darktable vs ART

So,

With all the foolishness recently coming out of the Capture One camp, I’ve decided to investigate other retouching tools. I love what C1 does for my images, but my confidence level in their business practices has fallen to virtually zero.

As such, I’ve decided to go open source. If I’m going to learn a new process, I want one that will provide complete freedom from this commercial foolishness. To preface, I’m on Windows 10 exclusively in my processing capability.

darktable

Initially I was drawn to darktable. Well thought of in the community, a goodly amount of support materials (videos and such on youtube), very actively developed, been around for a long while, etc. I installed a version on my laptop to play around with my local photos storage on that machine. DT “markets” itself as a tool for library management, with more about that later.

My “good” imagery is stored on a Synology NAS box with mapped drives, but I wasn’t ready for DT to be touching that yet, mostly due to the way DT handles xmp files, which is part of the problem.

It is carefully stated that when DT initially opens a file, it reads the xmp file if there is one, but after that it never looks at or updates the original xmp file. This makes interacting with other retouching tools a bit tenuous at best. So for testing purpose, I imported my local images, which is mostly stuff I’ve downloaded off the web.

The modules in DT seem very good (if a bit many), but as many have pointed out, they all don’t need to be used. The ability to create masks and such seem extremely powerful, but honestly the interface is very non-intuitive to me. I’ve had to do internet searches to figure out how to do simple things like show folders, etc.

The glaring omission in DT is file handling. This is none, or at least none that I could find. If files need to moved, it’s done outside of DT. If a file needs to be renamed, the sidecar files all need to be manually renamed as well. This is a major deficient in my consideration.

A thread here on the topic suggested using digikam for file management in conjunction with DT. I consider this to be decidedly sub-optimal.

ART

The other tool I’m looking at is ART. Alberto continues to be very aggressive in refactoring the tools in RT to be more user friendly, and more logical. He has done a great job. It’s amazing how much one, obviously skilled, coder can do.

A cursory review (I’ve spent about as much time in ART as I have in writing this message) shows a face that, to me, makes a lot more sense. The browser is just that, a browser. You navigate to the folder desired, pick a photo and edit. That simple. The editing tools include masking and such, so seem to be on par with DT.

There are two downsides to ART.

  1. As best I can tell, at this juncture, Alberto is the sole developer. While he is exceedingly active at present, I genuinely don’t see this as being viable in the long run. What happens to ART when life gets in the way? Hopefully by that point there are others involved, but for now he is all we have.
  2. Lack of documentation. The documentational materials I’ve seen referenced are for RT. While the tools work the same in both, they are not configured in the same manner. I guess it’s like studying to repair a Mercedes and then trying to fix your Toyota. The same, yet vastly different.

Either package will have me resorting to another tool for file management. I’ve recently gotten XnView MP installed and working as desired on all my Windows boxes and could probably just use that, with the alternative being DigiKam.

Would love to hear the thoughts from others about the comparison.

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Hello @doobs

What happens to ART when life gets in the way?

Interesting question :slight_smile:
In reality, most open source softwares have only a tiny amount of developers working on them on a daily basis. For instance, it took 8 years to pass from GIMP 2.8 to GIMP 2.10…

In the worst case scenario, you can always switch back to RawTherapee…

As regards darktable, judging by its github daily commits, there are many people working on it [1].

BTW, as regards a comparison between Capture One Pro and darktable-ART there is an interesting video on YouTube posted recently [2]

[1] Commits · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNOjhnhXfws

Hello and welcome. On your first question, Alberto has already stated that he does not plan to make major additions to Art (for now at least), as he considers the software more of less complete. I use Art on a daily basis and there is nothing I miss (or nearly). As it is right now, I can use it for years to come!

On your second point, I wrote some documentation a while back, it may be a bit outdated but can be of help, I hope, to get you started.
https://yap.bozart.eu/articles/art/intro/index.html

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Thank you for this. I’ll have a look.

Before you move to either Darktable or RawTherapee/Art really consider if you can do away without raster drawn masks and local editing.
If you can then I’d suggest you to go with Darktable. Art is a great software, it really is and I’d love some of it’s features to be in Darktable but for the long run, I think it’s better to get into Darktable. It has passionate developers moving it forward so investing time into it will pay off in the end.
It has more users and thus a it’s being tested a lot more.
But the main reason is vkdt which seems to be the future of Darktable. I think it will change our lives for us that are working photographers. I think that once it’s ready, it will receive massive adoption and achieve Blender like status in the industry.

