I’ve had a similar journey over the past 15 months or so. Up to that point I’d used Lightroom/Photoshop since Lightroom was in beta, upgrading every second version. When I moved to Fuji late in 2019 I needed a solution as I wasn’t going to go down the subscription route.
As a software engineer I’m a Linux user on a day to day basis, so I’d been running Lightroom either in dual boot or in a VM, so I wanted to move completely to Linux and reduce the Windows dependency.
As far as management is concerned, I knew pretty much from the outset that Digikam was going to be the solution. I know Darktable has tagging support built in, but coming from the Lightroom catalog, I wanted something that could measure up to that. Digikam does, albeit with a bit of a learning curve to get figure out getting around the UI and configuring it properly. I also use Rapid Photo Downloader to pull in the photos from the camera or card as it allows me organise the photos as I want
Linux and indeed Unix has the general philosophy that tools should do one thing and do it well, These basic tools can be composed into pipelines to do more complicated tasks. This kind of applies here, as though there is some overlap between the various individual programs, they can interact with each other (via the sidecars for example). The advantage is that if you do want to try something else (e.g. Darktable vs ART) you’re not starting from scratch for the whole pipeline.
Having initially done a fairly quick comparison between Darktable and RawTherapee over a few days, I decided to go with Darktable. There’re a lot of resources on the net - plenty of excellent tutorials on YouTube and Aurelien produces a wealth of material in the form of videos, and concise articles/posts here and elsewhere. I don’t know where he gets the time to write any code! I put in a fair amount of time getting to know the way around it and the masks in particular are really powerful. I did find issues however. I found I was having to put a lot of work into each image, and just wasn’t getting the results I wanted. The initial render bore no resemblance whatsoever to JPEG from the camera, and try as I might, I could never get it anywhere near that (I tried the Fuji simulation profiles to no avail). In particular colour management was an issue that I never got to the bottom of. There are also a lot of legacy modules which apparently should be avoided if using the newer RGB workflow, but it’s not obvious which ones. There’s also frequently multiple ways of doing something, which can sometimes be a good thing, but if memory serves there’re I think 5 different ways of converting to black and white. Some of this may be a Fuji XTrans files thing as older Canon and Panasonic files were much less problematic, but Fuji is what I’m working with.
Thus after about 6-8 months I decided to give ART a try (I think it was on around version 1.2 at that stage). I was immediately impressed. Initial rendering was usually close to what was needed and usually only needed a bit of tweaking for shadow and highlight detail. Even difficult contrasty images at the edge of the dynamic range limits of the sensor could frequently be rescued (Fuji files are very good at pulling back shadow detail). The concerns above are valid I guess. There is little documentation though I find that most things can be figured out from the RT documentation and RawPedia, and I find the UI fairly intuitive anyway after spending a couple of days with it. Yes, Alberto is the sole developer, and assuming that continues to be the case, the future is obviously tied to his enthusiasm or ability to continue development or support. But this is a risk for even commercial software. Google in particular are notorious for terminating services or products with little notice. Even Adobe with their subscription model (yes I know I can pay them every month from now to whenever, but…). What I will say it that he’s very responsive and helpful when asked questions, and I’m very happy with the results I’m getting (and the ease with which I’m getting them) for now.
The beauty of this is that I can try something else. vkdt
mentioned elsewhere in the thread looks interesting. I hadn’t been aware of it and I imagine I’ll have a look at it at some stage. That’s the beauty of open source - if something is unmaintained or bloated, anybody can come and fork it and potentially create something better