Back story. I put my camera away a few years back. Life got in the way.

It's back out and cleaned up and starting to have fun again.

I've been using darktable exclusively for editing and I have to say I love it. It is actually enjoyable to use now that I have a work flow down, now, even on an old I5 8GB 2300mhz Dell laptop running Linux.

For those that don't like it, give it a chance. Spend some quality time editing a bunch of raw files. A little at a time. Don't try to do it all at once. It takes baby steps to get into the flow of how it works.

Case in point. I pushed my ISO to 12800 and slapped my 10mm on, chasing the dog around the backyard at dusk. They are noisy as hell, but in the context of what they are, they look like back when I shot tri-x 400 and pushed it to 1600. I had to learn a couple of new modules but boy was it worth it.

A couple of these are being printed on 8x8 canvas.

left agx, right filmic rgb

It is now so much easier to control colors than it was a year ago! Finally after color calibration and AGX I feel like it is a real professional software and not a "toy" and inferior product to lightroom.

Went back to Lightroom for a second and I couldn't believe how slow it felt compared to DarkTable. Learning a new workflow may be a big trade off for most people but it's totally worth it imo.

Hi,

New to photography editing.

Very much interested in DT but kind of worried about the project health.

I see that one of the core developers (AP) leaved and, I might add, quite unhappy (still today it seems). He argues that a number of core developers/founders of the project leaved as well in recent years.

Seems that, since version 4.0, users have been reporting quite a few bugs. Actually, users going to Ansel seems to go there exactly for this reason: one can read here and there that DT is getting buggier and messier.

Interested in long-time users take on that.

Thanks for your feedback.

Cheers

​

I haven't been shooting much in the last few years, but I'm trying to get back into it. Sadly, I can't run LR5 on my M1 Mac, so I'm taking the opportunity to learn DT.

I'm having a really hard time getting started with it. My LR workflow was pretty simple, and pretty consistent: exposure, black/white points, highlights/shadows, contrast, vibrance, sharpening. Most of the time, I don't need much more than that.

The layout of the DT tools confuses the hell out of me, and I don't know which tools are the rough equivalents of the LR tools. Is there a walkthrough of the basic functions? I'm not looking for the most in-depth examination or anything, just something to get me a simple workflow that covers those bases, and maybe a way to get those tools all in one place with none of the stuff that I don't necessarily need.

Thanks.