Recently, I decided to bite the bullet and organize and edit the way-too-many photos I have sitting on my camera's SD card. Part of getting started was choosing what software to use to do the job.
The last time I did these kind of tasks was back in 2014 using Adobe Lightroom. Well, the 2014 version is quite out of date, so I decided to look for alternatives before committing to the spend. As a hobby-level photographer, good enough is good enough, and there is a limit to how much I want to spend on software.
After doing some research I downloaded and gave Darktable a spin. Darktable is an open source program that provides the same general capabilities as Lightroom (RAW image support, photo library organization and light to moderate photo editing tools.) It is free to download and use with versions for Windows, MacOS and Linux. I am using the Windows version.
Overall, I am impressed with my first run through.
In my first post to Photography Lovers I included this photo, which I edited with Lightroom many years ago.
I don't recall what adjustments I made to the image back then, but after working on the original I can say the cat gets a little lost in background. And it looks like I darkened and saturated the color in the whole image. This helped because the mostly gray cat didn't change as much as the background.
Using Darktable I produced this...
...which I think is much better, and more true to life.
Darkroom allows the user to apply masks that limit the area of effect to any editing tool. So, I was able to mask just the background and therefore only darken and saturate that. Since the darker parts of the cat were not changing to match the background, I was able to get nice separation without altering the photo as much and not altering the cat at all.
I don't recall Lightroom being able to apply masks. If it does now, then perhaps it was not available in the 2014 version. If it was actually available, I was unwise not to use it.
Happy with what I can accomplish with Darktable, I have decided to give it a shot on an ongoing basis. So, I am making progress on my original goal to get editing and organized.
In my first post, I mentioned that I tend to end up flat on my belly when I am taking pictures. I also have the, perhaps odd, tendency to point my camera straight down. I find interesting abstracts are often right at my feet. Here is another photo I worked on today using Darktable. I only made minimal adjustments and Darktable was easily up to the task.
Over the course of working with both photographs I only used basic tools (contrast, brightness, saturation, cropping in the cat photo, slight noise reduction in the cat's background.) Darktable has many many more tools available, most of which I don't have a clue what they do. So, like Lightroom, it seem to be able to handle the basics and much more.