After three years of using Adobe Lightroom and Lightroom Clasic for all of my photo editing, I ran into a small problem.
I decided to switch from Windows to Linux. For editing on the go, a Windows notebook was not great at all. It lacked battery life and had to fight overheating all the time.
Linux was nothing new for me, and I quite liked it anyway.
MacOS was also an option for a short time, but I didn’t want to spend a thousand bucks on a new notebook, mine was perfectly fine.
I tried hacking tosh for a few weeks, but it is really a pain. I have enough PCs to play around already, and I just want something that works.
After I have decided, that the Future will be Linux, I had to decide, which distribution is best for me.
I installed Fedora design suit. It’s simple and looks great. Many tools are optimized and preinstalled.
Every feature of my Microsoft Surface works great.
Now to the Darktable part.
Darktable is kind of the Open source counterpart of Lightroom.
It has a great feature set and all the settings I want to use are there.
It runs way better than Lightoom and the whole workflow works better for me.
- Take the photo
- Move it from the SD card to my file system on the external hard drive
- Rename the stack to “Date”_”WhatItIs”_”Numbering”
- Import the folder to Darktable
- Edit
- Export to an export folder
It took some time to get used to the Darktable settings, because they are named very different and there are quite some more than in LR.
I have to be honest with you – If I compare my editing skills in LR and Darktable, I have to say, that my Darktable edits are not as good as my Lightroom ones used to be. The learning-curve of Darktabel is way more extreme than LR. I have improved my work over the four months of using Darktable, but it’s not perfect.
What I can say is, with Lightroom I had to use my desktop PC and editing on the go was not possible. With Darktable and Linux I can edit my stuff everywhere, because battery life and performance of my notebook has majorly improved
And it’s free