I’ve been trying to improve my photography and was trying to decide on an editing software. I don’t have a lot of money to spend on photography so I only have a basic set of lens and I’m hoping to make up the difference with editing. The three names I keep seeing pop up are Darktable, LightZone, and RawTherapee. In your experience, which of these would be best for a beginner while still having all (or at least most) of the same functionality as Lightroom?
quick google search: https://skylum.com/blog/guide-to-the-best-free-lightroom-alternatives
I tried Rawtherapee and Darktable….they work quite well and there are many tutorials on youtube. For me Lightroom works better but thats a matter of personal preference I think
One advantage of Lightroom is that it really good for cataloging your photographs. I think the aforementioned free programs can do this as well but they may not be as efficient. I use digikam to organize my photos, process then in rawtherapee, and then send them to affinity photo for any final edits. Affinity photo is a Photoshop competitor that is a one time fee of ~$50 on sale.
Photoscape X free version is pretty good!
Frankly, try them out. They’re free.
Darktable is looks superficially more Lightroom-like than Rawtherapee. It has a searchable library, printing, etc.
In terms of the editing workflow, however, Darktable behaves a bit differently than the Lightroom template. There is generally equivalent functionality for each of Lightroom’s features (except AI masking and AI denoising). But the way to achieve the functionality is often quite different.
So read the manual, watch a YouTube or three, and you should be good to go. Darktable is tremendously good software, and every bit as capable as Lightroom in terms of professional results. Join discuss.pixls.us if you have questions.
Do take a look at Pixelmator Pro as it’s affordable and very powerful
Darktable is the only accurate LR Classic alternative. The other two only offer Develop capabilities.
You need to understand your requirements in post processing software and which tools should be considered. LR Classic has a serious image management database that is more special than the development capabilities. The latter, while powerful in LRC, can be matched more or less by RawTherapee and other image processing tools. LRC also offers a good, not great, printing capability, book making, a useful mapping, strong integration with Photoshop, and the full Adobe Creative Cloud bucket of apps, which can be highly valuable if you need a no-additional-cost web presence.