Interesting. Aurelien has his own variant of darktable now. Thanks for the info.
That’s very considerate of you, but there really is no sidetracking this thread. I intended it to be exactly what it developed into, a lively discussion about all types of different image processing software 
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Perhaps prompted by this thread, I have started a trial of Lightroom recently as well. There really is a lot to love in its tools. The new denoising feature and AI masking really is useful. I’ll probably run that subscription for a year and see how I feel.
Don’t worry, I’ll be back with darktable before too long. I’ve gone through multiple cycles of this. Try out some new software, find inspiration, and eventually port the newly learned techniques back to darktable. In the end what matters is the skill of the operator, not the algorithms or tools.
Photography is play for me, and trying different techniques (physical or software) is one way of playing.
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I did so too, yesterday. Today, I had my first conniption when I actually had to uninstall and reinstall Photoshop just to change the UI language. No kidding there, AFAICT it’s the only way to change the interface language in Ps.
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Hello @bastibe
Perhaps prompted by this thread, I have started a trial of Lightroom recently as well.
What about your opinion about Capture one?
I did recall you were using this software in the past.
Just curious because I mostly work with RawTherapee, at work.
I am a bit surprised you have been trying Lightroom now because one often read Capture One is better 
Just kidding, because I have always suspected that many of these suggestions (e.g. on YouTube) are actually paid advertisments “in disguise” (by Capture One, of course…).
In the past, for instance, I have read Capture One was the best as regards tethering (for studios) but now it looks like Lightroom has catched up and it is on par
I have written at length about Capture One both on this forum and on my blog. It has been a while, however, so perhaps an update is in order.
I’ll preface this with my appreciation for Darktable, as I don’t want to be known as a proprietary software shill. Essentially, I love to tinker with Darktable! I’ve customized its interface heavily to suit my needs, have written my own Lua plugins and compiled my own LUTs and color styles with purpose-built software. Darktable is a tinkerer’s dream! Whenever I want to try out some technique, or really get deep into an image, Darktable is my tool of choice, and it’s power is simply unmatched anywhere.
That said, with Darktable’s power comes a certain clunkiness. This can be worked around to some extent, but it’s simply not meant as a one-click solution. My initial foray into other tools came when my second daughter was born, and I was left with a great many images, but very little time to process them. That’s when I tried out Capture One.
It served that purpose well. Simple things are easy, the basic tools are well-built. But over time, you notice things. For one thing, C1 has this eerie tendency to shift high-saturation, high-lightness colors into secondaries. Like, bright skin becomes yellow, bright roses magenta, and a luminous sky may turn cyan. It doesn’t always happen, but often enough to be annoying. I also noticed a number of rather annoying bugs, such as the main window sometimes rendering images at too low a resolution, or sometimes slowing down to become very laggy. Regardless, on the whole, it’s a great package, and mostly works very well and robustly.
More annoying is that the program is just not particularly fast overall. Opening a directory makes you wait for several minutes until all the images are prerendered. Which is odd, since exports seem to be actually faster than loading a directory. Sometimes, image operations tend to be a bit laggy, not unlike Darktable, but without the clear indication that it is not rendered yet. Many times I have wiggled a slider in vain for a few moments, unable to make heads or tails from the results, and only then realized that C1 had had a slow day again and I was simply not seeing anything at all.
On the plus side, Capture One has these the very thoughtful keyboard shortcuts. Most operations do not require clicking and dragging a slider. Instead, you hold down a key on your keyboard and drag the mouse. This felt alien at first, but it is now positively impossible for me to use the program any other way. I use Darktable this way as well, thanks to its fantastically powerful shortcut system. This enables me to move extremely quickly through my images, especially the non-critical ones that don’t require deep edits.
However, there is that one thing about Capture One: The company has been bought out by an investment firm, and since then… they released an iPad app, and some half-baked AI shenanigans (fix horizon that doesn’t, the second-worst pano stitcher on the market), some workflow improvements, but No. Image. Editing. Tools. Whatsoever.
Capture One has stagnated. The last version I bought was 21. Since then, they have released 22, and 23, and there were no features in there that tickled my fancy. None. Meanwhile, they increased their prices, and made standalone purchases prohibitively unappealing (no updates for new cameras or lenses or bugfixes, no upgrade pricing). So it is safe to say that unless things change, Capture One is dead in the water. A true shame, really, as I would have loved to see a modern version of its tools.
So I tried DxO. It has some bold out-of-the-box rendering, that’s for sure. If you buy the additional FilmPack, it has some cool film simulations (and Fuji film sims, which I like), and if you buy the additional ViewPoint, it has some very cool distortion-correction tools (including a nifty make-my-wideangle-look-normal mode). And let’s not forget some rather stunning noise reduction. However, that whole package will set you back a cool €450.
The general editing tools are weirdly named, it’s e.g. “ClearView Plus” instead of clarity, and “DeepPrime XD” instead of denoising. And I don’t find the rendering quite as pleasing as Capture One, either, although it’s not bad at all. Highlights are more desaturated than color-twisted, which is great for some pictures but not for others. My main issue, however, is that it doesn’t support any semblance of keyboard shortcuts. It’s clicking buttons and dragging sliders. In a bout of anxiety I did buy a license once. But it hasn’t seen much use.
