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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

I tried to use Darktable coming from Lightroom, and I have seldom felt as stupid. I just couldn't grasp how Darktable worked.

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On the flip side, coming from Darktable and trying out Lightroom felt like trying to do good old darkroom work with my hands tied behind my back.

Darktable offers a few really powerful, generic tools that you can use in different ways to get different effects – things like equaliser, parametric masks, LAB curves, etc. It makes little sense to use it without reading up on some of those more advanced tools first.

Lightroom, in contrast, focuses more on offering a small selection of pre-defined tools for specific purposes. But once you want to do something outside of that (parametric masking is one of those things I really missed) you're shit out of luck.

Would you mind giving examples where you use parametric masking? I read the docs* and it is not very clear to me the practical side (I'm a Lightroom user).

* https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/3.8/en/darkroom/maskin...

This video shows how parametric masks can be used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfw-GWowH9M

This is one of the most powerful feature in this software.

An example: Camera noise is often particularly annoying in the sky area. So I'll have two denoising filters active: A subtle one that doesn't lose much detail, and a strong one that only applies to the sky. Selecting the sky tends to be easy with a parametric mask: Just select the sky's hue and it's done.

I use mushroom, but these generalized parametric masks look super useful!

That said, Lightroom now let's you mask the sky with a single click.

I meant "Lightroom", not "mushroom".

I mostly tag pictures, adjust exposure, sometimes split toning and contrast, that’s it basically. And cull pictures quickly.

Catalogue management is one of the things I agree Lightroom is better at – at least was, last I was a more active photographer.

It’s not stellar, but it doesn’t suck, and I haven’t been forced to upgrade.

Maybe I will never migrate off LR and just create a new catalog on some other computer with Ansel or something.

I use the last version of LR6 one could purchase outright, and I dragged it kicking and screaming all the way into Ventura, but I’m sure the party well end pretty soon.

You are most likely both right, because it mirrors my experience everytime I look at Photoshop/Lightroom when my dad does things and when looks at darktable when I do things.

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