#Picktorial or darktable install#
#Picktorial or darktable manual#
#Picktorial or darktable archive#
#Picktorial or darktable software#
#Picktorial or darktable trial#

Basics/Tone/Enhance has the usual suspects: exposure, brightness, highlights and shadows, clarity….

A good Crop tool (I like being able to control the precise pixel size and coordinates, it came in handy working on a photo series where I’m trying to align 20 pictures taken from the same spot!), and a Perspective tool that is maybe less intuitive.

#Picktorial or darktable manual#

White Balance (with a decent Auto option and manual control).A good histogram with black/white and color clipping highlighting.The adjustment sidebar has a bunch of good tools: I’d also love to keep a histogram in Info mode. I have to switch the sidebar from Edit to Info, which takes a good second for some reason, on top of making me lose my place. Personally, I’m missing a way to quickly show the photo’s metadata when I’m in Edit mode 6. The interface for that would benefit from some improvements though, since you need to use different menus to add a module, hide a module, and reorder modules it would be possible to unify all that in a single, more intuitive config view. On the customizing front, you can also reorder and show or hide each of the RAW “adjustments” modules that appear in the Edit sidebar. This lets you customize your workspace however you want, but sometimes I find that I want to go from one UI configuration to another, and clicking 3 buttons to change things one way and then 3 buttons to change it back is a bit painful. And if you hide the main photo viewer, the thumbnail strip becomes a bigger thumbnail grid. Right: a sidebar which shows either photo metadata or RAW development toolsĪll those UI components can be hidden or toggled.Left: a library explorer showing folders or Apple Photos albums.Top: a toolbar that can be customized and rearranged.The UI can be customized a bit, and includes: That workflow is not super specific to RAW Power, and could be reproduced in several apps, but sharing this method was a nice touch. I especially liked this one, RAW Power 3 for Mac: Rating and Filtering Workflow.

#Picktorial or darktable trial#

You can get a trial version on the app’s website, which is fully functional and adds a watermark to exported photos.īefore trying it out, I took an hour to watch this video tutorial series recorded by Nik. It was originally a development extension for Apple Photos, before gaining a photo library module in version 2 (improved further in version 3), making it usable as a standalone app as well. A bunch of user comments call RAW Power a spiritual successor to Aperture, though at this time its feature set seems more limited (with a few exceptions where it’s more up-to-date). RAW Power is developed by Nik Bhatt, who worked for years at Apple on the Aperture team. It piqued my interest since it’s cheap (around €30), runs natively on Apple’s new CPUs, and looks similar in spirit to early versions of Lightroom and Aperture. I didn’t consider them because they tend to have limited macOS support 3, a steep learning curve, and questionable usability 4.įinally, after reading this review of the Apple ProRAW format, I discovered a small macOS and iOS app called RAW Power. There are a few open-source options too, such as Darktable, RawTherapee and LightZone. They also don’t include a library browser or manager. While they can do some RAW development, and have some great features, they’re closer to Photoshop in spirit. I also got Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro, each for around €50.

#Picktorial or darktable archive#

Apple’s own Photos app (included with macOS), which I tried briefly, but I don’t want to import my photos from my archive folders on external drives and into their Photos Library I hear the development tools are a bit limited too.

Photoscape X (€44), seems marketed for the Instagram crowd but could be powerful anyway.

Darkroom (€88, or a €22/year subscription), seems to integrate with the Apple Photos library and provide a bunch of tools in a nicely designed package 2.

Skylum Luminar (€90 standalone, €150 with their new “AI” tools), which was slow when I tried it a few years back but might have improved since.

Exposure X6 (€110), which seems interesting.

ON1 Photo Raw (€102), not a good option for my M1 Mac 1.

DxO PhotoLab, more affordable (€130) I’ve heard some good things.

Capture One, the priciest option for pros (around €500).

#Picktorial or darktable install#

I still do, but they probably don’t install on current Macs, and Adobe made it hard if not impossible to get a license for the current Lightroom Classic app without paying 20 euros per month.

#Picktorial or darktable software#

Only problem: I didn’t have any photo management and development software I’m comfortable with. Still, I have a few thousand pictures, some edited and some not at all, that sit in my archives, and I’d like to edit and publish at least some of those. I’m still amateur level, I think, and haven’t shot much in the past 7 years or so. I used to dabble in digital photography, even attended a series of workshops for a year.