If we are lovers of photography, we are sure that we take our time before taking each capture, so that it is as perfect as we had thought, and we not only dedicate ourselves to point and shoot. However, there are times when editing may be necessary to correct some details. For this, Adobe has a very complete tool such as Lightroom, but that can be seen surpassed by another surprisingly free application such as Darktable.
In the market we can have access to a wide number of programs to be able to work with specialized photography in the RAW format. On the one hand, Lightroom is an Adobe classic that has been with us for many years, and on the other Darktable, its great open source alternative that is gradually winning the game.
Lightroom, the popular Adobe editor
It is a professional tool for photo editing. It is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite and is specially developed to help both beginners and professionals when it comes to digital imaging work, as well as post-production work. It has all kinds of tools for retouching photographs, such as noise reduction, making color adjustments, cropping, changing the focus, among others. In addition, it allows you to use photos taken directly in RAW. If we want to use it, it will be necessary to pay a monthly subscription of 12.09 euros, admitting a 7-day trial version to download.
Darktable, the open source alternative
We are talking about a free and free program that has not stopped evolving over time. It is mainly found focused on working with RAW images, although of course it accepts practically any image format. With it we can retouch and customize any image to our liking. For this, it has retouching tools that can be adapted to both home users and professionals in the sector. It even has its own acceleration engine through the processor of our PC to improve its performance and work faster with large and heavy images. It can be downloaded for free from the website of its developers.
Why use Darktable
There are different reasons why Darktable is currently more recommended than the Adobe application. Starting with a differential reason for many users, such as its price, since it is a free app, so we save having to pay the monthly subscription for Lightroom.
We can also say that it is a program more complete and that in recent years has evolved to become a true professional tool. On the other hand, Lightroom seems to have stopped in its development. This is something that may be due to its subscription model, which reduces the motivation for Adobe to make new improvements for which we are interested in paying for an update, causing us to be facing a somewhat stagnant product. Darktable, has the advantage that, being open source, it allows improvements and new features arrive fairly quickly.
Another problem that we found in the Adobe editing program is that officially does not support NAS to work with RAW files, something that does not happen with the Darktable that allows us to save our work in shared network folders. Finally, it should be noted that Lightroom only supports Windows, while Darktable, is multi-system. This allows it to be used in other operating systems such as macOS, or even Linux, which is arguably your preferred work environment. This feature may be inconsequential for some users, but it is also a plus for those who work interchangeably with different operating systems.
