Is DARKTABLE Secretly Better Than LIGHTROOM? - Darktable vs Lightroom 

Just an observation.. You put your talking head circle over an important part we need to see. There is an empty space in the bottom left corner.

The thing with learning darktable is, you not just learn to move sliders, but you learn a whole lot of science and theory, which was so fascinating to me. There are great and entertaining introductions, eg from Boris Hadjukovic (a photographer explaining the craftsmanship on an impressive level, which is both very effective and motivating to learn more und try out), Aurilien Pierre (the awesome dude who developed filmic and other core features, and a great teacher of the science behind), and Bruce Williams (explaining the modules in such a sympathic and patient way). Thank you too Nick.

As a Pro Photographer and Since using Darktable for a few years now, and i will never go back to Adobe, along with all its other products!

Nothing beats Darktable, especially when it comes to masking. Masking in Darktable is so much faster and accurate compared to LR, once one understands it of course :) Nice video, hope to see more.

I've watched two of your videos which have been very helpful, but they were about two very specific topics. A great video to do would show just the basic, typical and essential tools and workflow to develop an "ordinary" photo...one that is slightly under-exposed in the shadows and has just a few blown highlights. So, steps to discuss: Exposure>Shadow Adjustment>Highlight Adjustment>White Balance>any Hue changes>cropping/straightening>Eliminate distracting noise>sharpening>Exporting & Printing. (This is not necessarily the same order that you would use in Darktable vs Lightroom, but those are the most typical adjustments users fool with.) Thx!

I'd love to see more videos like this. Workflow with included in depth tips along the way!

Super helpful video - thanks Nick!

Darktable is excellent, the problem, at least for me, is that it is difficult to use and there are only a few sources for training ....

Thanks for showcasing Darktable, looks interesting. What holds me back from using other software than Lightroom is the lack of AI-based masking, like one-click accurate selection of the sky or subject, or a person's face, or hair, which I use all the time. With regard to your video, I'd like to suggest to put your cam image on the bottom left rather than have it cover the histogram.

Yeah I pretty much agree with the first few seconds. I'm a photography noob but I instantly understood what to do generally when I first used Lightroom. Darktable is just confusing all around for a beginner. Just tried using it again after a year of Lightroom now that I know what I'm looking for when editing. It's just as powerful if not more The lowercase letters also is annoying in darktable. Makes the UI feel so off. I hope they release some version with proper caps lock on the labels.

Capture one pro still for me. DT is excellent but its a very very detailed and very technical learning curve. I've used and still have the app and I go to it when i need some quickies done if I'm not using affinity photo. But dark table does unlock potentials for those that hate subscription nonsense like Adobe and with what they got going on now, people are leaving them. That and those that simply can never afford $300 for Capture one pro or more to say don't want to pay the price. Darktable is freakin awesome.... but it will never beat the process of the other apps like C1P which is my primary for bulk editing, affinity photo for my single photo work and XnView MP for my on location quick tag work

I watched this video after your tutorial on the tone equalizer module, and once again, the comparison between Lightroom and darktable brought some aha-moments. Thank you very much! Keep up the good work!

I love LR's tools but was confused in hour I tried Darktable. Will have to explore and give a second look. Happy to SUB to another little photo channel. Good luck!

Great video. Thank you! With respect to the flower, for me it depends on the actual color. You are correct in that lr was more pink. Dt had more contrast with respect to a distinct separation between the red and white. I personally liked the dt version better.

Is there a way to have darktable scrub through images and apply settings faster? I find myself waiting about a second before a setting applies or scrolling to a new image to work on

thanks for doing the comparison, would love to see more workflow videos on darktable

Thanks so much for the video Nick. Just a comment on your PIP. It was covering the histogram which would have been so handy to see what you're looking at to dial it in. All the best, and looking to see what else you have next!

Thank you very much for sharing Nick !! I've just discovered Darktable and surprised by it (in the past I was used to use Photoshop tools for my panoramas), then I needed something like this video to start playing Darktable. Great!

