A kind hello to everyone here!
Hope I’ve found the proper place to post here. If not tell me what to do next…
Using LR en PS a lot, my catalog contains 160.000 pictures, mostly raw’s. I like to do a lot of editing and do it on a - nearly - daily basis. I’m a 100% amateur. In LR I’ve built up a nice - well used - tag hierarchy, use flags and ratings on every picture. Have an organized workflow so to say. Use PS to do things I cannot achieve in LR, nothing really sophisticated.
Quite happy about the functionality LR + PS provide. That’s where I am now.
Decided a couple of weeks ago to stop the Adobe lock in. The reason is that I pay and pay, which I do not mind at all, for bugs that aren’t solved, which I do mind a lot. It caused me multiple times multiple days of work to collect all broken pieces. Only to find out I encountered a bug known for years already.
So far I like darktable a lot. I do not find it easy as it is very different to what I’m used to. But with the help of this forum and internet I manage and progress. Every day a couple of steps. I think darktable is very rich with an seemingly endless amount of modules and ways to use it. Decided to use scene-referred (filmic) as a starter (and investigate Sigmoid a bit later). Learned how to make both ‘atomic’ and a broader Styles and save them. I guess in a couple of weeks I will be more or less used to it and know my way.
On the lighttable side I find myself struggling a little bit. Used to have a folder for each and every day I have made a photo. Used to use LR’s Collections a lot, I have probably hundreds of collections, nested in a hierarchy. The most used are a couple of simple workflow oriented collections helping me keeping track of my workflow. Do not see any problems realizing those on the lighttable. I’m also having lots of LR Collections showing me the results/best pictures on certain subjects. I will mention one specific use here. My wife is an artist making mosaics. There are lots of pictures of the both the process and results of her work. As well as pictures of exhibitions. I’ve organized it in a way that I have a collection for each piece of art she has made in which I find all pictures taken during the making off and afterwards. I’m talking about lots of works being made in the course of time. I also have a collection with exactly 1 picture of each piece she made. Most is tag based. Making it very easy in LR to find back a lot of pictures and very fast to do so.
Long story short - on the lighttable I use the collection filters. As I’ve test-imported the tag hierachy and a couple of folders I can practice the filtering. That will work alright for me. Except that I hoped for to use the ‘|’ symbol to build a hierarchy of my saved collection filters. Using styles in darktable this works very well but as far as I could see not in the saved collection filters. I do hope I’m missing something…
Apart from that I am very glad I’ve encountered darktable. I plan to still do a couple of weeks learning/testing before I will migrate. Most technical - mostly know how - issues seem to be solved already.
As I’m on Windows 11 now I still have a big question to answer for myself: will I start to migrate away from Microsoft towards unix as well? I find it doable and tempting but have not yet researched this deep enough. So far I can only see Solidworks as a show stopper, having used FreeCAD for month.
So to wrap it up:
- Very(!) happy with darktable so far! My compliments for the great job being done here!
- Miss a way to organize my saved collection filters in a hierarchy - any tips very welcome!
- Wonder if I will leave Windows as well - any tips for informative websites very welcome!
Kind regards,
Jetze
