![]() Darktable gives something more like what I expected, if a bit darker than the embedded JPEG (and I think Adobe Lightroom’s default interpretation): DNGs in Darktable – closer to what I was expecting This is what my DNG looked like when opened in RAW: DNGs in RawTherapee – weird pink tint or maybe white balance Out of the gate, this was not the situation. On the plus side, I can already send the image to RawTherapee from within Digikam: DNGs in Digikam – Open in RawTherapee ![]() I would send RAWs to RawTherapee for processing and then manage them within Digikam. I would catalog (or, to use the right term, Digital Asset Management) in Digikam and use it for my phone and other JPEG-only cameras. ![]() Ideally, from the point of view of using Digikam to catalog my photos (with its many, many useful features), RawTherapee would be the best program. The best of breed for open source RAW image manipulation on Linux at this point seems to be a fight between RawTherapee and DarkTable. I will need to take a look at the documentation if I want to figure out what I need to do there to edit the RAW file before doing stuff in Digikam. Without reading the documentation, it looks as though the image is already converted from RAW and you’re making changes to the embedded JPEG. I tried some editing of the DNGs, but it was an exercise in frustration. The image I see is the embedded JPEG – the camera’s estimate of what it might look like after processing. They imported into Digikam without any issues. So, let me first present what happened yesterday when I played around with some DNGs – the same ones I used in the post on my Lightroom workflow. I may end up making a sub-folder for videos. Also, now that Lightroom has caught up with Digikam and can see videos, I’ve had issues with trying to do exports and other operations on video files in the same folder as pictures. So, whether or not I leave Adobe Lightroom, I’m definitely no longer creating JPEGs of anything but the best photos – the ones I’d either post to flickr or my blog. And also I’m sure with a very quick Google search they’d find a multitude of open source projects that could produce a JPEG for printing. But I discovered something about Dolphin, the KDE file manager – it can already see DNGs! DNGs are visible in Dolphin Basically, JPEGs are everywhere so I am sure that my descendants will have access to the photos. First off, the reason I always create JPEGs of my DNGs is so that people can see my files even if they don’t use Lightroom or Photoshop. So I googled and I posted on forums and experimented. But perhaps there’s room for a new workflow. If I can keep it mostly the same, that helps in not wasting my time on a learning curve. Yesterday I posted my typical Adobe Lightroom RAW workflow. Even if performance is no better than Lightroom, I’m saving myself about $150 every 1-2 years (assuming they don’t end up forcing the subscription model as they’ve done with the Creative Suite). Finally, the software is free in all senses of the word. The btrfs file system has matured a lot and it has natural protections against bit rot (even moreso if you have a RAID1 or greater setup). For one, I get to use my dual monitor setup to perhaps light-table the images at a larger size. But can I do what I need to do with Linux? A coworker says his experience is the same with Lightroom post version 3. Things just take forever and that delay costs me free time. Without providing any noticeable improvements over 3, it is so slow and memory-intensive compared to 3. The problem is that Lightroom 5 is horrible. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years. ![]() But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. ![]() So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. ![]()
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