Thanks Nick for your nice video. I work with darktable since many years and never had an issue with it. For a free editing photo software it's many powerful. When I started with darktable I just edited a few photos over the year. In this case LR wasn`t an opportunitiy for my. Over the years I allways had a point where I thought about to switch to LR because I edited photos more often and regluarly. But it works fine for me and there are many turorials at RU-vid about it like yours ;-). So I very apperecheate your work 🤩🙌

Hi Nick, I enjoyed the video and although a long time user of DT I always learn something different from another photographers approach to using the modules. I am far from an expert, so not wishing to be picky. I have always understood that whilst the ‘order’ of the modules in the stack is editable, for the most part DT puts them in the correct order of solve relative to one another. You may want to mention that unless you are an advanced user and understand the implications of changing the order it is best left to DT as the resulting effect can yield some unintended results. Hope this is useful.

can you SAVE the "EDIT Profiles" like in Lightroom???

Definitely going to try DT now

Yeah. I'm more keen to get started. I don't really like spending ages on image processing. But when I do want to say, make a print from a RAW file, then I do want control. What I, and I'm guessing many people like me, need and that this video provides is a starting workflow to at least get some good basic looks - rather than having to get a masters degree in Darktable before being able to make an image look good.

There is a way that almost all youtubers and bloggers don't put up or don't realize. You can get perfect result from raw files. Here is how. 1) process your raw file like you normally do and save it as jpg fileA 2) go back to the raw file and reprocess it with different values and save it as jpg fileB. Repeat this process several times with different values. Some times you wish you lightened up some spots or darken up another spot or some place more red and other place more green etc etc etc. Save each iteration as a different jpg file. After go to Photoshop and load up these jpg files into stack and ask photoshop to blend it all.

I have never actually used Lightroom. But I have used Darktable since version 1. Some major changes to how it works was done with Version 3 and up which definitely took some learning but I am very happy with it. I also use Gimp for different kinds of editing work too. With Darktable some simple but important features can really make a difference. The great denoise tools can really help deal with the limitations of using older cameras like my D300. That is what really sold me on the program a few versions ago. Other programs I was using at the time could not remove noise without destroying detail. Since then I have made a point to learn more about the many powerful tools included.

Does darktable have an auto heal brush?

I can’t get highlights recovered anywhere near as well in Lightroom as I can in Darktable.

The issue with Darktable isn't that it lacks features, it's that Darktable takes more time to develop photos, is far less intuitive in use, there is no structure or order you can just edit in and get, you kind of have to jump around. Also in LR you pretty much didn't edit the photo, so it would be expected it won't be to your taste if you barely touched it as opposed to Darktable. Also while both DT and LR won't address your issues with the programs, if you try get issue noticed in DT you will get informed that you're wrong, and stupid, and how dare you expect functionality from free software, which isn't really the case, as people I saw posting issues were approaching it from perspective of wanting this project to grow, and be more accessible to people in general, often people who won't read 300 page manual for photo editing software before first use. Did I mention just how painful it is to synchronize settings for multiple photos for the pictures? XD

great video with some great tips. the hand gestures feel unnatural though and distract from what you are saying. You speak really well and have a very clear voiceover style

Excellent.

I found your marketable video intriguing. I am an old film photographer from the days when we had to know only things Aperture, (light) shutter speed, ISO and ev (over and under steps called bracketing ) post camera processing left us in the wind. I shoot mostly B and W (studied under John Sexton, Ansel Adams wing man) and used the zone system. in that era most of the processing occurred pre-shooting .The most important part of the camera was the NUT using the shutter.. I would like to see what marketable can't do. to enhance button completely overtake the image like photoshop encourages. Let us know if you haveinterestin this. that you

I actually sidelined DT and started working with Raw Therapee again. I am getting FAR better results in RT compared to DT in every way (except masking). If I do need masking, I'm just exporting to Photoshop and using a masking panel. Not downing DT at all, I actually learned a TON of information by learning and using it.

