New here and don't know where to begin

Software
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Hi,
Found you guys through a few comments on reddit and thought I’ll look through some beginner articles here before I sign up and post. However my search of “start / begin here” didn’t yield much and when I asked the redditors, they advised me to just post a new thread. So here I am.

Bit about myself, I’m an amateur hobbyist, looking to get serious about photography because of the opportunities coming my way. I’m trying to develop my editing skills but it’s been really slow.

Current workflow - Download all the RAW files from my camera and use LRC to cull and tag photos. Then do basic exposure, crop, straightening and slight colour correction using Lightroom.

What do I photograph - Events, cosplay, Travel (panoramas)

Issue - Since I’m a hobbyist, paying for a subscription to LRC and PS doesn’t make sense to me and since I do plan to learn editing anyways, I might as well learn a new software. I downloaded Digikam and dont know where to go from there. I know the suitable contenders are Darktable, Rawtherapee, ART and maybe Gimp with a photoshop skin.

Where I could use some help

  1. Are any of these software better suited for a particular style of shots (landscapes / people)
  2. Are there any recommended courses on youtube to learn how to use the software? Maybe even starting with how to calibrate my screen, etc
  3. Any recommendations for courses on how to edit. How far to pull the sliders? how much is too much (saturation, etc).
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I can only provide you with input for my photography which is mainly wildlife, landscape and portrait. I never looked anywhere else than darktable although rawtherapee and art also look enticing. It does everything I need and so much more. Tutorials I’d recommend are the youtube channels of Boris (https://www.youtube.com/@s7habo) and https://www.youtube.com/@DarktableLandscapes. For more look here: Best learning resources for Darktable?

Others use https://www.digikam.org/ for organizing their photos. I just use folders on my NAS.

Gimp I rarely touch anymore since darktable covers most of my needs. But for some small retocuhing it can be quite useful. Now that 3.0rc1 is out the workflow might even be better.

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Welcome. I use Darktable because I like the control, less risk of artefacts, philosophy. I think Rawtherapee or ART may be closer to Lightroom and so more intuitive, though, if that’s what you’re used to, but others with actual experience of it should be able to offer better input.

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My background is teaching photography and imaging. Over many years I have taught Photoshop and Lightroom. However, for my own use I prefer GIMP over Photoshop. However, I do 99% of my editing in darktable which replaces the need for lightroom. Now I only teach Gimp and Darktable. Students are not interested in PS and LR enough anymore. Possibly the ongoing cost or the other better priced paid options.

I personally picked darktable over the other excellent options such as Rawtherapee and ART, which is a fork of RawTherapee. The reason I went with darktable is the excellent drawn and parametric masks that allow me to localise adjustments with every module that can benefit from them. Darktable leaves Lightroom for dead in my view, once you have began to master it. On this forum both RT and ART are popular and produce excellent results. I will let devotees of those programs sell their benefits.

Good luck and welcome to the forum.

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Essentially, darktable is your Lightroom replacement. It works a bit differently, and you’ll have to unlearn some Lightroom-isms, but with the help of a few videos, you’ll be able to do most of the same things in largely equivalent manners.

DigiKam is more of a DAM and less of a raw developer. I use it to manage my JPEGs, perhaps analogous to Apple’s Photos.app.

These programs are free, so just download them and try things out. We’re here to help if you have questions! Also have a look at their manuals, they’re quite unexpectedly good, compared to Lightroom.

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For beginners I’d recommend ART. With Auto-Matched Tone Curve enabled it gives a pretty good starting point. After that enable Capture Sharpening, increase Saturation/Vibrance and you are (almost) done. For extra tinkering I usually use Tone Equalizer and/or Dynamic Range Compression, Noise Reduction, Local Contrast, Soft Light, Crop, Rotate. ART does not have too many too complicated controls and this is a good thing IMHO.

Darktable is kind of opposite - it has so many powerful tools that you’ll need to spend a lot of time learning them. I liked videos from Bruce Williams to get familiar with DT and Boris Hajdukovic for deep dive.

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I think it’s useful to try to edit a few images with both softwares (DT and RT/ART) and compare the results. I often prefer RT results for some reason, even though I like DT overall design.

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You may want to check out @Andy_Astbury1 's videos, as he has tried them all. :slight_smile:

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My start before editing was simply using the JPEG output of the camera for a lack of understanding RAW. This year I decided to commit to learning and after trying a couple of the Open Source options I landed on Darktable. I have been with FOSS since '05. I encourage you to try a few different software packages and study which fits you and your style best.

One of the beauties of Open Source software comes from the contrast of the “Market”. Where most of the paid options comes from market studies and development in hopes you make something people will buy, FOSS is driven by the users who develop what they collectively want. This tends to be why FOSS out performs. It may not always be the prettiest but it tends to work best. What doesn’t work will be made to work depending on the interest of the contributors, which is key.

I landed on Darktable despite a decent learning curve. Once I understood Darktable well enough I could manage my files effectively and adjust images quickly. The modules are powerful and help adjust images anywhere from well captured in camera to manipulating less than ideal images to something acceptable.

If you get the image to a point and need to try something else Darktable will export to a variety of formats from which you can work. This opens the ability to work seamlessly with publication software available. One of the best features is outside of physically moving the files to permenant storage, Darktable does the edits without touching the original file.

While you may use a primary software package the full battery of FOSS will open a series of very powerful tools. This forum is a great place to have your questions answered, getting involved at whatever skill sets you have to further strengthen the FOSS community, and the PlayRaw here is a great way to reinforce your understanding. The last has done more for me to learn than any other video or article because you get to see others’ processes and workflow (via the .XMS file and posted results) coupled with the hands on practice.

