After having played with way too many raw developers for way too much time, there are only a few areas where the technical quality of a raw processor actually makes a difference. Most goals can be accomplished with most software if you know your way around them.
Luminar is perhaps the antithesis of Darktable. It goes all-in on “intuitive” tools such as the “mystic” slider. It provides easy tools that do many things at once towards a common goal. Darktable, in contrast, is all about “analytical” editing, where tools are as orthogonal and simple as possible.
This dichotomy between intuitive/easy and analytical/simple makes for a fascinating comparison. I often find Luminar’s tools great one-click solutions. Instead of faffing with multiple modules and masks, I adjust exposure and contrast, then hit the “AI accent” and maybe “Color pop”, and be done with it. It’s really cool. When it works.
When it doesn’t work, you need to start digging into which combination of weirdly-named tools can undo each other sufficiently to reach the result you like. And that process is frustrating. Algorithmic quality of the standard highlight/shadow recovery is not brilliant, either, and sometimes I struggle with getting colors to look right.
The process in Darktable is different: Darktable’s tools are good at addressing issues one at a time. So I’ll adjust the hue of a particular piece of red clothing, then recover highlights in a specific area, then increase local contrast somewhere else. And I can be reasonably sure that neither.of these operations will influence each other much. Contrast adjustments won’t shift hues. Color adjustments will leave brightness alone. But I will definitely need to judiciously combine several tools to get where I’m going. It’s more complex, but less complicated.
In the end, I find both approaches to image editing (as well as Capture One’s middle ground) valuable. I often try editing an image I particularly like in multiple developers. I invariably end up with different images, sort of like my very own Play Raw thread. Once I’ve found a style I like, I can generally reproduce it in either of the developers without much trouble. They are all technically more or less equivalent. But different workflows sure inspire different results.
(Performance in terms of user interface fluidity and export times is relatively similar. Neither of them is particularly snappy on my desktop, and both are almost unusable on my tablet. Capture One and Lightroom are seriously a different story, with all sliders rendering instantly, even on the tablet.)
