


My decade old entry level Olympus MFT camera felt a little long in the tooth, and I decided to upgrade. Last January, with photography once again on my NY resolutions list, I decided to try again. It’s been developing for a few years now, but 2020’s pandemic really helped me realize how much I love to be outdoors, in the woods, on the coast, and in the ocean. I’ve tried in the past, which went ok for a time, but as smartphones ate the world I eventually lost interest in lugging around a camera and drifted away from it. Unless I have some breakthrough in understanding DarkTable, or I learn something else new to alter my trajectory, it looks like my mainstay workflow is going to be based on Rapid Photo Downloader, RawTherapee, and of course The GIMP (which I was already pretty familiar with from other graphical work).Looking back at my new year’s resolutions for the last decade or so, taking up photography has been on the list virtually every year. Not all of them are the best film simulations that I've ever seen, but they do generally have some recognizable resemblance to the film stocks they're named for. RawTherapee also has a free package of film simulations available that you can download, called HaldCLUT. However, it can also do automatic distortion correction (but not vignetting or CA) on raw files that have a camera-corrected embedded jpeg, which I think is pretty damn clever. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to make it apply them automatically! It's a manual search for the file with a file selector every time. All my lens profiles from Lightroom can work with it I just copied them over from the Mac. The interface is eccentric but possible to figure out with some poking around. RawTherapee seemed most intimidating at first glance, but on second look it's not that bad. It's the little things that I miss: lens profiles for some of my favorite lenses, and the film simulation presets I'd collected over time for LR. If I can't figure out how to use it, I can't test it.Īftershot Pro seems to have the most straightforward interface and most direct transition from Lightroom. As a result, I've been unable to even begin to evaluate its features and performance.

I've beat my head against it many times and made no real progress. Many people seem to like DarkTable, but I swear… The user interface just kills me. The three main programs I've been evaluating thus far are: Corel Aftershot Pro 3, DarkTable, and RawTherapee. I'm currently moving to a Ubuntu based system.
