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RAW editing: farewell everything else, hello…

25 August 2024

Over the years I’ve tried pretty much every commercial raw photo file editor there is: LR, Capture One, On1 Photo RAW, combinations of Adobe Bridge with Affinity Photo, ACDSee, Corel Aftershot, Luminar. The list goes on.

When rumblings started circulating that Exposure Software (developers of the excellent X7) might be scaling back their development team to that of ‘support only’, I casually started looking for an alternative that would see me out until I either stopped photography altogether or physically couldn’t make work at all. I revisited all the usual suspects mentioned above. Some had the essentially the same features as when I’d stopped using them years ago. Some had moved to subscription models and were out of my budget. Some didn’t know what they were and kept changing it’s name to Something AI this or Something AI that. And one in particular kept tinkering with the UI so much that it became maddening to work with.

I was essentially starting from scratch. It didn’t concern me that all my edits to every photograph were going to vanish either. There’s something enjoyable about revisiting old work and re-editing files to my current taste - which hasn’t vastly changed over the years.

So what was my criteria for a workable raw file editor?

  1. Multiple platform: ideally macOS and Windows. I have both setups and it my primary Macbook Air carks it for some reason I can jump over to my horrible Windows machine.
  2. User experience: as a ‘new’ user can I understand what functions are what and how to get to where I’m going with my image edits.
  3. Exporting: can I export my files to a variety of formats and sizes and save those as presets to re-use.
  4. Lens support: not something I thought of until recently. Some applications are great, some not so great. With newer lenses sometimes the camera doesn’t correct the files internally.
  5. Support in general: does this application have long-term support or a means of being run years into the future.
  6. Cost: I don’t mind paying for good software and paying for upgrades when I need to but subscription not so much. I get why companies do it but its just not my thing. If it’s your thing then hooray.

Not a lot to ask is it? Or is it?

Fast forward to July 2024 and my journey has seen me revisit On1 to see if they fixed the date bug that bugged me and my Lumix S1 and no, they hadn’t. More importantly they did release two major upgrades with that same bug (and many others) intact. Scratch 1.

Next on the list was Luminar Neo, this mysterious editor that does some things you’d expect a modern editor to do as well as somethings you’d expect a modern editor to do, very badly. Exporting from Luminar Neo is considered something you can do but you need to go searching for that little button that gives you a place to put your jpeg file and little else. Scratch 2.

Lightroom Classic I’d used ever since Adobe bought out and decommissioned Pixmantec’s RawShooter in favour of version 1 of Lightroom. Since then Adobe have changed (for want of a better word) to a subscription model. LR Cloud isn’t feasible in any way shape or form. Even with 2TB available I’d be hard pressed to make good use of it and I’m not letting Adobe train their AI on my stuff so they’re out of the running. I’d moved away from Adobe completely years ago anyway. Going back, even in some small way, wouldn’t feel right. The only thing I miss about LR is smart previews. Alas, scratch 3.

Onwards to the outliers: Corel, ACDSee etc. There was nothing I could see in demo’ing these applications that were good replacements for Exposure X7 or that even cames close to other programs I’d used full-time in the past like Capture One. They were convoluted and their workflow didn’t gel with how I wanted to work. Scratch 4 and then some.

What about the vague world of opensource I hear you ask? A place where, unfortunately, the phrase ‘marketing budget’ either goes to die or doesn’t exist in the first place. But, undeterred, I went looking through the github recesses to see what I could see. The first one that revealed itself was RawTherapee. I was instantly drawn to the fact that you can point it any any directory containing images and go to work - no catalogue nonsense, meaning that if your files are on a networked drive then you can edit across machines, as RawTherapee saves sidecar files in the XMP format. Be that as it may, RawTherapee does some things that had me scratching my head: image previews aren’t very sharp and the UI I found to be very confusing. The crop tool function being one of them. Scratch 5.

darktable was next and probably the last thing I decided to try before revisiting the buggy On1 but persevering with Exposure X7 until it stopped working completely. (In all honesty it probably would have done the job to this day but when something you love using isn’t getting attention and you get the sense it’s going to get dropped that’s not a nice feeling. I don’t need to be on the bleeding edge of raw editors but if I commit to a program then it’s usually for a good amount years and I’d like to know it’s going to get a minimal amount of support at the very least.)

I’d installed darktable once before and was completely confused by it like I was RawTherapee, so it sat in the dock unused until about four months ago. Being used to the UI of Exposure X7 the experience in darktable grated on me - quite a lot. Thankfully I have some knowlege of CSS and that’s what’s used to tweak the UI. Once I worked out what elements to target the little amount of tweaking I did made all the difference. With that sorted we’re down to the learning curve and managing exports. It was clear to me straight away that darktable used a database catalogue to track where photo files live. Having been used to Exposure’s way of working that was the first hurdle to overcome. I get why it does it but you know. Next, darktable has what they refer to as a pixel pipeline, which in normalspeak means that the data from your raw file is processed through a specific series of steps to then present to you an image to work on. Once you have that starting point you’re free to use the multitude of modules available to create your masterpiece. This is where it gets interesting. Almost all of the editing applications I’ve used has a ‘top down’ approach to editing. Not so with Darktable. To me it appears to work from the bottom up. Fine, fine.

It was at this point I needed some help. Like with RawTherapee before it I turned to YouTube for some workflow guidance and there are some fantastic resources there (see below) that suggest some approaches to take. After a day or two with their help and some experimentation I was set. There are similarities to all the apps I’ve used and there are some things unique to darktable that make it, IMHO, special. For example, there are dozens of modules that do a variety of tasks - exposure, color calibration, sharpening, tone mapping etc - and each module can have it’s own group of presets. You can combine these presets into a master style and you’re good to use it elsewhere. But the ace up it’s sleeve is the ability to create instances of any given module (except export which is a bummer). Meaning, you can make a copy of a particular module, say sharpening, and use that instance to target a particular part of your image. The second ace up darktable’s sleeve is the masking. Once the penny dropped with how this works I can’t go back to use anything else. That with the instancing has me hooked.

There are some other really nice features in Darktable that really lend itself to outputting for social media, especially if you’ve ever tried to ‘squarecrop’ your portrait or landscape image. darktable has you covered there too. Need a border with that as well? Done.

Four months in and I’m still learning what some of the numerous modules are capable of. My editing needs aren’t that extensive. I typically don’t spend more than a few minutes on an image. (If it’s any more than that I’m more than likely getting too far away from the original and over-cooking it). On that, I’ve setup a custom panel to hold the modules I use most, which at the moment is about 20 out of the 60 or so available. There’s just sooo much to this application it can be mind boggling. But if you can cut through the imposing UI, sit through some tutorials, learning darktable is well worth the effort.

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