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03-19-2019, 11:38 AM   #1
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Lightroom and Darktable interfaces

To start with, I’ve been a happy Aperture user for a long time, but apple abandoned it, and it’s now getting unstable. I had one issue with it—even though I could add as many “adjustments” as I wanted, there wasn’t a clear order of operations which made certain things a little tricky. In December, I bought the new Luminar with the DAM, and it’s perfect except that is is very slow and unreliable. I’ve alread once lost all my edits to all my images, so I think I need to give it time to mature.

So I started looking at other options, and on Mac it seems to be Capture One, Lightroom, and Darktable. I downloaded the latest Darktable and a 7 day tryout of Lightroom. I tried both of these a couple of years ago and saw them both as competent programs that didn’t quite work for me, but both of them presented me with a really dumbed down interface that didn’t come close to doing what I wanted. This is completely different from what I remember when I last gave these apps a spin a couple year ago.

On interesting thing was when I found a curves panel, it wouldn’t let me move black from the bottom left and white from the top right. I googled this, the help and screenshots I saw were from what looked like a very different looking application even though they were from 2018. I spent quite some time trying to find what I wanted but couldn’t find anything like what the discussions showed. There was less information on Darktable, but it looked like a very different app that what I tried before.

Did both of these apps undergo a great simplifying recently, or am I missing something? (I searched but could find anything close to what I needed. I couldn’t even find a “develop” page on Lightroom, just a button that brought up a bunch of sliders)

For completeness, my use case is generally DSLR scanned film negatives. 99% of the B&W requires desaturate, invert (done with a down slope curves panel if the application doesn’t have a simple invert), and a curves panel to set black point and white point and adjust slope for contrast. Color negs need the same but have a white balance to remove most of the orange mask. Desaturate is used sparingly to achieve the right amount of color saturation.

03-19-2019, 12:10 PM   #2
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Tangentially related, but you may like the "invert" module in darktable. It allows you to pick a portion of the negative that is the orange base layer, and it makes tuning white balance a lot faster in my experience. 3.4.*Modules | usermanual | darktable
03-19-2019, 01:16 PM   #3
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There are two different versions of Lightroom - Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC. It sounds like you are looking at Lightroom CC but the Classic version will likely be what you remember from a couple of years ago.
03-19-2019, 01:56 PM   #4
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Longtime darktable user here. There has been no appreciable outward change in the darktable UI since I started using it. The proviso being that I am not as likely to see the changes versus somebody whio dives in and out once and a while.

03-19-2019, 02:30 PM   #5
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QuoteOriginally posted by steephill Quote
There are two different versions of Lightroom - Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC. It sounds like you are looking at Lightroom CC but the Classic version will likely be what you remember from a couple of years ago.
Thats interesting. Is Lightroom Classic CC still available/still developed? Or is it end-of-life? I really found it infuriatingly limited.
03-19-2019, 02:33 PM   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by jbinpg Quote
Longtime darktable user here. There has been no appreciable outward change in the darktable UI since I started using it. The proviso being that I am not as likely to see the changes versus somebody whio dives in and out once and a while.
I played with darktable a bit more today, and found some more of the depth. but it was pretty confusingly laid out compared to what I looked at a couple years ago, and seems completely different. Maybe I was thinking of another cross-platform, open source DAM?
03-19-2019, 02:57 PM   #7
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QuoteOriginally posted by abruzzi Quote
I played with darktable a bit more today, and found some more of the depth. but it was pretty confusingly laid out compared to what I looked at a couple years ago, and seems completely different. Maybe I was thinking of another cross-platform, open source DAM?
Maybe Rawtherapee, RawTherapee Blog ?

03-19-2019, 03:46 PM   #8
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QuoteOriginally posted by _rene_ Quote
Maybe Rawtherapee, RawTherapee Blog ?
I don't think so, but that looks interesting, and I'll have to take a look.

(in all honesty, I know my use case is somewhat uncommon, and I'm sure all these applications work great for the people that use them. Luminar is so close, but its stability has been a huge burden.)
03-19-2019, 10:20 PM   #9
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I use both LR Classic CC and ON1, the former for everyday quick development and the latter for more creative individual images. Aperture was my workhorse too.
03-19-2019, 10:32 PM   #10
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So I spent some time looking and sure enough, I was using Lightroom CC, I didn't even know that there was a different version. Lightroom CC was downright awful, and if I hadn't asked here I would have come to the conclusion that Adobe had lost their collective marbles. Seems really stupid to name it the same as a better product. I just searched for lightroom and found a terrible product. Sigh...

Some googling, and I think the other application I tried wasn't Darktable (or RawTherapee), but digiKam. Nonetheless, I tried the three, and I have mixed opinions on each.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction on these. Sorry for the confusion.
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