Especially if you do a lot of retouching, both Lightroom and Capture One start to slow down significantly once you have more than a few retouch spots or a few raster masks. And that’s exactly where vkdt is supposed to shine.

And Darktable is an ever evolving project so for the features that you miss, if you can make a good case for them, I’d encourage you to create a feature request on github.

Very convincing. Thanks

I don’t do a lot of masking in C1, but when needed, it’s indispensable.

No renaming but you can move them in the lighttable view…using the selected files options

I’m not talking about just any masking but specifically about raster drawn masking. That would be editing with brush in C1.
If you can get by with vector and parametric masks in Darktable then you’re in business. :slight_smile:

that’s not accurate. as the excellent new manual states:
xmp files are read in the beginning and always synced as you go (kinda write only). for better access the data in the sqlite db takes precedence. if you want to alter the xmp from the outside (write new tags from digikam or whatnot), dt can be instructed to launch a crawler on startup to ingest the new changes (also see the docs i linked above).

hth

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Okay. While a bit more manual than I’d like, that’s workable.

Thanks.

Yes I downloaded the manual. I’ve started reading it, but honestly haven’t gotten far.

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What has happened?

Thom Hogan had some comments here, too: Capture One Pricing | Cameras and Photography Explained | Thom Hogan

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4533387

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4545701

It’s been amusing watching, not

I have used both extensively and I love both of them, although it takes a while to become very familiar with them. In my opinion, ART is much more familiar when transitioning from commercial software, and it is perhaps more “intuitive” (a word that a lot of people hate around here) to get up and running as someone moving from Adobe and the like. My only real issue with it is the lack of digital asset management, something that Alberto isn’t interested in adding (which I totally understand). I like to use just one piece of software where possible, so the Digikam + ART route didn’t work as well for me.

My advice is always to just try both of them for extended periods. You’ll find that you end up preferring one of them. But you will find issues with both of them too: features you want added, features that don’t work they way you want them to, etc. So it becomes a matter of which ticks most of the boxes you are looking for. Or, if there’s a dealbreaker, then that’s your answer.

I have both installed so always have the choice to use one or the other. But ultimately I’ve started investing in the DAM features and tagging of darktable, so it’s become my go-to app.

I’m also not pleased with the Capture One business model and am looking seriously at darktable. One other software I think is worthwhile is SilkyPix Developer Studio Pro. It has a learning curve, but the company seems to be less aggressive about pushing major releases. They keep the same major release longer than many other companies, but provide free updates continuously. I purchased version 10 over a year ago and get am still getting free updates that include bug fixes and support for new cameras. For digital asset management I have started using IMatch. It’s a Windows-only program, but there is an add-on that allows other platforms, including Linux, to access the database via a web browser. I use both Linux and Windows 10, so having cross-platform solutions works best for me.

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Silkypix is the only commercial raw developer that tickles the technical part of my brain the way Darktable and RawTherapee do. They are (relatively) open about their algorithms, and expose much more documentation and parameters to the user than Lightroom and friends. And I find the almost-but-not-quite English user interface and documentation strangely charming.

Still, at the end of the day, I keep coming back to Darktable. Other developers have tempted me so many times, but when I actually compare the images that frustrate me across programs, I most often find that I’m not actually frustrated with Darktable, but that difficult images are difficult.

Yes there will always be parts of one piece of software that you prefer to the other but it is rare that you find everything under one roof. Sometimes you wish you could combine the best parts of all of them. What would it be called? Dart Therapee?
(perhaps the name won’t catch on…)

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This is more of a side note, but I also considered using Digikam as an asset manager along with darktable. When I looked at what would be installed with Digikam, I rejected the idea, quickly. That is a hell of a big infrastructure if all I want from it is asset management!

Hello @Tim

When I looked at what would be installed with Digikam, I rejected the idea, quickly. That is a hell of a big infrastructure if all I want from it is asset management!

Yep. With many natives KDE softwares, whenever you install them on Windows and Gnome (Linux), you are forced to download and install many libraries (e.g. QT stuff) to make them work.
I remember that the Krita developers joked about that saying that the final user might think they are about to install a very powerful software since it is huge as size (just think at the old .exe versions of Photoshop, for instance) :slight_smile: