One interesting thing to note about open-source vs commercial software when it comes to RAW conversion is that commercial offerings like Adobe CS, CaptureOne and Affinity Photo sometimes have a relationship with camera manufacturers to get access to their proprietary demosaicing algorithm for their camera's sensors. These algorithms are also embedded in the camera firmware and are responsible for converting the RAW sensor data into something resembling an image. Thus, when you view a RAW file in the camera (or a JPEG straight off the camera), or in a commercial offering, you're getting an image that looks more like what the manufacturer of the camera intended. Likely that's what they used in-house when developing the camera software. So whether or not you trust the camera company to do the best job of demosaicing their own sensor is up to you, but if you use open-source software you're still going to get great images, but they're never going to look exactly like the JPEGs you get off the camera. If you're a professional this probably doesn't matter, but for an amateur who just wants to shoot RAW to take great lossless photos and be able to do some tweaking in post-processing it can be frustrating.
For Canon at least, their in-house raw converter/photo editor is available for free (Canon Digital Photo Professional) and while its features are definitely not quite as good as either free or commercial offerings, its features are (for a total amateur like me) "good enough", and it will produce images that are identical to what comes off the camera. Plus you can save some of the raw processing steps that you did to a profile that you can load onto the camera and use in the field, so if you're shooting to JPEG you can bake in some of that processing ahead of time.
> if you use open-source software you're still going to get great images
Not necessarily. My D500's raws look OK in Darktable, but my D850's were awful last time I tried it, noisy and with patches of weird color casts.
I didn't try very hard to fix it, because I like Lightroom's functionality and UI a lot better anyway. Maybe they've successfully reverse-engineered the format by now, and I respect their work immensely no matter that it doesn't work for me, but especially with relatively new or relatively high-end cameras there is no guarantee of good FOSS support for raw formats.
"So whether or not you trust the camera company to do the best job of demosaicing their own sensor is up to you, but if you use open-source software you're still going to get great images, but they're never going to look exactly like the JPEGs you get off the camera. If you're a professional this probably doesn't matter, but for an amateur who just wants to shoot RAW to take great lossless photos and be able to do some tweaking in post-processing it can be frustrating."
I don't really see the distinction between amateurs and professionals here. I think both want the RAW starting point (after import) to look the way it was rendered in-camera.
I think it's a myth that professionals "want" a bland starting point and customize everything. The ideal workflow is that your RAW looks the same as in-camera, and then you use the power of RAW to customize. That's quite different from having a neutral RAW and trying to reconstruct everything.
I meant that a professional likely has an end goal in mind for developing an exposure and can use any software to obtain the result they want, whereas an amateur is likely more reliant on the software to provide sane defaults that look good enough. I don't think professionals necessarily want a bland starting point, but they probably end up straying so far from the default settings anyway that having a different starting point is less of a hindrance to them.
Aside from that, the default settings and processing that the manufacturer applies may be undesirable for someone pursuing a more realistic and less "filtered for focus groups" result. All photography is illusion, but some want more control over the illusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMMogOoWEbI
The simple fact that my ancient Sony SLT-A65 is set to M maybe excludes me from your notion of amateur without including me in your notion of professional ;-)
My guess is that professionals need to take a lot of photos, process them quickly; and probably show their clients what they are doing, while they are doing it.
I guess 2011 could be considered ancient now... My SL1 (100D) is from 2013 but I never thought of it that way. Of course it's a crop sensor so I guess that puts me solidly in the amateur category, but I also enjoy shooting manual. (More often than not I end up ruining shots because of it though...)
In my mind there are different kinds of professionals. Some, as you say, like to process lots of photos quickly. My sister-in-law shoots weddings semi-professionally and has Lightroom presets that she has built out to give her a quick jumping off point for the style that she likes, and sifts through hundreds of photos per session. Others spend a long time tweaking one or two exposures to frame or publish. Of course, if there was only one correct workflow, then we wouldn't have articles like this!
I personally interpreted that as professionals knowing how to do more post-shot tweaking than amateurs. That obviously doesn't matter if the results are bad, but if the defaults require significant tweaking that isn't going to be something that will stop a professional, although they might find it annoying as a matter of workflow.
"but if the defaults require significant tweaking that isn't going to be something that will stop a professional, although they might find it annoying as a matter of workflow."
