For posterity, parent is correct. The “flying his plane” story is a memeified summary. I did not actually mean that we would have lisp machines otherwise, which was the tell that I was kidding.
For others who did not get the joke, Kindall was kind of a big deal:
I tried Darktable and I don't doubt it's a powerful RAW editing software but it feels like to be effective with it you need to care about the software more than you do about photography. With Lightroom/Capture One etc. it's the opposite. Darktable is just too 'out there'
I tried to like Darktable but even after more than a year I couldn’t get the hang of it. It almost killed the hobby for me. Lightroom just works for me.
Anyway, I tried them, and found that, after you master the "a few rough brush strokes + adjust feathering and mask opacity until it snaps" and "overzealous brush + parametric mask" techniques taught in any Darktable course, for wildlife photo editing, AI doesn't bring much. And yes, this does require a course to break the "perfect mask is required" mindset.
Yes, Lightroom courses will brainwash you that AI "select subject, select sky, select object" workflow is the only modern way to do selective editing, but this is the Lightroom workflow. For Lightroom, it is a natural workflow, because it is, in Lightroom, the best strategy that can create a mask that aligns well with the object edges - until it doesn't. Other editors (such as ART and Darktable) have other idiomatic workflows for masking, and they work, because they have other tools than Lightroom for snapping the mask or refining it.
Bird feathers spread out on the tips of their wings are one particularly bad example where AI struggles, but non-AI tools don't.
Yet, LR is industrial standard no matter how enthusiastic developers of free software try. I wish that Adobe have proper competition, working on linux. There isn't.
I have a different problem with Lightroom being an industrial standard. If you avoid Lightroom, you cannot find a photography teacher.
You can find a Darktable teacher, and I did. He is a professional photographer, but I disagree with that particular teacher's style in photography - especially the rejection of strong edits even if they do work as creative reinterpretations of the scene.
You can find a photography teacher with good taste in composition, with recognition that both ultra-constrained and creative edits have their place (and I did find such a teacher), but that teacher will inevitably use Lightroom. That teacher recognizes what needs to be edited, recognizes that Darktable has the right to exist, but will explain the needed changes using Lightroom tool names.
It's now your job to translate - and, importantly, translate the visual effect achieved, not the slider name. This requires seeing the intended effect. This requires doing it in Lightroom first and then trying to make Darktable output look the same.
For example, the teacher asked for a high-key edit and told me to raise the whites. In Lightroom, this keeps contrast high near the top of the tonal range, right until it abruptly becomes zero because of clipping. That "high contrast followed by clipping" behavior is exactly what the requested high-key edit needed.
But your teacher will never describe it in those contrast-related terms. Before translating the instruction into Darktable, you first have to discover the visual pattern yourself that the Lightroom slider is producing.
And the correct translation, if you use the "sigmoid" tonemapper, is the "target white" control, which the official documentation marks as "don’t touch". You need to set it to 130% via right-clicking to override the soft limit of 100%. Very non-obvious, not mentioned in the Darktable course that I went through, but the photography teacher then accepted the edit.
In summary, the requirement to learn Lightroom in advance just to understand the photography teacher is the real trap here.
I think you missed the point. Darktable, effectively, has a parametric curve (implemented by the tone mapper) at the end of its processing chain. And this "curve" will, by default, compress contrast at the bright end in a way undesirable for high-key photos (infinitely smooth rolloff instead of sharp clipping). Adding another curve below that will not help, as the contrast compression factor by the tone mapper is gradually approaching infinity. The fight with this default, which is inappropriate for high-key photos, was the topic of my previous comment.
Curves (in the form of Tone Equalizer and the old display-oriented Curve) do exist in Darktable, as well as parametric, drawn, external, and, since 5.6, AI masks.
Another problem with Darktable is, that it has millions functions, demosaic algorithms, sharpening styles, etc. and a lot of developers that probably like tons possibilities but fail incredibly with default options thus making this software inappropriate for photographers that need few reliable tools to get job done rather than experimenting with sliders and buttons.
You speak in theory that geeks and enthusiastic photographers like talk about. Pro photographers don't care, they need results.
Absurd? What's with you folks and your strongly charged language?
Please recommend these "powerful alternatives", because I have explored the space and found nothing that replaces Lightroom in a way that I find acceptable. Please omit Darktable and Rawtherapee as I've already evaluated those.
Yeah that's a good point that I often forget about, thanks.
I wasn't looking for RAW hdr, just plain jane RAW support that handles moderately new cameras. I stayed on with the old Lightroom as long as I could, but a) it didn't handle my new Sony RAW files, and b) new Mac versions made it impossible to run.
I've moved away from Apple, as that was the last thing tying me to it. Photomator might be nice actually, maybe a good reason to dust off the iPad - cheers.
...
Edit: mobile editing has come a long way since I last checked. Photomator seems really great - between this and a desktop-first approach (Darktable / Davinci) I think this solves all my needs. Big thanks for the recommendation.
Great that it works for you. I gave my daughter my old Canon 70D and she needed a way to process pictures. She only has an iPad and I didn’t push her to adobe ^^. She produces great results with Photomator.
I need to do the jump myself to something better. The last update of Lightroom classic runs so damn slow on my Mac mini (M4). Was super annoyed yesterday while working on some pictures.
Plenty of cheap, safe, reliable, and easy to repair vehicles on Facebook marketplace and craigslist without this bullshit.
Personal inventory:
Suzuki DL-650 V-Strom 650 $3500
1999 SW1 $1500
1998 SL2 $1500
1998 SL2 $1500
2005 Sienna $1000 (!). This one does have a crash "black box" but no phone home bullshit.
I listed my reasons, feel free to provide your own. I've done enough security, ops, and oncall professionally that I have zero desire to do extra in my free time. Power to you if want to do otherwise and/or post references to "deskilling" while advocating an outdated inefficient approach to long-solved problems.
Please don't spread lies about Gary.
reply