PM for us culling. There’s a ton more it can do, but I’m def not using it to it’s fullest.
“ES”?
Electronic shutter
I recently picked up photography a bit more seriously again having used Nikon Capture NX 2 for years. I tried all the linux and FOSS options but I ended up buying DXO Photolab 7 and found it far superior for my needs. I’ve had to setup a dual boot system to get it to work but it’s definitely worth it. Dark table is good, but it’s a long way off the commercial offerings in terms of ease of use and image quality.
I’m seriously doubting the image quality bit
In terms of noise reduction which greatly affects image quality it is nowhere near the big commercial players.
Have you tried the “Denoise (profiled)” feature? It applies auto de-noising per your camera model and metadata quite nicely. You can then fine tune it after enabling the feature.
I usually leave it at chroma only as well. Luminance noise is far less unpleasant on the eyes.
I’ve found the profiled noise reduction in Darkroom to do what I need. I’ve not noticed any significant difference between it and the results I was getting from Lightroom.
That may be so, but Lightroom is not the class leader in noise reduction. There are other programs out there that do a much better job
Cool, but I don’t need class leader… I need “works on my linux box without loss of functionality compared to my previous Windows workflow”
You’re doubting that it’s meeting or missing image quality?
That’s just not true with the image quality.
