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Comment by polskibus | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone compare DarkTable to RawTherapee ?

When I used RawTherapee I liked it, but I found the interface a bit opaque. The exported jpegs were not what I saw in the application, which in turn was not what I expected to see given the source and the modifications I had performed. I am absolutely sure there were good reasons for this, but I never took the time to figure out what they were.

In contrast, with Darktable, only once have the final output not matched my expectations, and then it was immediately obvious that I had accidentally changed the colour space of the output and my image viewer assumed sRGB – this was a two-click fix in the export tab.

RT has no real workflow, more a set of tools that you might apply somehow, GUI reflects that, seems unorganized. DT seems to have more advanced algorithms and tools. Both are excellent. Does not hurt to have both in your toolbelt.

RT has more controls for finetuning (some of which is very necessary for Fujifilm RAF files still) while DT has never crashed on me. CLUT support is nice, I play with it when I happen to develop from raw data.

I should probably participate in DT's tracker and try to get the few shortcomings fixed... that should do for a new year's resolution: more participation in OS communities. :)

Can you expand on that? I'm a Fuji and Darktable user. What am I missing?

The pixel readout is frankly poor on both apps: false color here and there. Probably both apps use the same library behind the scenes. On RT I can crank up the demosaic algorithms to reduce the effect. DT has no similar filter available.

DT also used to not do a good job on lens corrections (I have an X100T). Perhaps this new version does better since there was a mention in the changelog about lens data.

The best pictures are still the SOOC JPEGs -- too bad if I want to adjust the shadows or highlights.

On the X100 you can at least convert the raw files to jpeg on camera.

I generally just stick to a couple of jpeg presets.

I just tried out the new version. While I suspect the older ones also had the options there but now I confirmed that the demosaic controls in DT are as good as in RT.

I've tried Rawtherapee a few times and I haven't really learned to use it but I can easily recommend its documentation site (rawpedia) even if you don't use Rawtherapee itself.

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