I love Darktable. Just came back from a weekend at one of our game reserves. I shot an owl after sunset on my R7 at iso 10 000. Masked the background and did stronger denoising there, and lesser denoising on the bird. Amazing result. Why would I want more? I think DT out performs LR

Great video, how do you not have more subscribers? :) Liked and subscribed...

I can't related to this coffee-drink feeling but I am happy for you that you enjoy it that much. 😆 I love to hear that so many people enjoy free and open software like Darkroom. In my opinion Adobe treats its customers atrociously, it is great that there are alternatives for Adobe software which will do what you need.

It's great that darktable exists as an open-source alternative to Lightroom that can give comparable results, especially now that Adobe has gone all into cloud and subscription stuff. Unfortunately, darktable also is at least as slow as Lightroom from my first impressions. It's just amazing how slow this kind of modern software is, and I don't even mean the processing, which arguably does a lot of maths, but simple things like switching between module tabs or expanding modules. If you are sensitive to latency, it feels like moving through molasses. There are also very bad UI choices like making the difference between ON and OFF state for modules just a slight variation of the shade of grey of the "power-button" icon. (I fixed that with some CSS tweaks but it is still very annoying that they don't change the symbol to indicate module state. An obvious neglect of usability.)

Nice

More vídeo About darktable please 🙏

Also, if you're converting older black & white or Color negatives.... Darktable is absolutely amazing in the Negadoctor module. It is like 100 times easier than any other program I've tried. Also correcting perspective on aspect ratio for negatives is mega easy. It's a steep learning curve so far. But for free and to know my art is safe from training AI models. I'll take my time to make our community safe.

if darktable gets the GUI overhaul it strongly needs it would suddenly boom.. just like how blender pre-2.4 was just so hard to use then 2.8 sky rocketet, not just because of its tech but mostly because blender team streamlined 2.8+ gui and processes

I use darktable for four years now. I am a great fan of this tool. Some times i miss tools for delete some objects from the picture, or i haven't found them. For me darktable ist the one and only i use.

I didn't use Lightroom. But I will now begin using Darktable. I did some testing and it is really good!

Thanks for this video. Darktable may be a great software. Darktable does not use the defined standard for metadata, which makes it an absolute NoG for me

I was with the paid for Lightroom 6.14 and used it a lot,.. but can't see the sense is paying for upgrades,, so it's Darkroom for me.

Darkroom is very good but I don't know what half of the options mean. It could do with a non-nerd designer to go through it and make the options make a bit more sense. I have achieved identical results to Lightroom with it, just less quickly.

My issue with DarkTable is that it has a very steep learning curve and I’ve been using lightroom since version 1.4, I want to learn DarkTable but haven’t had the time since work keeps me very occupied. I do believe that DarkTable can be better.

What's up with the hands Maestro😂?

Reminds me of the artist Slimgirl Fat, or is it Fatboy Slim

Darktable can’t do the main thing I need it to do: import my Lightroom catalog with 70 k photos, so I can escape Adobe. That’s why I went with capture one which was able to do that…

the brushes on darktable are a deal breaker

RIP LR😊

I tried Darktable: I will cancel my LR subscription. Much better results with less work... Amazing.

I have been following Darktable since they began. One thing I seriously can't stand about open source software is that while technologically they're good but UI/UX absolutely suck. Perfect representation of nerds building stuff as shown in popular media. Darktable is powerful but my god the UI/UX is so bad and after all these years, still is as bad as when they began. and another severely lacking thing is that there are no good resources to learn it.

Lightroom will always be better for the vast user majority that don't want to suffer Darkroom's horrible UI and learning curve.

Lightroom colors for yellow look like piss,

I had to laugh when you were " showing" changes to the histogram, which of course, wer covered up by your talking head image. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Video tips. Use your hands a lot less. And we don't need to see your face in the video. It doesn't add anything and covers up areas you are talking about.

"Grab some coffee" Any reason you're promoting an addictive drug on your channel that can lead to serious panic attacks/anxiety disorders along with withdrawls?