After reading the article and what you all wrote here I must conclude that the article is useless and very biased. The author clearly is a long time user of LR and then tries to achieve with very little time similar results (out of the box basically). This is pointless in the context of raw development.
Funny mode on: I propose a very different approach for such a comparison:
We take a professional photographer without any editing skills (always out-sourced that part) and have him select 5 to 10 different photos. He makes notes in which direction he wants the pictures to be developed (as usual for him). These photos with requirements are send to 5 experts for different software packages who develop these images according to the requirements.
Afterwards, the photographer rates the results.
This procedure is repeated for several photographers ā¦ to get a broader view.
Why do people care so much? I have a hard time understanding thisā¦ Whenever someone comes around here complaining (or, often, whining) how this and that free app is not professional enough, such someone is typically dismissed with a variation of āif you want professional, go for commercial apps ā ours are tools developed by volunteers in their free time and do not have to answer to any marketing logicā ā and rightfully so Iād say!. Yet, whenever some article on mainstream photography media pops up, the reaction is always the same ā like people are offended that some (maybe sloppy) reviewer didnāt take the time to understand the program and jumped to conclusions. Well, so what? Really, why do you care?
I donāt care what you, or anyone else beside myself, uses. If using Lightroom makes somebody happy, thatās great for them. If they think darktable is ridiculous, thatās fine by me, too. (although Iāll certainly reciprocate, without telling anyone)
However, people often turn up here asking for help, and then switch to vitriol halfway through being helped. That kind of sucks.
But in the end, youāre right. Donāt feed the trolls, disengage, spend your emotional budget on something more wholesome than online discussions. If people get gross, leave them be.
There is wonderful FOSS out there and I dislike when people donāt use it, just because FOSS has such a poor image (there are commercial interests to keep it that way). And also ā¦
Indeed, that sucks. But what does this have to do with getting upset here for an article written elsewhere? This is what I donāt get. But anyway, I should maybe also have let it go instead of bringing this up ā in the end this is a discussion forum and people are expected to discuss 
So, apologies!
I think its human nature to want people to like the things we like and enjoy.
Someone doesnāt like a commercial product? Who cares except the shareholders?
But people put a lot of their own time and effort into FOSS projects and to see all that hard work dismissed by a drive-by misinformed summary is like spending hours cooking someone a meal and them refusing to eat it because it doesnāt look nice. Disappointing to say the least.
No one gets fired for buying IBM Adobe.
Industry momentum and fear of liability counts for a lot, Adobe is taught in schools, has formalized online training available and itās the skill set most photo/video gigs want. Doesnāt matter if the FLOSS tools are technically better or are as capable itās unlikely to see widespread use outside of hobbyists. Even in places where FLOSS is widely used in the business world thatās not a dev or big tech shop itās usually corporate FLOSS like Red Hat, Canonical, or the like.
Recently weāve been barred from really using software that doesnāt have a support contract from the outside source at my work. If something goes sideways being able to pass the buck to Adobe counts for a lot in many shops especially with security being at the forefront of everyoneās mind these days. While itās not likely that darktable or RAWTherapee ends up with some awful bug that gets someone hacked but in big corps hardly anyone is going to stick their neck out for it.
Thereās also fear of looking incompetent or bad. Telling your boss "hey we should try $(OPEN_SOURCE_PROJECT) instead of $(PROPRIETARY_SOLUTION_EVERYONE_KNOWS)" and having them balk or struggle with it can have very adverse effects on oneās career.
For most independent working photographers the $20 or whatever a month fee Adobe charges probably just gets lost in the noise of the cost of doing business. Considering support, training and finding people with skills (say if you hire a second shooter or editor) are considerations for professionals that $20/month is probably well spent from their perspective. A lot of professional photography is more like factory work than art anyway, which is why I donāt really do it anymore, demands are high and turn around times are short. Doesnāt matter if the color science is correct as much as how fast you can compensate for your dumb accidental over exposure, give it a trendy look or color grade and extrude out a JPG. Speed is of the essence.
I teach photography and imaging and it really irks me the way Adobe is pushed as the program of choice to be taught in mainstream schools and institutions. It divides the students into the have and have nots because not everyone can afford the commercial product. The important skills needed for photoshop can be taught using GIMP. Then if a person gets a job at a place using Photoshop they would quickly adapt.
Many of the commercial products are about marketing or the NAME. I really push the fact that the FOSS options can be loaded on every work computer free of charge and saves the company so much money. I also point out that Adobe is actually a suite of programs used by professional designers and graphic artists and it not really needed by the average photographer. I wouldnāt try and talk a professional graphic artist into using FOSS. The same as a professional photographer can use whatever tools he wants. But really students should be getting taught how to use FOSS programs like GIMP so that there are no economic barriers to their learning (except owning a computer in the first place).
I really appreciate the great effort people put into creating FOSS programs and I try to filter out the noise of the doomsayers who speak against these free programs and always compare them to the commercial products as the poor cousin.
The problem with the DPReview for me is that the writer didnāt really edit the images and only looked at how they initially opened in the programs. No one edits photos like that. The writer didnāt explore the range of tools in each program. The strength of LR is its catalog system and the ease of sliders to tweak the adjustments. For me the strength of DT is the range of modules, the controls within the modules and the best masking system I have every worked with. Yes the images open in DT and look crap until a few tweaks are applied. An image opens in LR and already has a camera based style applied so it looks initially better than DT.