Well, it's funny how that could go either way. A huge amount of amateurs use RAW and they might actually have more time/interest to do max tweaking on a file compared to a pro, who is on the clock.
But there's also big differences between disciplines. In landscape photography, people use RAW to maximize the use of dynamic range, hence tweak it a lot.
In sports and wedding photography, not so much. To comment on the Nikon domain, Nikon is widely praised for its color science. Their engineers spent decades perfecting it and it even carries through in lens design. In the case of wedding photography, typically the photographer wants to Nikon rendering as it was intended. And it's not just color science, also tone compression and noise reduction. Done from the source.
If you'd take that RAW file and open it "neutral", without the proprietary demosaicing, curves, noise reduction, you're going to spend forever trying to reproduce the Nikon look. You fully dismissed a huge amount of value and are unlikely to regain it.
That's why I strongly believe that both amateurs and pros want the camera vendor's rendering in RAW as a starting point. Unfortunately, this is only fully possible in their custom crappy desktop apps.
> One interesting thing to note about open-source vs commercial software when it comes to RAW conversion is that commercial offerings like Adobe CS, CaptureOne and Affinity Photo sometimes have a relationship with camera manufacturers to get access to their proprietary demosaicing algorithm for their camera's sensors.
This is absolutely true even for Nikons and Canons of the world.
I'm always baffled about the obsession with open source for photo editing workflows on a desktop. From "I just want to get stuff done" OSS is just junk. It is a better junk than it was before, but it is still junk. And why would not it be? It is all about optimizing for the experience and there's not a single piece of open source software that is optimized for user's experience. Why on earth do we think this -- a fairly complex type of software -- would be any different if we cannot get themes in GNOME work consistently?
After battling with Linux on the desktop periodically for a couple of decades I came to the same conclusion. All the boring problems like consistency and stability are never solved. Only new problems written. I gave up and went to Mac. It’s not perfect but it’s less imperfect.
However I will say that Lightroom is horrible and I hate it. Only because of the memory gobbling and the persistent cost until I’m dead.
As I’m not a professional I settled on Apple Photos and Pixelmator Pro for when I bend Photos too far. This is good enough and doesn’t come with the persistent cost issues associated with subscriptions and paying for lots of RAM. Also works entirely offline or online if you need it to.
Open source photography software is, by and large, garbage. I'm working on a RAW parser for shits and giggles. The existing stuff is breathtakingly hacky.
My motivation for moving on from Lightroom is simply that Adobe no longer sells Lightroom. I'm not going to rent software that doesn't need constant updates to be useful. Sure, Adobe pushes out constant updates but their primary utility is in support for new bodies and I don't go through camera bodies that frequently. Unfortunately Adobe used a 32-bit installer for their 64-bit version of Lightroom so if I ever do a clean macOS install I'm boned.
+1! Darktable is simply amazing. I also use it, just on specific photos. RawTherapee gives me good results for the bulk of my photos in less time, which for me it's an important constraint.
In the end it's just great having multiple top-tier free-software options for photo editing, a big thank you to all their developers!
Somehow I missed when RawTherapee added the feature for bulk editing. Thanks for pointing that out in your article. Maybe I should give RawTherapee a new try :)
I'm glad you found something useful from the article. I have discovered ART [0] from the comments here, it looks like a better RawTherapee and I want to try it out soon.
I like Darktable, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get defringe working. It's completely intuitive in lightroom and rawtherapee, but for some reason darktable just doesn't do what I want.
Thanks, yeah I think I've tried the first 2 methods. I'm expecting something like an eyedropper to come up where I click the fringing, but I think it's something else I need to do.
Very useful, thanks for sharing Fidel!
Just to note that this guide is Linux focused but most of the tools, except Geeqie, are also available for Windows (and macOS of course).
He's also covering replication/synchronization with the excellent Syncthing (+1 vote from my side) as well as backup with Wasabi (being cheaper than Backblaze).
And to top it of, here is what he states about an online viewer: "I am currently working on creating a web gallery software that will give access to my full photography collection and allow navigating it...I will release the software as open source when its basic features are working, so stay tuned!"
