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.
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.
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).
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.
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…)
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!
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)
One nice perk of SilkyPix for Fujifilm users is that the software includes the film simulations. I think learning more about SilkyPix and darktable will be on my agenda this year. I did try running SilkyPix in a VMWare Workstation virtual machine a couple of months ago. It seemed to work fine, but moving the program window across the desktop was very slow. I don’t know if the issue was with VMWare or with SilkyPix code.
That has issues with workload I guess, but can benefit the general user experience. In darktable some modules have an confusing overlap, example exposure and basic adjustments.
