Just wanted to post a quick thumbs-up here; last weekend I shot my first major tournament since switching completely to darktable. Over 2400 photos collected over 2 days, and the results are completely satisfactory. Of equal importance, being able to customize the workflow using shortcuts allowed me to speed through the images with rarely a second thought.
Note: all processing was done with a development version 5.1.x - yes, I trusted it enough to use on an important project. Next project will be using the 5.3.x branch unless I have problems with it between now and July.
I use the development version all the time, thanks to the weekly windows builds. Very rarely does it cause a problem and when it does the developers want to know so it can be fixed by the next week. I can’t wait for the AgX module to appear in the development version.
I did report an issue with the lighttable “move” command, and it has been marked as “reproduced” so hopefully that will be addressed soon. One of the nice things about this app is that there is more than one way to perform most operations, so even a broken command is not often a show-stopper.
Yes, darktable is awesome. Both in its functionality, and in pure fun. It gives you lots of control and give you a chance to find your own path to image editing. After briefly trying the competition (Capture One, DxO, etc.), I find those editors VERY boring.
The darktable devs are awesome for putting in so much work to make this program!
I used Adobe until they stopped selling a perpetual license for Lightroom and required full time internet access. I moved to ON1 because it seemed to have all the features I needed and was a buy-once option (which can be set up to work offline).
Sadly, ON1 has withdrawn access to their free user forum and now wants a subscription to access many of their features. In addition, every new release seems to come with a handful of annoying new bugs that take a while to be fixed. For a while, not only was the default view broken (it defaulted to being zoomed in, and reverted to that view even after you corrected it) but the export function would hang if you tried to export more than 1-2 photos at a time. Aspect ratio configuration is broken and the app has a serious memory leak that slows it down after a while if left open. Darktable has none of these issues and the UI is much more responsive (on a Mac M1). No reason to look further!
DT is a very creative artistic tool. I have often described it as a Lamborghini and LR as an automatic Hyundai. The Hyundai is a nice car that gets you from point A to B with no trouble, but hell the Lambo is the car I would want to take for a spin along country roads just for the fun. I only wish I could do exposure merging, panorama stitching and focus stacking in DT. That is were I am forced to do those tasks elsewhere.
Last night I accidentally opened LR for the first time in months by accidentally clicking the icon I still have pinned on my task bar. It took about a minute to fully open and it brought up an old photo I kind of liked and I thought maybe I’ll poke around at some old stuff. As soon as I clicked on something the whole application crashed.
