Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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bakubo
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

bakubo wrote:Here is a new multi-part user review of darktable 2.4.1 and an interesting discussion thread:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/60904532

It sounds like darktable is getting to be a very interesting program. Available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. Free.
Version 2.4.2 was released a few days ago:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darkta ... ease-2.4.2

A few new features and bug fixes. By the way, there is a very well written user manual online that I have been reading through:

https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/index.html
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bakubo
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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How to Get Started with Darktable

https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutori ... -cms-27702

Linux, Windows, Mac versions of darktable.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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I will have another look both DT and RT have had updates they are heading in the right direction at least.
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ValeryD
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

Unread post by ValeryD »

I tried DT and RT and many program, but stuck with C1, so far it works great with RAW and JPG files, even Express version for Sony. Latest Adobe Lightroom not bad too.
For short correction and sorting the pictures I found FastStone works very fast and has all the option I need.
Everything in the life unusual!
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bakubo
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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​My current LR Classic CC/PS contract runs until the end of the year. I am not sure whether I will renew again at that time or not. We'll see how things look in December with LR and the competition.

I have been playing around with darktable 2.4.2 (Windows version) for the last week, studying, and searching for info about its use. I have learned a whole lot already. Evaluating software well takes lots of time to really get familiar with it. Too many people try something for a short time, find things that are different than what they are accustomed to, become irritated, and then decide they dislike it. Also, it is easy when spending too little time for the evaluation to think something is missing or can't be done, but with more time you discover it is there and can be done. Someone who is familiar with dt for a few years and then evaluates LR would just as likely be annoyed by how LR does some things. :-) I am looking at several areas to decide what I think overall about dt (or any other software such as ACDSee, etc.):

1. Power and flexibility to do many processing operations.
2. Ease of doing the processing operations I do most of the time (which is certainly a subset of the full power of LR/dt/ACDsee/etc.)
3. What it (dt in this case) has that my current program (LR in this case) doesn't have?
4. What my current program (LR in this case) has that it (dt in this case) doesn't have?
5. Quality of results.
6. The DAM aspects, what it has, what it doesn't have, ease of use, etc.
7. Use of system resources, speed, etc.

I am getting some impressions after some use, but I am still learning. These programs have lots of features, nooks & crannies, intuitive and not so intuitive features, and so on. It really takes time to do a fair, relatively unbiased evaluation for my own use.

Having said all that, I at one time thought I might finally post my thoughts, but as I have said before, there are hundreds, thousands of people who read posts here but almost no one bothers to post. I doubt if I will provide any more free content for them to leech off. This post is probably already too much. I suggest everyone do their own careful evaluation and research of any software, camera, etc.

What I will say is that so far I have found some areas that I like dt better, some areas where I like LR better, and some areas about the same. :lol:
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bfitzgerald
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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I've been using both now fairly extensively and yes some notable improvements over the first play around.
RT defaults are massively improved over previous versions lens corrections, exposure are vastly better than they were much quicker to tweak from this. Performance on RT flies on the new pc (and it should really 6c/12t) no complaints there. They have moved some of the quirky settings out of the main menus, though the UI could be more to my taste I find it faster to adjust images. It's just a shame they have no tools such as red eye removal/spot removal.

DT mimics LR at first, but has a very steep learning curve it's a lot slower on my pc as well with adjustments probably the windows version needs some work there. Plenty of tools again I crave for a more simple layout though you can add adjustments to the favorite tab which can help. LR users are certainly not going to find it easy to move over quickly to DT. Saying that is has much of what I like even the map for GPS tagged images, browsing images is fine, ratings etc. I am struggling a bit with highlight recovery, and the defaults on RT are clearly better as a starting point (again need to adjust some settings)