About the web gallery project, this being Hacker News I would like to give some more details about it: I have implemented a React frontend and FastAPI backend, navigating through the albums and photos already work, but thumbnails won't display because Digikam uses PGF image format [0]. PGF images are great for thumbnails because images load progressivel and can be quickly rendered at different sizes, but they are not supported natively by web browsers. I'm going to try compiling libpgf [1] to WASM so the frontend will be able to display the Digikam thumbnails directly (and allow for on-the-fly thumbnail resizing!), otherwise I will need to handle the conversion in backend.
Once thumbnails work I will deploy it on my home server, dogfood it for a while, polish a few things and release it. Of course Hacker News will get an announcement.
I am going to plug Andy Astbury's YouTube channel here, specifically his fantastic RawTherapee tutorials. Where Adobe, MS, and other big companies thrive is the amount of high quality training and tutorials for inferior software. RawTherapee is an amazing piece of software that is hard to use with limited learning resources (compared to Adobe or Capture One) but people like Andy are fixing some of that.
> Where Adobe, MS, and other big companies thrive is the amount of high quality training and tutorials for inferior software.
I'm afraid I don't buy this unfounded muck-slinging.
I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better.
However I think its only fair and reasonable to admit that it is possible to make high quality closed-source software.
Specifically, in terms of Adobe, I think it is deeply unfair and unfounded to call it "inferior". There is, for example, high-levels of integration between Adobe tools that is simply not present in open-source.
Ultimately money talks. December 2021 there were 26 million Adobe Creative Suite subscribers and growing. If Adobe was that shit, do you really think people would continue paying them ?
I know some people running companies in the design sector (larger companies, not one-man band freelancers), Adobe is a necessary business expense, they pay it because they want it, because time is money, and if their designers get the job done better, quicker and more efficiently in Adobe then they will pay the subscription. (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on the Adobe website).
1) > (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on the Adobe website).
Yes, most of the time when you know your tools you will not spend much time going through training material, but if you needed to there are plenty of options and not just from Adobe. If you want to learn and get started there are plenty more options.
2) > I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better.
I don't recall stating that OSS = better, but in many cases it is. RawTherapee may not be as easy to use compared to Lightroom of Capture One but if used properly you can achieve superior results. One closed source RAW processor I can think of that lacks much training material but achieves great results in Raw Photo Processor (better than LR of RT in many ways). GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop. IMO PhotoLine is much better than Photoshop in many ways, but also lack much training material or a large budget (being developed by two brothers in Germany). I can keep going.
I should add to my original comment that the amount of training and getting a product out for users to use is major for a company to succeed. Adobe and Microsoft have done a great job at getting their products in front of students and making sure they are comfortable with their products before going into the working world.
> GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop.
GIMP is not great until it has adjustment layers.
In the meantime, nobody on a budget should be using Photoshop when Affinity Photo is so inexpensive (and significantly better than Photoshop in a couple of important ways).
Affinity is great but there is also not as much training as PS, but for the price it is worth having. One thing that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS can't is make curves adjustments in the Lab color space without having to change the entire document from RGB to Lab. I am sure there are plenty of other things XYZ apps do better than PS, but I will say this again, PS has so much training and tutorials out there which save you time.
To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing. The work that team does is amazing and I give them props (though I still would love to see adjustment layers).
> One thing that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS can't is make curves adjustments in the Lab color space without having to change the entire document from RGB to Lab.
Yeah, this is super-useful. Also the layer blend curves are amazingly useful, particularly combined with live filter layers. And it can do LUT inference (e.g. from HALD CLUT images). I use that all the time.
> To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing.
So did I, but GIMP has existed for almost as long as adjustment layers in PS! And for all that time they've refused to prioritise something that IMO is transformative in photoshop; it's the basis of non-destructive editing.
I look into what it going on from time to time, they are in the process of moving from GTK v2 to v3. Apparently it is not a easy transition but when it is done (GIMP v3) implementing adjustment layers and other new features should not take as much effort. I am going off memory so don't quote this as fact.
I will also add that, for photographers, there is bundle from Adobe that I consider to be a tremendous value. For about $10/month (where I live, it's easy to spend more than that on a single drink in a bar), I get access to both LightRoom and Photoshop. I've tried open source alternatives, and they are good, but none of them are necessarily better than the Adobe product.
I hate the fact that I am paying for yet another subscription, but in this case, over the course of 5 years, I am just barely paying the retail price of the old CD-based product. So (a) I don't feel like I'm being fleeced, and (b) I get to spread the payments out without really paying more.