Welcome aboard. I hope you find this forum and FOSS in general a great addition to your skill sets and education. I look forward to seeing some of your captures.

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I’m an Rawtherapee user but was a darktable user years ago and regularly try darktable and ART out to check developements. Art is a bit more straightforward than Rawtherapee without sacrificing much if any power. So it’s a good choice imho.

My take is that Rawtherapee and Art are better when you have a lot of photographs to process. The way you can work with and, dynamically and on demand, stack presets give more consistent and fast results.

I find that darktable often needs more tweaking after presets. The sigmoid tone mapper module is really quite something though and makes exposure/dynamic range handling very easy.

darktable is optimized for GPU whilst RT is optimised for CPU so your computer specs may also influence.

My suggestion is that you install and try out all three and just pick the one that feels right and snappy on your system. You can’t really go wrong.

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If using DT then I suggest in preferences to set the workflow to sigmoid. It is easier for a newbie to master than the filmic default. Sigmoid gives brighter colors straight out of the box and often requires no intervention, although I suggest reading the manual and experimenting with sigmoid controls.

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Also if using DT read the manual and understand how to create styles and presets for a faster workflow.

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I also use darktable because it’s very powerful and can be adapted to all kinds of tasks. However, it took me some time to learn, not only using the modules but also judging what way I want to go with a certain image. When I started I could not match the out of camera JPEG and I was rather frustrated. Now I think, I can always do (much) better than the camera software.
When using a FOSS editor you should be aware, they are not a one-to-one replacement for LR. These programs do things in different ways and might even miss some features of LR. Some features may be inferior to LR others are much better than in proprietary programs. You have to be willing to accept these differences. Otherwise, you will quickly come to the conclusion to use LR again.

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This is a common mistake of newbies to want to match the out of camera JPG. If that is the result you want then use the JPG from the camera. However, with dedication and practice you will soon realise that 99.99% of the time you can get superior results to the cameras JPG. I actually cringe when I have to edit a JPG because you can do so much more with the raw files.

Embrace and enjoy the learning experience of which ever program you choose.

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Yes, it makes not much sense to match something that you do not want in the end. RAW files give you so much more possibilities. However, you should be able to get something similar and of equal value as the out of camera JPEG. Otherwise, you can not use a FOSS editor to its full potential.

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Yes, maybe it’s that you shouldn’t have to struggle to avoid ending up with something “worse”

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When I started with darktable, I looked at the OOC JPEGs afterward just to check whether my edits were worse than the JPEGs. I think this might be a good habit for a beginner. But I haven’t done that for some time :wink:.
But I would never advise reproducing the OOC JPEG in darktable and use this as a starting point for one’s edits. This might lead into a wrong direction.

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I have tended until recently to shot JPG + RAW and use the JPG as a comparison point to ensure my edits are better. Now I have tended to abandon this approach as faith in my own editing abilities has grown.

There are some nice darktable camera styles coming in the next stable release which some people will find helpful. I actually further refined one of these styles which I call R7 filmic style which includes sharpening and denoising in addition to the darktable camera style for my Canon R7. It looks pretty good for some of the daylight landscapes I take when travelling.

image

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I’m not sure if it’s a one to one conversion but ART has it now as well…I think @agriggio mentioned it was a port of the DT version…

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digiKam is a DAM (digital asset manager), so it’s for managing your photos: Organising, tagging etc. I believe the Adobe equivalent would be Bridge. It does have an editor, but it’s very basic. It simply shows and manages the files and folders as they are in the filesystem, with (depending on configuration) the database mostly a performance convenience.

darktable is an all-in-one solution, similar to Lightroom. That is, it’s a raw editor with competent DAM/library features. It is database-centric, so once a file has been added it expects that it will stay in the same folder without being moved.

RawTherapee and ART are mainly raw editors. They do have some basic file management, but you may want to use digiKam instead for that.

GIMP is a bitmap editor similar to Photoshop. It has no raw editing capabilities of it’s own (just like PS), so if you try to open a raw file it will send the file to DT or RT to be rendered first. As such, if you shoot raw, it’s only for adding final polish to your edit.

In terms of editing workflow, RawTherapee and ART are going to be the most familiar when coming from Lightroom. It shouldn’t take you long to learn either of them. Darktable, however, is very different from Lightroom and you will basically have to unlearn everything you already know. That means it’s going to take you longer to become proficient, but in return you will gain a level of control over the edit that few other raw editors can match.

RawTherapee and ART
I don’t know of any particular tutorials, but there should be plenty (for RT at least) on YouTube. Since ART is a fork of RT, most basic tutorials will be relevant.

darktable
I recommend that you start by reading the Overview section of the manual. That will ensure you have some important base knowledge. Next watch this beginner tutorial. Details have changed since it was made, so you can mostly ignore where he changes settings, but all important concepts are the same.

The Darktable Landscapes channel has a few videos for users coming from Lightroom: https://www.youtube.com/@DarktableLandscapes

Bruce William’s channel is basically an annotated version of the manual: https://www.youtube.com/@audio2u

Boris Hajdukovic is the darktable wizard: https://www.youtube.com/@s7habo

And all of of these programs have very good manuals, so don’t hesitate to consult them.

No. That doesn’t matter.

There are already several discussions about that here. Short version: Get a CaliBrite Display SL and use DisplayCAL for profiling and calibrating. DisplayCAL tutorial: https://phototacopodcast.com/photographers-guide-to-screen-calibration-with-displaycal/

If you really want to get into the weeds: Articles and tutorials on Color management

That is something you’ll ultimately have to learn through practice, but less is almost always more. A tutorial can teach you how to do something, and even when and what, but rarely how much to do, since it’s so dependent on the photo.

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This is a good place to start

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