I think what made LR so useful is a combination of the easy to use UI (sliders are not overly sensitive either they can be on RT and DT) with selective adjustments easily at hand so rarely did you need to even use another program very often unless you are doing more advanced editing. It was a one stop shop for many users. Workflow wise both RT and DT have some way to go to get to the level LR is at. Sometimes I do work on many images and need to quickly adjust/tweak so it's an important area, other software such as Affinity is quite good (used it a few times and can say it's very respectable), such software is better suited to those who do extensive tweaking to less images. Hence I think the gap LR has left needs to be filled. Hopefully with the subscription back lash from many users the development of the open source/free software will accelerate and bring them up to a point where they are ready to fill the void. I'm not sure RT is going to ever have a full UI revamp or selective edits (red eye/spot etc), and I think it really needs to do those basic things. DT for the moment shows the most potential, RT is looking like a better developer for raw. This might change over time...
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

Unread post by Eiffel »

I've been a user of LR since version 2 (and currently subscribe to LR/PS), as it covered my basic needs better than Photoshop which I used before. Subsequent editions added features which I found valuable (lens correction, local edits, etc.), but this has tapered down in recent years (e.g. very limited support for video editing or tethering) and some modules are in dire need of any upgrade in my view. The recent feature additions are of little interest to me (I have created my own camera profiles, for instance), and the shift of development attention to the 'New' cloud orientated software does not bode well.

I would consider a move away from LR Classic if there were an alternative which covered all the basics that LR does (I could do without Photoshop, which I use rarely, and as I have a perpetual license for version 5.5), but I find that all the alternatives (starting with DXO and Capture1) have some big shortcomings in terms of feature mix or the lack of a large enough community for support, and find myself into a bind. In the meantime, I see no better alternative than paying my monthly subscription to LR!
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artHarris
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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I rarely contribute to discussions, being a keen and serious amateur who feels that he has little to contribute and a lot to learn. HoweverI find this discussion extremely shallow.
I used to use Lightroom, but DxO is where all me shots go before I even look at them; its automatic treatment gets the best out of an image and I find it extremely easy to 'polish' if necessary. I print straight out of DxO and get the best prints ever, much better than from Lightroom. I use Aperture as the receiving software, as converted tiffs, although they also go to the source folder, because Aperture has a file system I have got used to.
I occassionally try to see if I can get more from Capture 1 Pro (for Sony) but have yet to find it gives much in return for the effort.
I have contemplated throwning Lightroom away, but I'm not short of space (yet) on my iMac.
Kit: all Sony now:
RX-100/3, A6000, A7R. Lenses:FE16-35, FE24-70, SonyF10-18,SonyF18-200, FE35/f2.8, F16/2.8, Minolta APO 100-300, Nikon 135 macro, Nikon 50/1.4, various extras.
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bakubo
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

bakubo wrote:How to Get Started with Darktable

https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutori ... -cms-27702

Linux, Windows, Mac versions of darktable.
Version 2.4.3 was just released (darktable is free):

https://www.darktable.org/2018/04/darkt ... -released/

I have been off and on playing with it for awhile. The masking is very powerful and flexible.

Also, Lightroom Classic CC 7.3.1 was just released.
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bakubo
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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bfitzgerald
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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artHarris wrote:I rarely contribute to discussions, being a keen and serious amateur who feels that he has little to contribute and a lot to learn. HoweverI find this discussion extremely shallow.
I used to use Lightroom, but DxO is where all me shots go before I even look at them; its automatic treatment gets the best out of an image and I find it extremely easy to 'polish' if necessary. I print straight out of DxO and get the best prints ever, much better than from Lightroom. I use Aperture as the receiving software, as converted tiffs, although they also go to the source folder, because Aperture has a file system I have got used to.
I occassionally try to see if I can get more from Capture 1 Pro (for Sony) but have yet to find it gives much in return for the effort.
I have contemplated throwning Lightroom away, but I'm not short of space (yet) on my iMac.
DxO is quite good I have a free version 11 (some offer I ran across) the results are excellent and tonality wise I like it quite a lot, as well as the lens corrections which are extensive. There is a newer version but alas they are not supporting Lossy DNG at the moment which is something I do need, if they fix that I'd give it serious consideration as I find it fast to process images and tweak them.