Every time I've tried moving into the world of FOSS photography, I've wasted dozens of hours trying to figure out how to do relatively simple things, modifying and tweaking configurations, or completely removing and reinstalling because an update broke something that should have never broken. I work in software, so I'm not exactly a dummy on this stuff; and I know that sometimes that's just part of the deal - especially in a world where you get what you pay for.
In the end, I had to decide whether I wanted my hobby time to be focused on working with my photos or working with my software. And that is why I happily pay.
> whether I wanted my hobby time to be focused on working with my photos or working with my software.
Exactly.
I aggressively delete most images as-soon-as they are on the file system. (Is this image worth my time?) So less of an image management problem.
I use ~5% of what RawTherapee provides, because I no longer struggle to make OK pictures from flawed images. Instead I make pictures I like from OK images.
On the photography forums it's hilarious to see people spend $5k-$10k on camera gear and whine about spending $10/mo because it's too expensive. Time is money like everything else and I'm sure a ton of time was spent getting this all together to save how much?
I've tried open source photo editing before, and honestly, the editing experience is pretty good. I've always struggled to match Lightroom for library management however, even if Lightroom doesn't deal with my network drive properly (it always thinks it's out of sync). And so, like you, I've always ended up going back to Adobe's photography plan.
I would really love to use open source tools instead, the network drive bug is very annoying and not being able to run on Linux is pretty unfortunate. The overall process just ends up being quicker with Lightroom than Darktable or RawTherapee though :(
I recently did close looks at both RawTherapee (https://lwn.net/Articles/883599/) and darktable (https://lwn.net/Articles/881853/) for anybody interested in a comparison. One point worthy of note is that the RawTherapee development community has been struggling, which could be a long-term problem.
I had seen some mentions to ART a while ago, it looks like it has come a long way. I see several features that I was missing from Darktable (automatic perspective correction, improved shadows-midtones-highlights handling, masks...), I definitely need to give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
It was film in the old days, but all digital since early 2000's. I've always preferred open source software which has really come a long way since GIMP and friends were in their infancy.
My workflow has evolved over the years to suit my uses of photography. Mostly photos are raw material and highly manipulated for artistic purposes.
For my purposes jpegs have usually been good enough so I seldom need to do raw processing. For those times I have Darktable and RawTherapee installed, both are incredible programs that have worked well for me.
GIMP continues to be a primary tool. It's not perfect but it does many things extremely well. For example, making color separations for CMYK printing is pretty easy and straightforward. GIMP also allows effective image manipulation, particularly when plugins are added: gmic, cyan, resynthesizer, autosave.
Workflow also relies on other FOSS programs such as Scribus (for printing positives) and occasionally inkscape, krita, paint.net for certain image effects. Yes, it takes time and effort to work out components of a custom workflow.
I have no doubt proprietary programs offer greater levels of convenience (for "standard" workflow) at significant monetary cost. Like everything else tradeoffs are implicit, one approach isn't absolutely "better" than the other.
I prefer Darktable over Rawtherapee, but both are great open-source RAW development programs. LR is obviously more fully featured but for amateur or semi-pro they are more than acceptable.
Yes. "Open-source workflow" means you're leaving quality on the table.
This is one place where there's just no replacement to hiring engineers to sit down and work on the product for a few years. The open-source stuff is nowhere close to CaptureOne or Lightroom in terms of quality of RAW conversion or the quality of the image processing.
> "Open-source workflow" means you're leaving quality on the table.
That is true, but my choice of software is not uni-dimensional, I also care about trusting the software I run in my computer and their maintainability in the long term, to highlight two other important dimensions for me. When considering all this together I have little choice but to use free software exclusively.
Of course different people will assign different weights to each dimension, and that is completely fine, but let's not oversimplify the decision to just "quality".
I haven't used it but I hear very very good things.
Does CaptureOne support a "RAW+sidecar metadata" format? It is important to me that the raws not be modified (i.e. metadata not written directly to them) and that the metadata be a per-file sidecar and not just a single giant catalog file. Lightroom seems to support this workflow but others didn't seem to (or at least didn't explicitly state they did).
That would be the ideal workflow for me in terms of generating useful catalogs and making backups smooth.