My distrust of Capture One’s parent company, and the writing on the wall that they won’t support future cameras in my old version without paying an exorbitant fee, has thus lead me to Lightroom. I have not liked Lightroom in the past, mostly on account of its ugly user interface. But somehow, over the last few years, I lost my zealotry for this sort of thing. If it works, it works. Keyboard shortcuts it has not, but there’s an addon program called LrSuperKeys that adds them through their plugin API. And the (discounted) price for a yearlong rental is actually rather reasonable, at €85 including Photoshop.
So, at this point in time, I can’t really recommend Capture One any longer. Perhaps they’ll repent, and start improving in the future. I hope so. DxO managed to do that, so maybe they can, too. But as it stands, they seem more interested in milking their existing customers, than actually delivering value. A shame. And I can’t really recommend DxO, either, mostly because of its lack of keyboard shortcuts, and the rather steep price (although it does go on sale from time to time, and upgrade prices are actually reasonable). Lightroom is plainly a good deal, however. Or just stick with Darktable if you have the time for it. That’s probably what a sane person would do.
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Hello @bastibe
Oh gosh: I was hoping you wrote this very long in-depth review and you just did it
Thanks a lot indeed. It is a been a pleasure reading it.
Lightroom is plainly a good deal, however.
Yeah. From what I have read it does look like Adobe, lately, has been improving quite a lot its softwares. No wonder since it hires tons of full-time developers by which take advantage, compared to its commercial competitors.
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In particular, Adobe hired Marc Levoy, the principal scientist behind the Google Pixel cameras, and author of a rather fantastic lecture on digital photography that I urge everyone to check out.
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DXO was what I used to use before switching back to Linux. I bought a few versions, filmpack and a couple of the nik collection versions thinking that supporting them they’d do something good with it. I got annoyed with them and actually vowed never to buy anything else from them but the pureraw trial has tempted me but it still won’t sit right if I do end up buying it. I tried Topaz photo ai last night but not really keen on that.
I do use the free version of Capture One and that runs really well on my VM better than anything else. Comes in handy when I’m after a fast edit on photos that don’t need much work and the camera colour profiles are good and a simple way to get a fast different look. I wouldn’t buy it though. Agree that Adobe is the best deal with how the other companies operate, every time I’ve payed for a subscription though I’ve ended up hardly using it.
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OMFG, I think my further contributions to this thread will all be about shortcomings of Lightroom.
Check this out: In the year of the Lord 2023, there is no way to zoom into an image for precision cropping in Adobe Lightroom.
Is that even remotely believable? The Transform tab and its functions in RawTherapee hardly leave anything to be desired. It’s instantly intuitive, I managed to perfectly and precisely crop, rotate and straighten an image on my very first try, been 100% happy with it ever since. No such luck in the proprietary competition. This is just abysmal. What the heck are Adobe doing there?? What’s the thinking behind implementing a crop tool without being able to zoom in?!? What gives?? Who on god’s green earth would ever greenlight such a half-baked tool? I actually can’t believe what I’m seeing.
At this rate, I’m gonna cancel my subscription inside the 2-week time window, get my money back and spend it on a good speedlight instead 
Edit: Oh wow, I found a thread on the Adobe “Support” “Community” forums. That thread dates back to April 2012, and it’s still going. Everyone there complains about the lack of zoom functionality when using the crop tool in Lightroom. That’s what you get for forking over hard currency: Total silence, nothing fixed – for more than a decade at this point. This is my free weekend, so I’m gonna look around Lr some more, but I’m actually sure that I’m going to give Adobe the boot. Just wow.
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C1 Express was the first “real” raw editor I used a decade+ ago, but I checked again recently and they no longer support Canon at all in the Express product line. There’s a version for Sony and one for Nikon IIRC but nothing for Canon. After learning they were bought by a bunch of bean counters that suddenly makes sense.
Here’s a thing… In a short time, I’m getting to rather like Darktable!
Bottom line: conversion of a raw file into a jpg which is at least as good as my camera can do (albeit different) without too much work and without going around in too many circles. Rather like my use of GIMP: the package may be huge, but it looks as if I can do what I need with just a handful of tools.
It was noise that got me interested in the latest Windows stuff. DT seems to denoise very nicely: maybe better than than in-camera jpeg processing. Perhaps the result is a little softer/smoother, but it has its charm. And my sooc jpegs, of which I used to sing the praises, are suddenly looking a little rough to my eye!
My problem with Rawtherapee (I should stress “my”… doubtless my lack of skills) is that I’d spend ages see-saw tweaking. a bit of this, a bit of something else and changing the first thing again. I literally did not have enough hours in a day.
So I guess I’m putting my install-Windows plan on a top shelf for a while, at least. That’s a relief!
I think I still need to do a final gimp-tweak to many of my DT pics, but that may be because I know how to do that particular thing quickly in gimp, and haven’t yet found that with DT. It’s early days: the first week!