BTW, I own the full creative suite of Adobes programs and have LR. I choose to use GIMP and DT because I prefer them. So for me it is not a cost or investment issue.
I highly value having a good result straight out of the box in a RAW editor. If I have to do a bunch of work just to get it looking as good as the OOC JPEG, I consider that a waste of time. Otherwise, the process becomes too tedious when Iām working on a lot of photos. I get really close to the OOC JPEG with ART by applying some dynamic rules, including the Adobe DCP color profiles for my camera, which make a huge difference. Doing better than the OOC JPEG is then usually only a few clicks away, and I still have full flexibility to go in a totally different direction if I want.
This is a fair comment. I have created picture styles in DT that with one click gives me a good result straight out of the box. My comment was directed to the review where no style or edit was applied to the image and then a comparison was made. That was an unfair review for DT.
I donāt even feel the need to compare DT, RT or Art. We all have the option to pick the one that suits our needs best. I donāt even have a problem with someone picking a commercial program as their tool of choice. But donāt claim that comparing a program by just opening an image and doing no edits is a fair comparison for any program. The ease of edits in LR is its beauty. RT and Art also have very easy to use GUI. DT has a steeper learning curve which would make it unappealing to many new users and users unable or unwilling to invest time in learning how to use it to the maximum.
What I like about the play raw option on discuss.pixels is the ability to see how different programs and different users handle the processing of images. And there are a lot of good results from all the FOSS programs. We are just so lucky to have such dedicated and talented developers.
Well, I consider it a part of fair treatment. A massive platform like dpreview should (even if owned by amazon) spend some time to make fair comparisons. At least that is my understanding of āmore or lessā professional journalism (what they hopefully aim for).
In that context I find almost absurd under which boundary conditions these programs are compared. I - for my part - do not care so much. I am a DT user. But I think such comparisons - especially on such big platforms - help other people to make decisions. And if these comparisons are spoiled that is not helpful. Also, I could imagine that good credits are nice feedback for the developers.
It totally blew me away (in a negative sense) a couple of weeks ago when I was discussing with a colleague, who is an engineering manager in a technical business and was using and writing software for more than 30 years, about free software licensing. He was totally convinced that all free software cannot be used for commercial work because of the licensing. He was not even willing to differentiate between f/l/oss, freeware, shareware, and adware.
Why does this bother me? I donāt know. Maybe because working with software is also about interoperability, exchange of work, and collaboration, and this often becomes a hurdle when people are not willing to use the software other people are using just because itās āfreeā. I mean, this really blocked me many times in my professional and private life, when solutions would have been so easy but are blocked by the misunderstanding of f/l/oss licensing.
Is he not aware of all the free(not always foss) software thatās currently used to run the world? An easy example, how many servers out there use nginx as a reverse proxy? Probably in the millions. It can be seen everywhere both user facing or in all the servers. Web frameworks like angular or react run the web. Even if owned by Google and Facebook respectively, they still take a lot of contributions from the outside and are used by a lot of people free of charge.
Canāt say I havenāt seen the same. People in company, specially older ones, seem to look at FOSS software like second tier garbage that poor people or companies that canāt pay licenses use.
Also my opinion the article is somehow biased and not well researched. Like this it could do more harm than help.
I use both LR and DT. LR is really handy to come to āokayā results pretty fast (with all the AI features). I use it primarily if I have to quickly finish a first round of pictures of an event (just think about a kidās birthday party, where everyone is expecting to see photos very soon). The results are okay.
But then in a later step, when I have more time I go for DT. The result of which I like more. It is more art than simple batch processing.
FOSS libraries have their problems:-) Didnāt someone pulled off a NodeJS module a couple of years ago which caused havoc in all the build pipelines across the world?
I was similarily surprised when I first heard about that. I think this comes down to derivative work that must be licensed similarly (under certain open source licenses). So if you use a certain open source licensed software to develop your in-house solution, your in-house solution becomes licensed automatically like that. Thatās a big no-no in the corporate world since most in-house solutions are their bread and butter.
Because it implicitly criticizes their decisions to use or even develop software X.
If you then sprinkle some sub-par journalism over it, people will feel unjust criticism.
Thatās a misreading of GPL. You have to publish the source of modified software that you redistribute. If you use a library as is, you donāt need to publish your source code that uses the library. You can distribute you closed-source code and tell your users to install the required FOSS library from external sources. Of course if your code requires a modified version of the library then you would have to publish the source of the modified library (but still, not the source of your code).
There is also a specific LGPL (ālibraryā license) that lets you link in the FOSS code with your own without making your code FOSS.
In addition, the licence is about distribution, so as long as you donāt distribute the modified application, you donāt have to distribute the source.
And then, plenty of FOSS is under less restrictive licensing (Apache, MITā¦)
I should have chosen a more careful wording when typing as I certainly do not want to misrepresent OpenSource licenses.
When I wrote āI think it comes down toā¦ā I meant: āPeople in the legal department think of it asā¦ā. There might be a disconnect between how they see this in comparison to as how the GPL wants to see it. The legal department tends to give advice that is overly precautious and that then becomes a practice of the above āall F/LOSS is problematic in any businessā.
No doubt, specially libraries controlled by only one person. I still laugh at the āis-oddā library, that ends up being referenced by another one called āis-evenā or the other way around. Node is specially bad as things end up in giant entanglements of dependencies.