One has to learn their strengths and weaknesses, and learn to work with the tool instead of emulating a different tool's workflows.Īnd short of doing that, these comparisons are just comparing the UIs and marketing material. Face it, learning a RAW developer takes a lot of time and work. You can use it to enhance RAW pictures taken by 400+ different camera models. Darktable is an open-source software developed for those who need to quickly edit their photos. While Darktable is more suitable for small edits, Luminar has everything to satisfy the needs of full retouching. This is why their toolsets are different as well. Consequently, most of these comparison videos are utter nonsense, filled with uninformed guesswork. However, they were created for people with different levels of experience. It's got a huge learning curve, and many features are not obvious at first glance. And it's slow.īut no matter, I have yet to find a RAW developer more powerful than Darktable. This looks good, and it's a good idea to incorporate in Darktable as well.Īnd denoising just kind of sucks in Darktable. When you push the shadows in Capture One, you secretly also push their saturation. I will say, however, that other tools are often more 'convenient', or 'magic', if you like.

I do a comparison like this once every few years, as a Darktable user.Īnd since I know Darktable much better than the other tools, my conclusion is always the opposite: where are all the masking options in other tools? Where is Color Zones, where is the Contrast Equalizer, where is Filmic when I need it, where is the Tone Equalizer? Why can't most tools push shadows without haloing? Why do most tools suck at file management, why do I have to import everything before even looking at images.

Luminar 4 vs darktable