Hi y’all. I’ve recently started looking at getting back into running Linux again as a main OS. With Proton and Steam all my gaming works fine. And with so many web apps those are all cross-platform anyways.
However the one application which I have not yet found a good alternative for is Adobe Lightroom. I’ve found Lightroom to be simply the best experience for managing a large (100k+) catalog of photos. I’ve really tried to get into using Darktable but while it can do a lot, I’ve found the UX to be incredibly bad and painful to use.
Is there a photo workflow app which is relatively simple, efficient and easily usable that lets me manage my photo library, can do some basic editing (levels, crop, etc.) and runs on Linux? Thanks.
There isn’t one that does catalog management too.
RawTherapee is OK for RAW editing, but that’s all it does. It’s a bit slow too at updating when you change things, it’ll take like half a second after moving a slider instead of updating right away as you move it.
DigiKam is OK for cataloging, but it’s very slow and you have to open photos in external editors, and then RAW edits you do don’t show up in DigiKam unless you export to some other format first, it’s a huge mess and hassle to use.
Darktable does both, but it’s so insanely difficult to use that I gave up after seeing people suggesting really long tutorial videos to learn how to do basic stuff. The photo output from Darktable also never looks right compared to other programs I edit in. It also has the same slowness issue as RawTherapee.
Really? I’m a super-casual Darktable user - like, once or twice a year when I get around to actually doing the (for me) boring post-processing stuff, and I don’t find DarkTable confusing or hard.
What sorts of things do you think it does poorly? Maybe I just don’t do those things.
Just basic exposure and black/shadow/highlight/white levels usually.
In lightroom opening a RAW file I can basically export it with no tweaks and it looks just fine, so the effort is really minimal. Darktable doesnt seem to be pulling in the camera processing and applying it to the RAW or something, because each photo needs a lot of adjustment to be usable.
Also darktable just doesnt have black/shadow/highlight/white sliders that I can find.
That’s a good point. I stopped using RAW shortly after switching to Fujifilm cameras, and realized the jpgs coming out of the camera were categorically better than anything my tweaking could produce. I do mess with color temperature and light adjustments, and a lot of conversion to B/W. Shadows and highlights adjustments occasionally. But while jpgs from my Canon were not acceptable and I ended up mass processing ever RAW I imported, with the Fujis it’s the rare photo I have to tweak for an effect.
However, the light and color adjustments are pretty straightforward?
Oh yeah if you’re editing JPEGs then it’s going to be way easier, as you start with something that looks fine.
The sliders are there but they don’t seem to work like I’d expect, so far I have not been able to replicate Lightroom results in Darktable.
Gotcha.
Yeah, Fuji’s really spoiled me. The built in processing is so good, unless I want a specific look (usually BW) I can only make it look worse.