Overall both tools are good and well tested. In fact, I used to have an external tool for HDR, but most probably because I was a bit picky. In saying that, I always found the Lightroom HDR tool to be good enough, although not the best. These cameras have a huge dynamic range to work with (obviously you need to shoot RAW files). I used to do HDR in the past but not anymore since I moved to the Sony A7 cameras. Only in a few cases, I had to retouch here and there. In Lightroom Panorama works actually great in stitching photos. With Lightroom, I can filter on the top of the Photo Grid but then I have to go into the Collections module on the left to re-create again the filters for future usage. It all makes sense as I already have the filters in front of me, with the result that I expect so it is natural to save that setup for later usage. This is where I can filter only the photos I want (for example done with one camera on a specific week) and take these filters to create a collection. I personally prefer the way that DarkTable works as I have all in one module called Collect Images. The job gets done with the same result, but the workflow is different. No winner in this section for my workflow, although I quite appreciate the drag&drop of files in Lightroom Collection and filtering In my workflow, both programs do what I need in a very similar way. I then Synchronise that folder (in Lightroom) or I import it (in Darktable). Where needed, I also create subfolders based on the day.

I have folders for each year and within the year subfolders for each place that I travel to. Nowadays I usually move the files from my SD Card to a folder that I previously created. I like to keep the workflow to a bare minimum. I like to reduce my steps to the bare minimum so I stopped renaming them a while back when I did not even think about any other tool than Lightroom. I did it for a few years in the past but I noticed that it did not improve or speed up my process. In my workflow, I do not rename the files. Honestly, I have all I need to work on filesĭarktable imports the files where they are, it does not really create or move files around and you can’t rename files. You can import from an SD card, easily move photos around with drag&drop operations and much more. Lightroom performs some file management tasks that Darkroom can not. Lightroom has AI People tagging which works well but it’s not perfect and I find myself going through all the photos again to check if all the people were tagged correctly which defeats the purpose.ĭarktable works better for my workflow thanks to the focus points preview Importing files The few differences would not make me decide to go for Darkroom or Lightroom.ĭarktable has the Focus-Points tool (Alt-W) that can be quite handy during the screening of the photos to understand if I correctly set my focusing points.Īssigning Colours to photos works better in Darktable as you can associate multiple colours to a single photo, something you can’t do in Lightroom. The photo grid is pretty similar in both software. Let’s get started with the way you organise and retrieve your photos with both Darktable vs Lightroom. Darkatble Lighttable View vs Lightroom Library Window

Darktable vs lightroom 2018