I’m growing more and more impressed with its capabilities the more I use it! Wrapping my head around its approach to masking, and its “scene referred pipeline” took some time, but now that I’m getting the hang of it, I think I can say I genuinely prefer it to Lightroom.
Combined with digiKam, which is excellent for photo collection management, I’m a very happy photographer :)
I recently picked up photography a bit more seriously again having used Nikon Capture NX 2 for years. I tried all the linux and FOSS options but I ended up buying DXO Photolab 7 and found it far superior for my needs. I’ve had to setup a dual boot system to get it to work but it’s definitely worth it. Dark table is good, but it’s a long way off the commercial offerings in terms of ease of use and image quality.
I’m seriously doubting the image quality bit
In terms of noise reduction which greatly affects image quality it is nowhere near the big commercial players.
Have you tried the “Denoise (profiled)” feature? It applies auto de-noising per your camera model and metadata quite nicely. You can then fine tune it after enabling the feature.
I usually leave it at chroma only as well. Luminance noise is far less unpleasant on the eyes.
I’ve found the profiled noise reduction in Darkroom to do what I need. I’ve not noticed any significant difference between it and the results I was getting from Lightroom.
That may be so, but Lightroom is not the class leader in noise reduction. There are other programs out there that do a much better job
Cool, but I don’t need class leader… I need “works on my linux box without loss of functionality compared to my previous Windows workflow”
You’re doubting that it’s meeting or missing image quality?
That’s just not true with the image quality.