It definitely does yes and that is the default. CaptureOne is basically the highest tier of the proprietary photo editing apps out there. You do not need one of their very expensive medium format cameras to use it
> You do not need one of their very expensive medium format cameras to use it
Not only that, but they also have an extensive collection of camera profiles and lens corrections for pretty much every vendor. Their support for Sony and Fuji are particularly great.
Their support for the latest Canon RF lenses (some of which need heavy adjustments by design) is lacking, made worse by them being completely silent about any planned support.
It is the other way, IMHO. As an amateur, my photos are not pixel perfect. I depend a lot of Topaz to sharpen the image and remove noise. My LR is mostly around adjusting the basic parameters which I can do in Darktable/RawTherapee. However, the new masking capabilities in LR has been a big boon where I can easily select the subject/sky and make adjustments.
I expect that the professionals take better pictures straight out of camera and need less adjustments while the dabblers like me need more post processing help. Now, I am struck on a loop with Topaz and LR and cannot switch out of windows (or mac).
Capture One has free versions that have missing features but offer good masking, I used to pay for LR and switched to C1 with minimal impact (the healing brush isn't as good)
There's a lot of mud-flinging in this thread about the superiority of this software or that.
Frankly, this is all BS. All of these softwares are capable of producing professional results. The difference is made by the user, not the software. Learn one of them; any one of them. Learn it well. The individual choice in the end is just a preference, but does not determine quality. You do. Thankfully.
(That's a bit like modern cameras. They are all great. They are all capable of professional results. The individual choice in the end doesn't matter.)
Well to take your argument and show its downfall you can argue that you can achieve the same result with a hex editor. The difference between the tools is how you get to the result. You're right that the capabilities of the user are usually the more limiting factor but allowing the user to achieve a certain output in an intuitive way can be magnitudes more complicated that developing the required (technical) feature-set.
Same here. However, I'd argue that Lightroom is probably easier to use but Darktable at this point has much more features and depending on how skilled you are at using it also gives you more fine-grained control and more options to do the same things that Lightroom does.
Using Darktable has gotten easier over time. But it definitely has some things that are probably not that intuitive for new users. The lack of features and opinionated nature of Lightroom might be considered a feature for some but I don't think there is anything specific that it does that doesn't have at least several alternatives in Darktable at this point. We can haggle about the quality of the algorithms on either side of course. I'm pretty happy with what Darktable does here and it seems it has developers that are really obsessive on this front. Check e.g. lead developer Aurelian Pierre's youtube channel for some in depth discussion of what Darktable does and why it works the way it works.
The transition to the so-called the scene referred work flow in Darktable in recent years has made my workflow a lot simpler. But it is also something that has a bit of a learning curve.
Scene referred means that instead of applying some one size fits all curve based on your camera model, it actually looks at your photo and applies the exposure and filmic modules which together will try to fit the curve for each photo using some heuristics and nice algorithms. The result is typically pretty good out of the box and any further tweaks tend to be straightforward.
A typical workflow for me in Darktable works like so:
- import photos and move them to the right place. I'm not big on tagging, so I tend to skip that.
- apply some initial star ratings in the lighttable section so I can focus on the ones I like the most.
- after initial screening, anything below 2 stars gets hidden and I start editing.
- I open the photos for editing one by one and let Darktable apply its defaults (and my overrides). For example, my Fuji requires +1.25 stops exposure correction as it tends to underexpose to avoid blowing highlights and I have a preset for this that auto applies. Auto applied settings and copy pasting parts of a history stack or applying them as styles is one of many workflow enhancements that allow you to be productive in Darktable. Worth reading up on if you have a lot of photos to process.
- I tweak the exposure defaults manually to set the gray point. The nice thing with this is that filmic adjusts black and white points accordingly. You can think of this as an intelligent way to set the brightness.
- tweak filmic parameters if still needed (quite often this is not needed). I do typically apply some contrast but not a lot. This is also the place to deal with highlight recovery if that is needed.
- Crop & rotate as needed. You can do this at any point of course but I like to get this out of the way early.
- decide if I want lens correction and local contrast modules turned on. Not every photo needs this. Lens correction is nice for wide angle photos. Local contrast can be nice but I try not to over use it.
- Deal with any color issues and saturation as needed. There are various modules for this, including a few recent additions that work well with the scene referred work flow. Mostly Darktable does the right things here and I don't actually need to do a lot here. But I do like the new perceptive saturation slider in the color balance module.
