Ever since Adobe announced that Lightroom was moving to a subscription only model, I have read countless people online talk of moving on and leaving the Adobe ecosystem. The general consensus was that Adobe was just trying to wring every penny they could out of their user base and that since they were Adobe and had Photoshop and Lightroom, no one would walk away. For the most part, Adobe was right. The company made huge profits off of their subscription model and to be honest, the $10 a month they charged for both Lightroom and Photoshop wasn’t all that bad for amateur users and for professionals, it was a great deal. I however, was one of those who didn’t like being charged monthly, especially for a product that at the time was slower than the competition, more crash prone and had issues with the FujiFilm X-Trans raw files that I primarily shot.
The big problem with moving away from Adobe for me has always been the great digital asset management (DAM) aspects of the program tied in with fairly intuitive and quick to learn controls of Lightroom. A slightly lesser problem was that all of the edits to my RAW files would be lost switching to another program. Both of those reasons kept me locked into Adobe’s ecosystem for years.
That is until I took a 2nd look at an open source application called darktable. While previous versions of this software were very good, it just wasn’t enough for me to be able to transition easily. This newest version that was released a month ago, 2.6.0, has fixed nearly all of the issues that kept me from switching. Some of the most important features I needed were ability to import and have darktable understand my hierarchy of keywords, a map module with GPS tagging and the ability to translate Lightroom created .xmp files and apply some basic corrections based on those. Thankfully, in version 2.6.0, darktable does all of that.
To test this crazy idea out, I pulled a 5 year old MacBook Pro out of my closet, wiped the hard drive and installed a few different Linux distributions to try out (Linux Mint and Pop!_OS). Both distro’s ran great and quickly enough I copied over a few years worth of RAW files and xmp sidecar files and began the import process into darktable. For the most part, everything went smoothly. All of my keywords and ratings were imported into darktable for easy searching and once the thumbnails were generated, it was rather quick.
Since I’m a FujiFilm X-series user, finding replacements for the built-in Fuji profiles that Lightroom offered was paramount. I try to do minimal editing to most of my pictures and applying either the default Provia, Velvia or Acros profile + a few tweaks saved to a preset was always my preffered way of dealing with RAW files. Once again, a random person to the rescue who offered a free download of many Fuji presets for darktable that are called ‘styles’. With these, all of the Fuji film simulations are again available with a single click.
With all of the above working out well, I ended up ordering a new laptop from a small Colorado based company, System76. This new laptop, a Galago Pro, comes preinstalled with a Linux operating system. I’ll have more to say about this laptop in the next post. Bottom line for now, it’s awesome. The laptop is all set up and my 36,000+ image library is being imported into darktable. So far my walk away from Adobe is going well. Updates on this transition will be coming.