The PC is getting slow and occasionally shuts down spontaneously; it has now lived a longer life than any of my previous 4 PCs. For $450 spent 5 years ago, I have no complaints. And perhaps it has another few years left. Obviously, I can’t say for certain, but (even so) I have decided to prepare for the inevitable and have spent the last 2 months shifting my entire photographic post-processing workflow to a free open source software (FOSS) solution.
The issue isn’t cost or effectiveness. To be honest, I had become quite proficient (for a hobbyist) working within the Adobe ecosystem, importing and processing my photos in Lightroom (LR) and editing them further in Photoshop (PS) with plugins from Nik and On1. I had a variety of actions for film emulation and grains, luminosity masks, and skin retouching. And for $120 per year, I found the cost to be more than reasonable considering how much use I got out of it and the frequency of updates.
The problem is Microsoft. And Apple too, for that matter. When I purchase my next computer (likely a laptop, rather than a PC) I don’t want to be tied-down to a proprietary operating system that is developed and distributed by a large tech company that is openly trying to collect information and data from and about their end-users. No … I have said good-bye to FB (including IG), Twitter. and Amazon. I keep my data for myself, even if Christine openly shares hers. Microsoft will be the next domino to fall.
That pushes me towards Linux, an OS that I am familiar with, but haven’t used extensively for almost a decade. I am unsure as yet if I would go with an Ubuntu-build or a similar OS like Mint, but I will most certainly need to move away from Adobe as Wine won’t run Adobe’s Creative Cloud (CC) software. Perhaps other solutions might run on Linux (e.g. DxO, On1, or Topaz), but there are quite a few solutions in the FOSS-sphere that seemed intriguing, so I have been processing all my RAW files outside of Adobe for the months of November and December with a pleasing level of success.
Don’t get me wrong, though; the learning curve has been a little steep. Adobe did everything that I needed it to and it did it all in one application: importing, tagging, non-destructive editing, and exporting (to online albums and local folders).
The importing piece was the most clear-cut when trying to find a Windows solution that was also available on Linux. The answer here is Digikam. I can insert my SDCard and am then only one click away from downloading all new and uncatalogued images off the card. #Boom #Done
Then there is the culling and tagging. This can also be accomplished right in Digikam similarly to my workflow in LR. I can use the arrow keys to move from one image to another and assign a star rating with the numeral keys on the keyboard. Tagging is also straightforward: zoom-out in library mode, ctrl-click multiple images and select the appropriate tag. Filtering images is just as easy.
The problem with Digikam is that it is not a very useful tool for editing images. It has some useful features for JPEGs, but I capture all my images in RAW format, and to process RAW images in Digikam is cumbersome and somewhat limited, so I needed to point another piece of software to the RAW files (and .xmp sidecar files). Both Rawtherapee and darktable fit the bill here.
First up was darktable, which was not at all intuitive for me, especially learning how images are processed sequentially in a “pipeline”. And there are so many ways/modules to accomplish things … it is very powerful. What I LOVE about darktable is that almost all adjustments (even white balance, as of 12/25/2020) can be applied with masks and with blending modes. I can use a high pass filter for sharpening and apply a “soft-light” blending mode. I can work in LAB and RGB color space, then reduce the opacity of the effect. I can swap channels for IR false colors. These are all things that I needed to bring the image from LR to PS to accomplish.
After a few weeks of learning and playing with darktable, it became clear to me that the problem that I would have with darktable is the noise reduction. It is adequate, but not as good as Rawtherapee and as the user of a 5-year-old MFT camera, the more noise control that I have the better. But, at the same time, while darktable seems to struggle after ISO 2000, I also don’t often shoot above that level unless I am capturing images at TKD, and I have never printed a single image from a TKD event ever. Not once, so how much of an issue is noise really?
I have to confess, though, that the color and monochrome film emulations in Rawtherapee were very nice “out of the box” and there is an “auto” adjustment for exposure that is very intuitive to use. White balance is also a breeze and all of these adjustments can be completed or applied to batches of photos. With minimal effort, it is easy to use Rawtherapee to process casual snapshots, even those special images that I will cherish for decades to come (or so I hope). In the end, though, when I tried to process images from my catalogue in both Rawtherapee and darktable, I found that my personal project/outdoor/landscape photos looked better when I could process them with all of the modules available in darktable.
So I was left to choose to edit my photos with different software depending on the need, or find another compromise. I elected to try the former and further develop a sustainable workflow in darktable. I have now spent quite a while finding some presets that I am happy with in darktable for my family snapshots. The biggest challenge was not being able to have an easy auto-exposure fix for images that I miss exposure on or that the TTL on the flash is inconsistent … but I was able to use a levels-module set on “auto” to get close enough in most instances, especially if I am better with the camera when it is in my hand and expose for the scene in camera, rather than just relying on the software to fix a 1 to 2-stop exposure mistake.
I am now exporting full resolution JPEGs from darktable to a sub-folder in the Digikam library and they are auto-imported by refreshing the folder. Digikam than interfaces directly with Flickr, so I can load my photos right from the library, rather than needing to open a web browser and manually uploading in Flickr’s web interface. A second export from darktable is placed in a second sub-folder for images that are to down-sized and then uploaded to the family website.
So, when working through the process from camera to export, the only thing that I have to do now that I didn’t need to do before is export JPEGs from my editing platform to my library platform. Otherwise, my workflow remains the same, and I now avoid jumping back and forth between LR and PS as I can do almost everything that I would previously accomplish in PS in darktable. And when I can’t do everything in darktable, I know how to use Gimp.
I still miss Nik, though. I will be holding onto Adobe for another month or two still so that I can try to figure out how to replicate some of my favorite ColorEfex modules in darktable, especially some of the contrast modules (Pro Contrast, Soft Contrast, Dynamic Contrast, Tonal Contrast). If I can master that, I won’t miss the Adobe ecosystem much at all.