I have a semi-difficult photo here (bright highlights on skin) that I am editing from a recent shoot, and decided to edit the photo in lightroom after my initial edit in darktable, as a test of my old vs new friend.
Thoughts: I purposefully made this edit very simple, no masking, no hsl, no editing of primaries, no sharpening, no clarity/texture, dehaze, etc. I mainly kept my editing restricted to contrast adjustments (via contrast equalizer, and the controls in the Lightroom “light” section), and I also roughly tried to match saturation and white balance. If I only had access to Lightroom, I think I would edit the photo differently, because I had to pretty much max out some sliders to get a similar softening of the highlights. Since I am quite happy with the highlight reduction I was able to achieve in darktable, I really wanted to see if I would have been able to achieve a similar dynamic range in Lightroom. I am interested in hearing your thoughts.
Just for fun, here is the comparison of the photos as they were loaded in both applications.
Thoughts: When I first moved to darktable, I was constantly frustrated at how much contrast and saturation I needed to add in order to replicate the visuals I saw in Lightroom by default. Today, going back into lightroom to edit a fresh photo, I felt assaulted by the harsh colors and jpeg like contrast. I actually had to reduce saturation (balanced out by adding vibrance), in order to get more natural looking colors.
Since I edited in Lightroom (not Classic) I didn’t have access to primaries, so that is why the colors are slightly different.
This is an observation I made as well. When zoomed out, the Lightroom photo is noticeably softer (I guess LR uses a lower-res preview during editing).
When zooming both in to 100%, the sharpness is identical as far as I can tell.
Here are the changes I made regarding sharpness.
I disabled the default sharpening in LR (I always do this, even back in the day when it was my main editing software, because I think it is usually overkill).
I did not do any sharpening to the darktable edit (not even capture sharpening in demosaic).
For reference. Here are the contrast adjustments I made to tame the harsh highlights and bring up shadows. Also note that in AGX, I brought contrast up to “3”, to bring back some midtones contrast after the tone equalizer work:
After being bombarded on this forum with so many questions/complaints/ expectations of how do I get Darktable to edit my photos like Lightroom it seems a breath of fresh air to be ask how to get Lightroom to edit like DT.
I never knock Lightroom. Adobe has built a nice product and you pay for it with a subscription for the rest of your life if you want to use it. Although I have a perpetual Licence for LR6 which they have removed from their downloads trying to force me into a subscription. Luckily I saved the installation files.
But DT is much more flexible and creative. LR has been described to me as a cookie cutter where DT was described by the same artist as a real artist tool for photo editing. And its free thanks to the wonderfully generous developers.
By and large, people take Lightroom for granted. The photographic community has gotten so used to how Lightroom renders things that it can be hard to talk about alternatives.
For example, the way Lightroom’s Light section often adds harsh lines to soft gradients in faces. Or the often egregious halos often introduced to horizons by the Highlights slider.
A similar effect is happening to iPhone photos, with their waxy, over-softened skin, and yellow skin highlights.
These are obvious defects, which photographers seem to have internalized as “correct”, just because they’re so ubiquitous.
Not to rain on your parade - but if you had to push shadows to +97 and bring down white point all the way in Lightroom I think there was a slight issue with your original capture (or your expectations from the picture).
Yeah folks, this is why I feel much better using dt over … (you know! )
I redevelop a couple of pictures every day and often I’m delighted to see how much better they get - or how different I presently experience what to be good development. I’m brainwashed
I kind of agree with you, in that back when I was using Lightroom only, I would have expected less from a photo like the one I shared. I would have edited differently, more moody, less exposure, etc. Now with darktable it feels like I have new options available to me because of the in-depth tools available. Now I’ll have high expectations for everything hahaha.
I included the original files in my post, in case you missed it, and there isn’t really an exposure problem (no clipping). The main “problem” with this photo is that it was taken near sunset, with the faces at a 90 degree angle to the light, which generally is not what you want to do. But kids are hard to photograph and you have to take opportunities when they arise
Remember that raising Exposure in Lightroom will kill your highlights. You can compensate somewhat by lowering Highlights, but the latitude is limited. The only thing left after that is raising Shadows, all in order to get a good midtone exposure. So if you have a shot with a large range in the highlights, you often end up with full Highlights and Shadows (and the resulting crunchy look).
This simplifies massively in Darktable, as you just raise Exposure, and the tone mapper takes care of your highlights. It’s one of the central benefits of the scene referred pipeline.
The workflow is a complete different. The photo shown in this thread has no special hurdle like blown highlights, high ISO, a lack of sharpness or a huge dynamic range.
So how and what do you compare? The Lightroom edit looks softer? Well increase sharpness. The darktable edit looks dull, raise satuaration and contrasts. I don’t understand how such a side by side comparison should work on a simple edit, if you use different software with a complete different workflow.
If I compare RawTherapee with darktable on a simple edit, there is hardly a difference. I can get the (almost) same look, if I know the Software and know how to get there.
The differences in the results only arise, when it comes to the use of masks and stuff like that which RT simply doesn’t offer to that extend. But even then I could still use GIMP for blending two edits. So what I can compare is the workflow to get to a result. But the result itself is only comparable under certain circumstances. At least if I compare two quite mighty editors and not a pro one with a basic one.
The point here is that it’s extremely difficult to achieve the same natural skin tones you see in darktable, in lightroom. Evident by the slider use while still having a sort of overcooked look in the lightroom version. As Bastibe pointed out, it’s a direct result of the scene referred workflow and how you can manipulate overall exposure without sacrificing the overall tonality since you can then control it with the tone mappers.
It’s one of those things that once you start to see, you see it everywhere. And IMO these comparisons need to happen, because it’s one of those points where darktable is clearly superior and could help bring in more users.
I apologize if I wasn’t clear on my intent. While editing this photo in darktable (which primarily consisted of rangling the harsh dynamics of the lighting), I began wondering if I would be able to compress the dynamic range in a similarly pleasing way with Lightroom. So I opened the image in Lightroom and did what I could without resorting to making a bunch of masks (since I didn’t do manual masking in darktable either).
In order to not make the comparison completely useless I purposefully did not touch other aspects of the photos other than to try and reduce the harsh saturation in the highlights for the Lightroom version.
I know this isn’t a complex edit, but in my opinion it is the simple edits, side by side, that allow for the greatest comparisons. Once an edit becomes complex, the differences in each processing step pile up so much that it becomes difficult/impossible to understand where or how those differences arise.
I mentioned the sharpening difference in a previous response, but basically when zoomed in the photos have near identical sharpness, but when zoomed out the light room one is less sharp (probably a difference in preview/working copy resolution). This is neither good or bad, even though I prefer the sharpness of the dark table one, Lightroom runs a little faster.
I would love to continue doing comparisons like this. I still have a subscription to LR due to still needing to migrate some photos from the adobe cloud.
I plan on posting more comparisons. Hopefully people find them helpful, or at least fun
Try looking zoomed out with the HQ preveiw vs default in DT…zoomed out the default in DT will often look more sharp and contrasted. If you enable HQ preview and use the full image data you will see it can look different esp depending on what modules you look at…The difference goes away looking at 100%…so this could be a similar situation in LR and what data it uses …or it may be unrelated but for comparisons with DT esp if comments are made looking at the zoomed out image you need to look at both and or specify in which mode you are working when making your judgements…
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