Touches on RT, DT, Digikam and Filmulator.
Not bad, actually. But a big swing and miss at the end: if you want out of the box excellence, just shoot jpeg to begin with and skip post all together. Not every program aims for excellence out of the box.
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The comment sounds a bit snobbish to be honest, although perhaps that was not the intention. In any case, there are many good reasons why even people who like the overall look produced by the in-camera development could benefit from shooting raw. Of course, if you donât want to bother with processing, thatâs why in-camera development exists. But if you like the in-camera look but would still like the flexibility of raw, it would be great to have the best of both worlds without being forced to use the proprietary raw developer that comes with the camera. Reproducing the in-camera look is not always easy, but that doesnât meant it wouldnât be good to be able to do itâŚ
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At least they didnât present their opinions as anything other than the cursory glances they are. Although I have to say, fifteen minutes reading each programâs manual would have made quite the difference.
Still, Iâd count this as a pretty even article overall.
Not least of all because writing comparative articles like this is actually rather hard. These programs require a lot of time and practice to use well, so any comparison is bound to be limited to one or two programs, or otherwise only skin deep.
Iâd much rather read superficial overview articles like these instead of the fake âin-depthâ blogspam so usually found elsewhere.
Really, one ought to put together a panel of experts in various programs and have them compare their workflows. But ainât nobody has the time for that.
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The point is, whatâs the point of opening a program and going âhmmm is that good? Better than LR?â There is very little point, I think.
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I could not see the point of comparing âdefaultâ images straight out of opening the images in a program. The whole idea for me of RAW processing is hand crafting images like we use to do with film in a darkroom. I have Lightroom and get bored with it compared to the amazing options in Darktable, especially the masks.
I guess we could compare a Lamborghini to a 4 cylinder automatic car by putting a 90 year old grandmother in it and seeing which she prefers to drive to the shops for groceries. That is what this reviewer has done when they compared Dt to LR by just looking at the default image as opened.
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Well put.
The articleâs author asks: âCan any of these apps completely replace Lightroom in every way?â ⌠and concludes by answering âNo.â
The correct answer is a resounding âYes, of course they can - and currently do.â
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I agree. But what the author meant by that question was, rather pointlessly, âdo these programs replicate every feature of Lightroomâ.
I donât understand where this mindset is coming from. Iâd assume they donât blame, say, Capture One, for not being Lightroom when they review it. After all, the entire point of alternative software should be that it is different in some way. Or maybe this sort of comparison is only leveled at open source software, as that is perceived to try to be a âfree copyâ?
Does anyone have a good theory on where this notion originates from? As a user and developer of open source software, I never conceive of it as trying to copy proprietary tech. Quite the opposite, in fact. I find itâs often proprietary software that tries to commercialize innovations from the OSS space. So where does this popular idea come from that OSS is at all about building free copies?
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Not to mention they didnât say a word of e.g. darkatbleâs unique strength - Filmic RGB, Tone EQ or uniform colour space 
But generally itâs not that bad, Iâve read much worse comparisons or âreviewsâ.
Unfortunately the reviewers expect similar set of tools in each program: few sliders for whites, highlights, shadows and blacks, then they do the same operations in e.g. Lightroom, DXO, Capture One and debate on famous âbest rendering engineâ and âclass leading colourâ.
Compared to its for-pay rival, Darktable isnât going to give you quite the same image quality without needing to roll your sleeves up and start tweaking,
Well, as one who wants image editing to be fun and a potential way to learn something, I find Lightroom extremely boring. Darktable gives me full control, it shows me much of what is going on under the hood and gives me the feeling that I am the one who decides how my images shall look even when I use the built in presets or default settings.
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Part of this learning is understanding that many praises about recovering highlights in Lr is only because a typical Lr user doesnât know that a camera underexposes image, hence the need for boosting exposure when working scene-referred in darktable 
Lightroom just hides that, compensates overall lightness under the hood and then ârecoversâ highlights just because the data is present, no magic.
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I do not understand though what the author tried and rejected digiKam by saying
" I found it completely unable to write files to disk no matter what I tried"
Was that through the image editing module? He does not either mention the OS that he âtestedâ the app.
The purpose of the article is not really to review and compare the software. It is to get page views to show ads and they were successful.
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Yes agreed. Hopefully you can escape the adds if you have the appropriate sw on your browser. Generally reading the article just in the beginning, you know what to expectâŚ
I think it comes from a supposition that Adobe Lightroom is the âgold standardâ for image processing so any other software is measured plus or minus against it.
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And if something doesnât cost any money, it can not be good. This is funny because Linux costs no money (only for service & support) and most of the servers worldwide run with it. Nevertheless, most be think Linux to be âstrangeâ.
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Always been like this. The canonical case for me is people who edit images and upload them to Facebook/Twitter, where they are resized/recompressed, so the final result looks bad. If they used Photoshop, you see them inquire in forums about the site (or the web browser). If they used Gimp, they complain in a Gimp forum.
Maybe people consider that something that is free is inherently of low quality (but it doesnât strike them that they didnât pay a penny for Facebook/Twitter either 
).
In my dreams GIMP as been renamed as GINP (GINP is Not Photoshop).
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For you perhaps but you do realize itâs one of many ways of working?
A raw processor is a tool that can be useful for a number of workflows. The photographers that are handcrafting images are few and far between. Plenty photographers have to manage volumes. A raw developer unable to do this is severely limited and very niche. This is of course unrelated to the out of the box image but a result of tools that give consistent and expected results when applied to a range of images.
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I also think thatâs the reason why Lightroom is regarded at least as some kind of a standard. It does that reasonably well. Itâs not slow, does local adjustments fast, exports fast, has predictable output (not the best output as we all know, but itâs good enough).
I donât think people see Lightroom as a âgold standardâ but a standard. I donât think thatâs wrong.
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IIRC with Canonâs own DPP application, once you have applied a processing, you can re-upload the ârecipeâ to your camera and the camera will use it for future JPEGs. So you can use directly the JPEGs from the camera from then on.