RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor

I fought darktable for two years before feeling right at home. I had used Lightroom since it's inception. I'm happy now I invested the time. I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.

It's not about not "feeling right at home". I've detailed this in other comments but it's just that DT has an abysmal interface and that the devs insist that it needs to be complex. This sort of hostile attitude is part of what spawned Ansel.

  I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.

This is a bit of a myth.

One of my complaints dealt with how unintuitive the sliders are. There's no additional control gained by making the UI widgets difficult to deal with.

Another dealt with trying to set color temperature. There are two places color temperature can be set and they'll both conflict with each other. The newer module is absurdly complex. It's great if you're writing a dissertation on color rendition but less great if you're trying to be productive.

Sure there's more control offered by having ten different demosaicing algorithms to choose from. Unfortunately I can't think of a time when I've needed or wanted that control. Maybe if I shot Fuji or Sigma. But I don't. And most folks don't.

Presets and history are a nightmare. Items in the history widget get aggregated so it's difficult/impossible to pick out individual steps. If you give labels to the actions in a preset (my terminology is off because I've not used DT much in a while)… sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't and things don't appear to pick up the label/group/whatever it's called. If memory serves I had to apply presets in one module to have them visible in the develop module.

The vestigial DAM stuff… ugh.

There's no obvious A/B split views.

Perhaps the most obnoxious thing is that DT shamelessly apes the Lightroom interface but in reality behaves almost nothing like Lightroom. There's a TON of complexity for little-if-any improvement in outcomes.

First, let me concur that Darktable is not great. I found it to be neither quite as simple as Lightroom, nor as powerful as RawTherapee, and severely lacking in documentation.

> Another dealt with trying to set color temperature. There are two places color temperature can be set and they'll both conflict with each other.

There are at least three colour temperature / white balance controls in RT; more if you count output colour space primaries, Lab space curve, etc. as ways of creative white balance control.

I’m not sure I see any particular conflict between them. They all do different things; some of them are more relevant if you want to achieve the most precise representation (e.g., you are digitizing analog prints or paintings), others are more relevant if you are going for a creative look of your own.

It’s probably best to consult RawPedia[0], but as far as I understand:

— One of them controls raw data interpretation, and affects how different tools work down the line (e.g., highlight recovery or targeting sky with wavelets). As far as I understand, you probably want to keep this one technically correct and as close as possible to the true neutral white/grey point; at this step you are helping the tool do the rest of its job and not trying to achieve a look. If you use a colour card, a DCP profile, etc., then you know exactly what to set White Balance controls to.

— There are a couple of controls under CAM model, which you may or may not be using depending on your profile. With scene illuminant you set… well, scene illuminant (the light you have in your scene), and viewing conditions allow you to shift colours to make it look right if you know your photo will be viewed in an environment with particular light.

— Then, of course, you have dozens of different ways of creatively controlling perceived white balance via different curves or CLUT; I think these are most handy if you are going for a look.

[0] https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/White_Balance

I try to daily drive Linux but can't find a simple / nice to use RAW editor. I had high hopes for Darktable but I was astonished how bad the GUI is. When trying to delete photo, it deletes the photo under the pointer, not the photo I selected... WTF ?!? And the whole app feels so complicated... Then there's forks emerging and the dev forces are diluted in multiples applications and Adobe continues to milk its users because Open Source dev can't work together. Between Shotwell, Gthumb, Loupe, RT, DigiKam, and more... Imagine if all this efforts was done in one cohesive app ? Ok I stop dreaming.

If you seek a GUI for managing/cataloguing photos, my advice would be to look for that and not a raw image processing tool that incidentally happens to also handle cataloguing (inevitably in a half-baked way).

I have never seen Lightroom (or C1, for that matter) as compelling at all ever since I started using RawTherapee. Unlike, say, InDesign, which is legitimately a difficult to replace professional tool with incredible capabilities, Adobe’s raw image processing offering looks incredibly dumbed down.

Yes good point. But my needs are very limited. On macOS I use the Photo app to cull, make small adjustments, and crop. On Windows there is also a Photo app that allows such basic features. They both works with RAW and works fine with my NAS mount in smb to cull directly the files (though macOS is a pain for that, doesn't play well with files, need to import in lib).

On linux, the default Gnome image viewer is nice but you can't make adjustement and when deleting a file, the file is not remove from the NAS directory (need a manual refresh). With Gthumb it works for deleting files but the crop tool and the overall app is not as nice. Anyway I'll continue to look for my perfect app or for the default Gnome viewer to update its features (I think it is in active development)

> I’m not sure I see any particular conflict between them.

I don't have DT under hand to check, but there are two controls which, if active at the same time, will produce a warning along the lines of "wb is already set in [the other control]".

edit: I think [0] describes the issue

[0] https://discuss.pixls.us/t/white-balance-applied-twice/34949

I see, that explains why DT is confusing in this regard.

  my advice would be to look for that and not a raw image processing tool
  that incidentally happens to also handle cataloguing (inevitably in a
  half-baked way).

Eh. No? Lightroom is a pretty darn good DAM. Maybe digiKam is at least as good, but I wouldn't know as it crashed the first time I launched it. I want to use my tools, not debug them. DT's asset management is, to put it charitably, an after thought.

About the worst thing I can say about Lightroom is that it didn't reliably work with my iPhone. Otherwise it did everything I needed in terms of tagging, presets, and organizing the pictures on the file system.

Meanwhile darktable creates freaking sidecars for every picture while it relies on an SQLite database for tracking history just like Lightroom does.

  I have never seen Lightroom (or C1, for that matter) as compelling at all ever since
  I started using RawTherapee. 

Conversely Darktable is the best advert I've seen for Lighgtroom.

The problems I listed were for Darktable. If you use the stock configuration and go into the "white balance" module you will get an error. If memory serves turning off the "white balance" module also leads to problems. Instead you're expected to go into the "color calibration" module. More powerful? Perhaps. Unnecessarily obtuse? Absolutely.

I tried Rawtherapee first as they actually sign their (macOS) app. Unfortunately it was too unstable to be useful.

Filmulator (I really need to fix the CI...)

I windows I highly recommend IrfanView just for basic photo viewing (odd name). It's extremely fast.