- Apply other modules as needed; I tend to be conservative with this. For example noise reduction is sometimes nice and profiled noise reduction does a good job out of the box but sometimes when noise is really a problem there are alternative strategies to explore.
- export everything with 2 stars or more as jpg & upload it some place for publishing
The place where I store my RAW files is not where I work on them - I'll typically copy them from a memory card to my machine, do whatever processing, then shift them away to storage, so I find the whole idea of a 'library' unecessary.
"Importing" in Darktable just means letting Darktable know where to find the RAWs. Copying them from the original location into a separate library is optional. If you routinely move the RAW files after working on them you may find that you need to clean up some broken links periodically but it isn't much of an issue. All the edits are stored in .xmp sidecar files and will automatically be restored if you import the RAWs again from a different location, provided you keep the RAWs and sidecar files together.
Yep, I work exactly in the same way with Darktable and I really enjoy it. Once you get it, it’s quite straight forward and I’m really happy with the results!
The section of the TeXbook (the user manual for Knuth's TeX typesetting system) that talks about hyphenation has the lovely/horrible example of "the-rapists pre-aching on wee-knights".
Blog author here. Would you believe I didn't notice the proper capitalization is RawTherapee and not RawTheRapee? I didn't think twice about the semantics, now I can't unsee it. Thanks for the comment!
I thought "why would someone name anything that?" until I went to the website and found that this guy had for some reason changed the capitalisation to something much more creepy.
A few years ago, I bought into Apple's "DNG promise" and converted all my raw photos into lossless DNGs AND my JPEGs into lossy DNGs. Silly me. I now feel trapped into Lightroom, which I pay for out of inertia and wouldn't like to any longer... and I feel that such conversion was a huge mistake.
The reason I ask is because I've found support for DNG files to be lacking in many cases, and when I researched this recently, the answers didn't seem better than years ago. The article doesn't talk about this at all. So I'd love to be proven wrong :)
DNG is supported by most open source RAW developers, e.g. Darktable. I'm assuming you've had some issue more subtle than inability to find a program roughly equivalent to Lightroom that has general support for the format, but you may need to elaborate if you want useful responses.
To be honest, I haven't yet put any serious effort into figuring out how to abandon Lightroom. At most... I just did a few searches for a couple of programs I already knew about and looked at whether they supported DNG. Most comments I found online sounded negative (but again, my research was too superficial). I didn't even know Darktable existed for example!
I am a very light Lightroom user. I have thousands of pictures, but mostly use Lightroom to categorize them and do some trivial edits here and there. The pictures are already organized in a tree structure with sidecar XMP (?) metadata files, so I don't think the LR catalog has a ton of information I care about anyway?
I'd be nice to have a pure file-system based catalog that separates edits from originals in some way, and that keeps photo metadata attached to the photos themselves.
But I guess my question remains: is it a good idea to continue "investing" into DNG by converting new photos into it, or is it better to "stop the bleeding"? Because from what I have read before, this format didn't seem too well-supported outside of Adobe apps...
Darktable and RawTherapee are fairly Lightroom-like (but different enough that you shouldn't be surprised when things are, well, different), but Filmulator might actually be the best fit for your preferences.
Regardless, the best way to get an answer to your question about DNG is probably to try some of these programs with your files and see if you encounter any problems. DNG is typically better supported than camera-specific raw formats.
I'd say to keep adding to your DNG collection as is, because if you switch and you need to convert, 1-2% extra images won't hurt. RawTherapee is also a RAW image processing software that can help, instead of Darkroom, or maybe just to convert your DNGs to whatever other raw format Darkroom likes.
Since you cannot really re-take photos and the author has decades of photos, I'd be more paranoid about backups and extend it with one low tech option.
Sync mechanisms can go wrong. Somebody might hack into your cloud storage account and wipe it out. The odds may be small, but you'd be absolutely heart broken if your lifelong portfolio is gone.
So what I do is that once a year, I manually back up everything on a USB disc. On two actually, the second disc I bring to another location. Once backed up, I never have them connected. They just sit in storage.
Since this manual backup is so infrequent, it's not a huge pain. Should full disaster strike and all hot backups fail, at worst I lose 1 year of photos, which is better than 20 years.
