Hi Steven and thanks for talking about your experience. About the new Mac you’ve bought – I totally get it (the excitement and the experience); I am sure that these new Macs are fantastic, I remember only a few days ago I’ve read a review on the new macbook pro, again lots of praises (“the best computer laptop ever! more powerful than anything else on the market etc etc”).
Incidentally (I’m saying this just for you to know where I come from), I have also been into Macs for years, from the G4 white macbook until a 2014 macbook pro; I still love those computers and have fond memories of them (“fond memories” of… a computer??). About the new ones – only thing that don’t like is the keyboard, I prefer the lenovo/thinkpad keyboards but that’s probably just me, for those who are much more ipad-friendly those keyboards are probably fine; consider that I use mechanical keyboards connected to my home and work laptops.
Anyway, back in 2018 for various reasons I decided to switch to linux and darktable, and I’ve talked about this at length.
Now, I’m sure that if I take a bunch of photos and use a new macbook with the latest Lightroom I will be going “WOW”… I would certainly be mesmerized by how the entire process would seem smooth and fast and efficient…
But I’m even more sure that
- I don’t ever want to go through again the pain of moving my entire library to a new application (from what I’ve read it wasn’t painful for you but for me it was: I had to move twice my library and edits, first from Aperture to Lightroom, then Lightroom to darktable)
- I don’t understand, I don’t support, I basically hate the idea of not owning the application but only rent it, so you rely on somebody else to hold all your photos (well, the edits and processing); people don’t think too much about this and this is so weird… probably because they haven’t had the experience I had when Apple decided to shut down Aperture. With darktable (or RT or anything from the open source community) I can instead count on using the application even if development stops.
(These two points above are obv not a direct response to your message, it’s just me ranting again on the same topics…)
Coming back to your experience, I’d love if you just stick around here because there’s frequently discussion about how LR is not too accurate (meaning that perhaps it relies on algorithms that can “fall apart” if pushed too much), so it would be interesting to have you participate in playraws for example where we can check if this indeed true – or if indeed darktable has an edge on LR on results alone.
(I’m pretty sure as you said it already that LR wins hands down for smoothness and ease of usage etc; maybe equally experienced users can process files as quickly in dt as in LR, who knows, but what about the results?).
Thinking of that, I have a couple of playraws where editing was particularly tricky:
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.