RawTherapee 5.3 – Photo software
rawtherapee.com
rawtherapee.com
I just closed darktable few minutes ago, so I guess that made my experience of it pretty fresh.
On my system (Ubuntu 17.4), darktable runs nicely. And it's easier to use than RawTherapee. I only encountered some problems cause it to freeze up when loading photos, but I can't figure out the reason (Of course it's not because I'm loading photos).
RawTherapee is bit harder / complicate to use, but once you used to it, they're almost the same (Not totally, like darktable's Vibrance adjustment is far weaker than RawTherapee's etc).
One problem with RawTherapee for me is, it sometime can't correctly recognize the color profile of my camera, so the initial preview look over exposed and require manual adjustment. I didn't get same problem with darktable.
One of the reasons I use RT is because it doesn't try to take ownership of my images. I have a hierachy of images that looks something like this:
Images/
Images/2017
Images/2017/10
Images/2017/10/01-jody/
Images/2017/10/01-jody/RAW
Images/2017/10/01-jody/JPG
Images/2017/10/01-jody/JPG/thumbs
Images/2017/10/01-jody/Public/
Having used both Dartable and Rawtherapee, part of the reason I primarily use Darktable is that it seems to better facilitate working through a few hundred images in a few hours...a use case that not everyone has and that some people might reasonably not ever wish to have but one that I deal with based on the type of subjects I sometimes shoot.
What this means is that you set your global contrast and export the file for further dodging/burning and edits in Photoshop, Gimp or some other software.
If you increased the contrast of the image in RawTherapee you will have darkened the shadows. So, when you open the exported bitmap in Photoshop, dodging an eye or some other part in will give you a lot more noise and a lot less headroom compared to doing this work on the undemosaiced data.
This is a big design fail and an actual problem if you go beyond the most basic raw conversion.
* RawTherapee runs on Windows since years.
* Darktable just started the Windows port.
* RawTherapee seems to provide more functions.
* Darktable seems to be better integrated and polished.
* RawTherapee was a bit easier to get into.
* Darktable has a better workflow if you're into it.
* Darktable also seems to be more "stable" in the sense that not everything changes meaning all the time and most things work like expected.
In the end, the workflow was the deciding factor for me. It just felt way better and more efficient. Technologically they are different. RawTherapee should have more potential once they manage to clean up the user interface.
Also as I've seen mentioned in other comments, it lacks local adjustment tools and/or anything remotely equivalent to the masks system in DT.
It does have some interesting tools, but comparing DT to RT feels like comparing Ps to GIMP... there's a fundamental capability in the workflow that you'll feel missing if coming from DT to RT.
The issue is that RawTherapee can only handle Linear DNGs. Linear DNGs are essentially TIFF files where the underlying sensor data has been de-mosaiced and normalized. A Linear DNG retains the higher color depth of the sensor, but it's not RAW.
DarkTable has no such limitation. It properly recognizes the underlying CFA scheme (which are different for different sensors), and processes them properly.
Fortunately for the alternatives that would describe Lightroom these days too, to the point that Adobe had to publicly acknowledge that performance isn’t good enough [1].
1: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/07/on-lightroom...
So, am I correct to understand that Adobe managed to botch LR so badly that PCs with vastly superior processing and IO to what I used back then struggle on basic tasks?
Woah.
(I had problem with their pricing though, so I switched to another (non-OSS) SW that is performing similarly for ~1/3 of the price)