If you think I'm too distrustful of sync tech: a year ago at work OneDrive wiped out all my files. I've pressed internal IT and Microsoft itself for answers, but none were given but this: OneDrive is a sync solution, not a backup solution.
You make a great point, and I am that careful with my photo collection. I didn't put it in the article but I do copy my full photo collection into a USB hard drive about once a year when I visit my parents. This way they have my photos and I have yet another backup. :)
I have a similar workflow but with darktable. Rawtherapee has an easier interface but last time I checked it didn’t have local adjustments which I need sometimes.
Very nice article. I'm suprised, that nobody mentioned photoprism[1]... It does deduplicate and provide a nice web interface for browsing and searching photos as well as a very powerful AI for object detection...
> File grouping means that by default Geeqie will only show the JPEG file of each photo, while the RAW file and potential sidecars (e.g. XMP or PP3) are hidden away, but still only one click away. Then when a file is deleted all the files in the same group are deleted as well. Sidecar grouping works well by default, but if necessary it can be tweaked it in Preferences
I would be interested in reading OP's approach with sidecars, and how he configured Digikam for storing metadata (in file or in sidecar ? How does the two communicate between Digikam and Rawtherapee/Darktable ?)
OP here. I honestly don't worry too much about full sync between Digikam and other software. In my workflow I process all RAWs first, then edit all metadata in Digikam. After that I very rarely have to come back to RawTherapee/Darktable so I treat it as a one-way flow.
Last time I checked about keeping Digikam and other programs in sync, about 2 years ago, it seemed to me that it wasn't going to work seamlessly, so I decided to let it be. If someone has experience about it I would love to hear about it.
I would like to see a list of these for all sorts of different workflows!
Also - holy shit, RawTheRapee needs a new/different name, eh? I'm guessing/hoping English is not the creator's first language? :3
Edit:
Apparently, it's 'RawTherapee' - as in 'RAW therapy' - not 'Raw the Rape'. It actually took me until Googling it and seeing it that way that I got it. Maybe it should've just been called RawTherapy? :/
I still find lightzones editing model the most intuitive and at the same time extremely powerful. Unfortunately development is extremely slow and it has not seen significant functionality updates since it was made oss, and is quite slow in comparison to the others.
Agreed - LightZone still feels like one of the more intuitive & powerful tools for applying and experimenting with types of filters. It's my preferred tool for doing some quick edits on photos.
On a half-way decent machine I find the performance excellent - what kind of slow issues are you finding?
Development, if you track the github issues, is down to one guy at the moment. I fear the relicensing of the project was just a smidge too late, and the field was already well populated, for it to attract more interest, unfortunately.
I didn't see Hugin, but it should have been mentioned. It produces some amazing results for stitching panoramas, focus stacking, or man other techniques that require multiple photos.
I do use Hugin for panoramas, and it's fantastic. I was going to write a bonus section about it but I wanted to get the post out of the way as I had been working on it for too long already. I will add it in a future update.
I actually kinda love Kdenlive. It's not half as powerful as something like Davinci Resolve, but it's been a consistently wonderful experience every time I need to splice together a couple clips or composite a video. Now if only it could get more NLE features...
I have played with these in the past and found that rawtherapee results look far less appealing (or need far more effort than what I was willing to invest) than Adobe Lightroom for non trivial settings.
I wonder how things compare now.
It is great that these softwares are offered for free though.
Never heard of rawtherapee, looks dope. Like others I use Darktable, which is especially awesome because it allows me to directly export to a new album on my Piwigo server. If you publish photos Piwigo is awesome too.
I've got no dog in this fight, but when I was getting paid for photos long ago I used something called Breeze Browser to do just about everything. Nothing did batch processing nearly as well.
This is my workflow, it doesn't have to fit everybody else. If you want a single software to do everything then you should give Darktable [0] a try, it can handle all steps in my proposed workflow including importing, browsing, editing and metadata organization. It even exports to third-party services. I think it has more features than Lightroom, although the UX is arguably worse.
For Canon at least, their in-house raw converter/photo editor is available for free (Canon Digital Photo Professional) and while its features are definitely not quite as good as either free or commercial offerings, its features are (for a total amateur like me) "good enough", and it will produce images that are identical to what comes off the camera. Plus you can save some of the raw processing steps that you did to a profile that you can load onto the camera and use in the field, so if you're shooting to JPEG you can bake in some of that processing ahead of time.