In my last article, I stated that there are some hints that local adjustments are probably coming soon, but they are not ready to be published yet. Well done, RawTherapee.Īs much as I like shifting sliders or adjusting my overall exposure and contrast settings, I do miss the ability to apply local adjustments. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about open source or commercial products. User experience and intuitive interfaces are the key features for any software, at least to me. Instead of taking days to understand the program, most of its basic functions were clear at first sight. The histogram and buttons work well, but they need an update in my opinion. I have the feeling that wherever I shifted one slider in Lightroom, I need to shift three sliders in Darktable: make an adjustment, counterbalance it, and soften the effect. Still, there are far too many panels and sliders. Once you find a suitable workflow, however, this program will help you gain full control of your image. There is simply too much going on in the software - too much to discover, too much to consider. Still, I found the program really hard to understand. Of course, a few sessions of editing with Darktable couldn’t replace my years of experience with Adobe. With little or no expectations, my first impression still was disappointing. But as I wanted to write a fair review of the program, I had to be patient. In the beginning, it was really hard to deal with new concepts of editing and to not have all those shortcuts which are written deeply into my muscle memory. I really like the path tools in Darktable.ĭarktable was the first software I used after a decade of experience with Adobe. Most effects can have multiple instances and their order can be changed.Great design and full control. There are 25 composite blending options and an opacity slider. And, the sum of this whole masking selection area can expose the processed output of the effect module as a composite image operation (like Photoshop layer blending). You can combine the parametric mask and the drawn mask with an inclusive or exclusive operation. All the drawn masking tools have adjustable feathering and brush size using scroll wheel and shift modifier key. As far as I know, there is no analog to this tool in Lightroom. The polygon tool is really nice and intuitive creating smooth curvy shapes that avoid creating geometric artifacts. The drawn masking feature allows you to manually select areas of the image using brushes, gradient spreads, oval shapes, and polygonal areas. And, if it still has any harsh edges or high contrast dithering areas you can apply a global blurring effect to the whole mask. For instance, you could target only areas of the image sloping off from max blue value but then falling in areas with over 50% red and only where saturation is between 25% and 75% and all those factors can be smoothly feathered and blended for the most subtle and natural effect. These controls can result in very finely tuned adjustments to selection areas that would nearly impossible to access by hand. You can adjust this slope for each channel's input and output and each can also be inverted or all polarities can be inverted at once. For each channel you can set a slope at the low and/or high end of the channel which basically feathers the edges of the effect area. Depending on the effect, these channels may include Red/Green/Blue, Hue/Saturation/Lightness, or a(turquoise-magenta)/b(blue-yellow), chroma and grey. The parametric masking section gives the ability target your effect based on any combination of color channels. Click the arrow next to the word "Blend" and you can choose uniform blending, parametric masking, or drawn masking or combined parametric and drawn masking. Each and every effect module has a blending section at the bottom. Yeah, Darktable has incredible masking capabilities. I am not going to get into great details, but I will show some comparisons of what Jared did to the photo in Lightroom, and what I did in Darktable. You can visit his site here if you would like to download the RAW file (you will have to sign up for the forum to download the files though). I suggest you give this a try as it will help your RAW editing skills. In addition to that, he provides the RAW photos so that you can follow along and do your own edit. One of the great things of this site is that the owner of the site, Jared, goes through and does tutorials editing RAW photos in Lightroom. If you are interested in photography, then I highly suggest you visit this site. Fortunately though, there is a wonderful website called Fro Knows Photo. As a result (and as a consequence of me using Linux) I do not have the program to do a step by step comparison. Unfortunately (for me) it costs a lot of money. Lightroom is perhaps the most popular RAW editing software. If you are a photographer who shoots in RAW, chances are pretty good you already know what Lightroom is.
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