DANGER: opinion post ahead
I’m self employed doing multimedia and web dev… I do photos for clients too, sometimes for the government, ministry of tourism… blah blah… self taught…blah blah…which all somehow makes me a professional or at least my clients think I am. Here are my thoughts (oh boy!).
I think that most important thing for professional photographers and why they choose Lightroom is its fast workflow. It makes a big return on investment. For most images, you just push a few sliders and you’re done.
If there was a program that edited images by itself without user input, we’d be using that.
Other photo software is heading that way by using AI and neural nets.
I tend to do most of my edit in the raw development tool or as much as I can b/c Gimp is destructive and Ps doesn’t perform well in a VM (I’m on Linux). And with Lightroom it’s way faster than with DT.
I also tend to do very radical edits that almost look like composits b/c it’s what instagram kids do and what my client is seeing from others so he wants the same.
So in Lightroom, I’ll often times use a drawn mask almost as a painting brush to fake a sunset or whatever.
In the recent months I’ve started promoting DT to my photographer friends etc. Yesterday we tried to achieve the same exact edit that one friend did on Lr. It took him 10 min on Lr, it took me at least an hour on DT to do the same. Still couldn’t quite get copy it 100%. And he told me exactly what he did in Lr before I started editing. But, maybe I’m not skilled enough tho I really doubt that is the case.
1. masking
The amazing Darktable parametric masking is also huge pain when it comes to any visually bussy scenes. As much as parametric masking helps, often times you can spend hours tweeking it and drawing it and still not get the right mask. Darktable desperately needs a painted raster mask to complement it’s vector masking and parametric masking.
Now, let’s say you have your mask, you will spend at least 20 min to achieve the result you wanted b/c you have to duplicate multiple modules, set it to the same masking, move between the tabs and between different modules countless times until you achieve the desired look.
Yes, it gives you absolute control but it’s slow as a snail, it’s impossible to work with if you have like 500 images from an event that you have to deliver the next day.
2. Tool controls
Darktable is a software that gives you the absolute control and that I enjoy using when I have the time that I can spend on it.
Lightroom on the other hand helps you every step of the way, it takes away the hassle of needing to purposely set every single parameter of the algorithms and having to understand what’s uner the hood or how the software will behave, perform, what kind of result will it spit out, the pipeline order etc.
When I’m doing images for a client, I don’t want to be thinking about anything else but the image I’m working on, the time I’m spending and the money that I’m getting. It doesn’t have to be the best possible edit, I’m not payed for that. It has to be an image good enough to achieve desired results whether that’s market something, document something etc.
Professional photography imo is not art, it’s an industry job.
3. misc
Would I ever give Darktable to an employee?
- Probably not, he wouldn’t know where to even begin and would just waste time and money with DT.
Will Darktable ever be suitable for professional photography at scale?
- Probably not. In order to be suitable for that it would have to be dumbed down or abstracted significantly and even myself that I’m frustrated with it’s slow workflow wouldn’t want that to happen.
Who is Darktable for imo?
- Artists that can take their time to edit a photograph that will be considered as art and maybe sell for bunch of money.
- It’s for image enthusiasts that want to really dive deep into how everything works without really actually having to do any of that stuff for the client and an impossible deadline.
- It’s for ppl in a country with low living standards like mine that can’t afford to pay Adobe every month.
4. All what I’ve just said is a bunch of bs
- I’ve fell in love with Darktable precisely b/c of its steep learning curve and the opportunity to really understand what’s happening in the black box that we call raw development software. Without it being difficult I wouldn’t be reading this forum and connecting with all of these amazing people. The feeling of proudness or even “elitism” that using Darktable gives to a person is a thing too, you can’t escape that.
Where I’m at now?
- Basically I’m doing everything in DT but I haven’t deleted Lightroom b/c when I get a deadline I often get scared that I won’t be able to make it in DT and just reach for Lr.
But I’m doing all of my non business relate personal photography with DT to really understand it and possibly help with bugs and features input.
Would I love to delete my Lightroom VM and finally be done with it? Oh god yes! But we’re at the least many papercuts away from that 
With all this said. I still can’t really point to any particular issue and propose a fix since I really don’t want the DT to get so abstracted like Lr, but on the other hand I would love to have a very fast workflow.
For now I’ve been opening smaller bug reports and feature requests that actually add up to help a lot in the end. So I’ll continue to do that for now until we all get a better idea where things need to go.
TL/DR: Darktable workflow is slow, Lightroom workflow is fast. Darktable gives me control, Lightroom is too abstracted. How to get Lightroom’s speed in Darktable w/o losing the control it gives?