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Why do I feel like you just caught me red-handed? 
Here I was thinking that this was just me not having a handle on RT, nor on the purely aesthetic aspects of image processing. Both of which is certainly the case to an extent, but maybe there’s also an innate quality of RT at play.
I could (and I have!) spend literally days processing individuals images in RT, never being quite satisfied, endlessly and quite aimlessly tinkering around, inching closer to something I like but never quite getting there.
This is really interesting, I’ll have to keep this in mind and observe it.
I believe I can relate. My (brief) attempts at using DT always looked too soft too me.
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That is, incidentally, part of why I sometimes use these commercial programs. They are more restrictive, and I’m less prone to tinkering with them. When I need to process a big bunch of pictures (like right now, after a vacation), that seems necessary. Otherwise, I’ll once again embark on some programming/customization project instead of working through the pictures 
.
And then I’ll come back on a few months and reprocess my favorites in darktable, and incidentally learn what I like and dislike about either process.
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When I am on vacation, I usually trim down photos to about 5–20 a day, depending on how intense the day was, eg a hike in a scenic area gives me more photos than a day at the beach. But I rarely take that many reasonably good photos anyway, so this is not a constraint.
I use presets in Darktable, which give me a “good enough” baseline. I just have about 5 at the moment:
- one for the camera (usually lens correction, denoise, camera-specific color calibration, nothing else), then in addition:
- for brightly lit shots of people (one instance of color balance rgb, rely mostly perceptual brilliance for emphasis, not saturation),
- landscapes (two instances of the above, for dealing with greens nicely),
- night-time street photography,
- a monochrome sepia (basically bw with color calibration, then in color balance rgb, add teal to the shadows and orange to the highlights, but just a bit).
This allows me to process a gazillion of photos very quickly. The hard part is culling. Then I tweak based on these to taste, but don’t overdo it.
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It seems to me that DT has, by default, a style of its own. Previously, my JPEG+GIMP pics were quite high contrast. I’m actually a) getting used to the DT look and, b) learning how to do closer to my thing with DT+GIMP.
One huge thing (“Yeah, yeah, I know” to the many people who have been telling me this for years!) is the greater dynamic range. Can I really say goodbye to blown-out whites? Such a problem with the white clothes on the stage. Is that really too good to be true? I might even stop under-exposing for it. See if I can make DT blow out!
There are tools in RT that I love. Particularly the LAB set. Processing luminance by hue is wonderful for garden-flower pics: can be quite accurate in picking to colour to change. DT’s Colour Zones is a blunt tool by comparison.
Oh, and DT seems to come with extra built-in schism! with one set of tools being frowned upon! I really need an LH/Colour-zones tool. GIMP’s Hue-Saturation tool is sometimes useful, and sometimes causes weird things to happen to other colours in the picture.
I can very quickly bring light into a face with GIMP. Don’t know how to do the same thing one-touch in DT. It’s curves also seem to be blunter tools, and it’s colour-balance-RGB and Tone-Equaliser tools seem very powerful, but without the same scalpel-touch thing. Unless one uses masks. No doubt, huge power is there! But, again, that’s tools that need time to finesse. I have taken a hardly-scratching-the-surface peek at that.
I find some small dose of occasionally instability and unexpected or irregular behaviour in DT. That is not something I would expect to leave behind with commercial software. Call me cynical, but I’d expect to to increase! Hyperbole: “A slider isn’t working? Oh yeah, I had that: try reformatting your disc, re-install Windows, reinstall the package…” 
It is all good enough for me to put the whole commercial wonderworld, including, for now, AI denoise/sharpening (but AI masking would be nice) on hold for now.
Unless, maybe, someone can tell me, “Hey, all the stuff you mention is really easy in XYZ Package!” I’m neither wealthy nor professional, but I’m not but I’m not against paying for software. I’d rather spend the money on gear, though.
Any opinions/feedback on Corel Aftershot? It’s big pro is that we can run it in our beloved Linux environment. I did buy it. But I find it goes the other way to DT. It too has a built-in look, but it is a bit too Bright-Postcard for me.
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It’s been all but abandoned roughly ten years ago. The newest camera supported are more than five years old. It doesn’t know, nor supports “modern” features like high-dpi screens.
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I know what you mean; it’s like a desease: I started ‘see-saw’ tweaking my custom PPs a few years back, and I haven’t found a cure yet. 
That’s just me, though — I never consider anything truely finished and just can’t help messing around with stuff (just as well I’m a photographer and not a tattoo artist! ).
On a serious note, I will say this: for myself personally, RawTherapee is quite simply the best thing ever — if it disapeared tomorrow, I’d throw all my gear in the bin and take up yoga instead; I just couldn’t imagine using anything else. That’s not to say there aren’t some amazing alternatives knocking about (of course there are), it’s just that RawTherapee’s the perfect fit for me.
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Yes, the site looks unchanged since I first saw it.
I suspect that it really, really is. And that I just never found the key.
(sorry, I can’t work out what went wrong with your quote)