I'm on the brink of getting a Lr/Ps subscription

Gotta ask… Have you tried darktable? Because I recently went they other way. I’m a working professional and had been using Lightroom since its first release. Getting results I was happy with in darktable took me about two years of on and off fiddling on my home Linux computer though… One day I noticed on my work MacBook Pro that I was feeling constrained by Lightroom and I installed darktable on that machine too. Have been almost 100% darktable since that day. I use Krita for some after work at home, but at work I still fire up Photoshop to do some pixel edits. The lack of adjustment layers in GIMP I can not live with. Krita is the only sane FOSS replacement for Photoshop as I see it.

darktable is not perfect. I mainly miss support for DCPs (especially the dual illuminant ones). Creating camera profiles for every single lighting situation is not tenable. I also sorely miss a way to shift several colors in one module. The scene referred way to work around that now is to use 9 simultaneous color balance rgb modules (!). Aurelien started working on a color eq, but it may have been abandoned. I just love darktable’s masking tools though! And sigmoid really made in impact for me.

4 Likes