Outside of that Darktable isn't quite giving me the results I like at the minute, worth keeping an eye on.
I do like the workflow on Lightzone, it's in need of a serious update the devs are taking a very hands off approach ie not doing much that I can see - again no Lossy DNG support, the UI is pretty decent in my view
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

Unread post by Vidgamer »

artHarris wrote:I rarely contribute to discussions, being a keen and serious amateur who feels that he has little to contribute and a lot to learn. HoweverI find this discussion extremely shallow.
I used to use Lightroom, but DxO is where all me shots go before I even look at them; its automatic treatment gets the best out of an image and I find it extremely easy to 'polish' if necessary. I print straight out of DxO and get the best prints ever, much better than from Lightroom. ...
That's why I started using DxO years ago -- it just gives really good results with little fiddling. And I like to edit images, but it's just so time-consuming.

One of the other packages that I previewed, I didn't like it's tonality. Reds came out a bit too pink, for example. Odd.
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bakubo
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

I found that darktable is very powerful and flexible, but I am still using LR Classic CC. I still prefer LR by far. With darktable there are just so many ways to do similar things, lots of controls, and many options. But, it takes a lot of dedication to learn it well.

You can see how it is clearly wonderful as a platform for implementing various graphic algorithms that the computer science community comes up with. I think many are published in academic papers and journals and then the darktable developers implement them and add them to darktable. I think that although having all that in a free program is great it seems like the audience for it is more other developers and computer scientists to play with than for photographers.

I tried to just pull out a subset of the main functions I wanted to use and put them in the favorites module so that I wouldn't have to even look at all the others most of the time. That certainly helped, but I still felt the need to dig around in other stuff pretty often. Naming is also more in line with what computer scientists use than what makes it easier for photographers.

I never used darktable for real use, just playing with it for a few weeks. I think it has tremendous potential and most of the building blocks are there, but it could use some work by someone who really understands ease of use and flow. Since it is free I expect to keep downloading each version to see how things move along.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

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With Darktable there is so much going on it's not very intuitive. Biggest problem so far is loading images they seem to have an odd tonal curve (I know it can be adjusted by default), but I'm not overly blown away with the raw conversions. It's quite slow even on a 6c/12t up to date pc, where as other software is very fast might be optimisation issues. I just don't like the layout and the NR is quite poor. At the moment for a workflow product it's not even on the table. I'd like a complete overhaul of the interface and making it simpler to use. I will keep an eye out, but it's been around a while and the direction doesn't seem to be changing.

DxO I am now using as a standard picture adjustment editor I got tired of the photopad nagging screens or feature crippling, paint.net isn't very useful for image editing nor is gimp even adjusting colour balance is a hassle. The search continues it seems nobody is able to nail it. DT has the concept but the layout is all wrong.
Lightroom got the layout and workflow right, that doesn't mean others have to do a clone job, but the area of usability and workflow seems lost on some of these offerings. The might pass for a few edit jobs, but fail if you have any kind of need to work on many images. Unfortunately the geek crowd seem to be intent on cramming as many silly tweaks into the software on DT and RT, and missing the need to use it.
There are other paid ones I've not looked at
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bakubo
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Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

I have not tried ON1, but they seem to be making steady progress. I have heard that early adopters were often unhappy, but I have also heard that they have continuously updated it, fixed bugs, and added new features. I see today that they have a new major version out.

ON1 Photo RAW 2019 arrives with new UI, AI-powered Lightroom migration, and more

https://www.dpreview.com/news/949270834 ... n-and-more

New Lightroom Photo Settings Migration​​ – New AI-powered algorithms give customers the ability to transfer Lightroom edited photos, keep the non-destructive settings, and move them into ON1 Photo RAW 2019. The updated Lightroom Migration Tool in version 2019 transfers almost every edit you can make in Lightroom including raw processing, crop, retouching and local adjustments along with folders, photos, collections, and metadata.
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