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vijay-prema/Lightroom-toDarktable.md

Last active May 21, 2022 01:27
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Moving from Adobe Lightroom 4 to Darktable 3.6
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Lightroom-toDarktable.md

One key philosophical difference compared to Lightroom is that there are many different tools which do similar things in different ways in Darktable. This makes Darktable both powerful and flexible but also hard (and frustrating) to learn. It makes it very easy to mess up the image if you dont know exactly what the tools are doing. Lightroom on the otherhand does a restricts its options and sliders to prevent edits that damage the image.

However if you get up the learning curve with darktable you will have a much better understanding of the algorithms and optics that go behind RAW image processing and be able to create more specific effects in th end. Solid understanding is a requirement for using darktable in an effective way, while Lightroom does not require much understanding as anyone can shift some sliders around without breaking the image.

Rather than a direct replacement of Lightroom, it becomes apparent that darktable sits somewhere between Lightroom and Photoshop. If you are used to editing photos in Photoshop you may find darktable less powerful but easier and quicker to edit. If you are used to editing photos in Lightroom you may find darktable complicated and slower to edit but more powerful

There are some known workflows that incorporate a subset of Darktables tools and provide a good way to avoid damaging an image and reduce the number of tools down to a managable set. The currently recommendeed workflow is Scene Referred which operates on the raw optical definition of light for as long as possible before compressing to the display dynamic range (of 0 black to 1 white). I would recommend learning it then span out to incorporate some of the tools which are not included in it, as it allows for more robust editing although familiar tools like tone-curves and white balance (that only make sense on display-referred 0-1 pixels) are replaced by new processes.

Bonus:

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