darktable, RawTherapee and Digikam

Does anyone use both darktable and raw therapee together while using digiKam as your program to organize your photos?

yes

Do they work well together? From what I have read and hear, it seems that by using both RT and DT you get just about everything you need to edit.

Sounds like a nice recipe to mess everything :slight_smile:

Well. Recently I used dt more than RT. RT has ingenious noise reduction and sharpening (it uses detect edges or something like that under the hood). dt has the masks. I hope they will add a noise reduction and sharpening module in dt that is similar to RT eventually.
But according to my experience sharpening/noise reduction with RT after editing with dt is not always effective. I am not sure why, I do not understand the math behind it.
But well, they are both very complex programs. I am not sure it is possible to master both of them properly at the same time.
Well, and I also want to add that somehow I have the feeling that the devs want you to be “faithful” to their program. I think they do not like it if you use more than one app that more or less does the same thing. They want you to choose.
One more edit: I also use Krita and GIMP. There are things that I cannot do with dt or RT. E.g. the clone tool/brush is better in both GIMP and Krita. In RT there is no repair or clone brush at all and the spot removal tool in dt is just not as good as the equivalent tools in GIMP or Krita.

I don’t think this is true at all. I think most of them want you to use whatever tooling works for you.

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It was supposed to be a joke :wink:

@betazoid
Have you not tried the retouch module in darktable?
Bruce Williams tutorial is a must.

A link in case anyone is interested

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thanks for the hint, going to try it. Did not know about it
edit: checked it out. The retouch module is good for portrait. Not so useful for landscape/nature. It is very good but I think I still need old school editing for some tasks.

I use darktable to process and organize the raw images and digikam to organize all the exported jpgs, phone pictures, etc

Note at all. RT + Digikam why not. But using an external program to catalog and organize pcitures on top of dt is a recipe for disaster. We already had report about .xmp messed and tags not being recognized. I don’t know if this has improved but be warned if your .xmp are all messed up.