Darktable 3.6
I use darktable for my photography and really appreciate how powerful it is. I do wish the UI was a little more friendly. Throughout the versions I’ve run into a large number of quirks. Tool tips not being a huge thing means you have to learn what all the tiny greyscale icons mean by heart. Duplicating the exposure module to touch up a specific area means the histogram now controls the duplicate and not the original. Minor adjustments for any slider with a right click on the tiny slider knob we’re super broken for a while. These kinds of things would be great to not happen.<p>But I think my biggest struggle with it is documentation. The docs are written in a way that seem to assume you know a whole lot of details of the software and the theory behind image processing. I am by no means an expert so when I start reading about how a specific module does it’s transforms at some specific phase in the pipeline and in this specific color space I don’t actually get what the effect of that will have on the photo. I understand that there is a lot you can do with the software but for example it took like an hour of YouTube videos from random people for me to figure out how to add a soft focus effect (apparently I needed to invoke local contrast?) or how to darken a specific spot on a photo in a way that blended nicely with the rest of it. Personally I have gotten comfortable with it and now can do what I need to do but at the same time that learning curve was super steep. I still wonder if I should give Lightroom a try just to see if that’s more user friendly.