UPDATE 12/09/2024

I have restarted my Adobe Photography subscription. And yes, I feel like a sellout. Mainly I found a few specific instances where Darktable really underperformed Lightroom. Maybe I’ll write about that. If Darktable (or anything else) works for you, please keep using it and stick it to Adobe. I wish I was.

Original post

I canceled my Adobe Photography subscription1.

Some background

As seen in this section of my alternatives2, I have been unhappy with the fact that I couldn’t find an alternative to Adobe Lightroom for RAW development. However, I couldn’t find any alternatives that had all of the features I want as produced similar results.

Lightroom has always been the best solution for digital asset management (photo tagging, organization, rating, etc) as well as RAW development.

Why not Adobe?

In general - Adobe has generally predatory business practices3, costs a lot of money4, and, of recent, has some serious privacy concerns.

A couple months ago5 Adobe released a new Terms of Service, that among other things entitled them to look at your entire library and use those images as they see fit6. Among many concerns from others (NDA violations, privacy concerns, etc), it seemed from the Terms that Adobe could use your content to train their AI on it. This was the final straw in an already contentious relationship between myself and Adobe. So, I canceled.

Adobe has since clarified their Terms7 to explicitly say that they do not train AI on customer data, but this came after I had canceled. Honestly, this was the kick I needed to realize I didn’t need Adobe anyway.

Alternatives

As of now, I am pretty comfortably settled using Darktable8.

I tried out a few other pieces of software, such as Capture One9 and DxoPhotolab10, both of which offered a one time purchase to use the software. I also really appreciate the short and concise EULA11 that Dxo has.

However, if I was going to be ditching one piece of proprietary software for another, I worried that it would end the same way in a couple more years with an even larger library of photos to migrate. Darktable is open source, actively developed, and extremely powerful. It also has one of the worst user interfaces I’ve ever experienced12, and is overly, unnecessarily complex.

Transitioning

My switch to Darktable was deeply frustrating, then satisfactory, and finally extremely exciting. Detailed below are some common Lightroom use cases, how I’ve filled them with Darktable, and some gotchas along the way.

White balance

Due to some complicated engineering reasons, the White Balance13 module defers to the Color Calibration14 module by default. Don’t touch the White Balance one, and instead apply in the Color Calibration module. Honestly - I find my camera usually does a good enough job and I don’t have to tweak it much.

Shadows and Highlights

I almost always make these adjustments in the Tone Equalizer15 module. The Shadows and Highlights16 module does a particularly bad job of doing these adjustments 17.

It took me a long time to get good results from this module, and it all comes down to setting the mask correctly. I generally have to pull down the “mask exposure compensation” slider quite a bit until the highest highlights are at -0.1 or so.

Masking

Darktable has wonderful masking tools, that were really frustrating to me at first. Lightroom’s masks have edits applied to them, Darktable has edits applied to a mask. This is an important distinction - for every module you want to work on a mask, you have to set it on that module itself instead of applying a bunch of edits to a created mask.

The key to this not being painful, is to reuse and adjust masks via the Mask Manager18 module.

Saturation/vibrance

Darktable does a much better job of allowing gradual saturation and vibrance adjustments via the Color Balance RGB 19 module. I just wholeheartedly like this module better than the sliders in Lightroom.

HSL

HSL in Darktable is something I am still figuring out, but I primarily use the Color Equalizer module to do HSL adjustments. It works on a curve, as opposed to Lightroom’s sliders, but it accomplishes the same general goal.

Darktable for the foreseeable future

After about a month and a half of use, I am happy enough with Darktable20 to continue to use it for the foreseeable future. I have ported my library of over a thousand photos to it, and have reedited them all. Here a couple sample photos that were edited with Darktable. More are on my Flickr21

Botanical Gardens

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Bison Family

Last Fish Before the Sun Goes Down and the Rain Comes In

  1. If I had more subscriptions of theirs, I would’ve canceled them too. ↩︎

  2. If it hasn’t been updated yet to reflect the outcome described in this article ↩︎

  3. So bad, in fact, that they were sued by the United States government ↩︎

  4. My yearly subscription was over $120 dollars I believe ↩︎

  5. It has taken me over a month and a half to start and finish this post ↩︎

  6. https://petapixel.com/2024/06/06/photographers-outraged-by-adobes-new-privacy-and-content-terms/ ↩︎

  7. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/06/06/clarification-adobe-terms-of-use ↩︎

  8. https://www.darktable.org/ ↩︎

  9. https://www.captureone.com/en ↩︎

  10. https://www.dxo.com/dxo-photolab/ ↩︎

  11. https://www.dxo.com/eula/ ↩︎

  12. In classic Designed By Developers fashion ↩︎

  13. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/white-balance/ ↩︎

  14. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/color-calibration/ ↩︎

  15. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/tone-equalizer/ ↩︎

  16. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/shadows-and-highlights/ ↩︎

  17. It is mentioned in the Shadows and Highlights documentation that Tone Equalizer is the preferred module for these adjustments. Why they wouldn’t make it clearer that this module is deprecated (or allow it to be removed completely) I don’t understand. ↩︎

  18. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/module-reference/utility-modules/darkroom/mask-manager/ ↩︎

  19. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/color-balance-rgb/ ↩︎

  20. Especially in cost and privacy ↩︎

  21. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlgre/ ↩︎