Adobe’s devotion to supporting and community remains much higher than the comparatively smaller range of resources for Darktable. As a free and open-source piece of software, Darktable is the clear winner when it comes to costs. Winner: Lightroom.The plugins for Lightroom are very convenient in terms of what they can pull to edit your photos better. Winner: Lightroom.Vast improvements with panoramic and HDR rendering have been made in Lightroom to make it better suited for high-quality output.

The learning curve is much less steep for Lightroom for having been around much longer with more help offered. The organization is a bit easier to utilize within Darktable. The range of control within Darktable is relatively high that it can be daunting at times. Despite a bit of a learning curve, the tools available in Lightroom are a bit more robust. Both Lightroom and Darktable have interfaces so similar it’s eerie how close they appear in the design.

Lightroom has the benefit of its mobile app and cloud sync but Darktable’s abundance of tools is just too powerful and too vast to ignore considering how much you get for free.

Overall, Darktable is the better program among the two. Lightroom is a subscription-based product, while Darktable is completely free. While Lightroom is a powerful tool in Adobe’s photo-editing arsenal, Darktable is more versatile and feature-rich for editing photos.

Slightly steeper learning curve when compared to Lightroom.

Related: Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic | Which One to Pick? (2023) Some of its key features are made to sharpen images and tweak their brightness, as the name may imply. What differentiates the application from Photoshop is how the software is built specifically for editing on top of raw photos rather than adding all sorts of raster graphics. Overview of Adobe LightroomĪdobe Lightroom first sprang to life as an add-on to Adobe Photoshop around 2007 and has grown to be more of its own program. Each area will be reviewed and rated on a scale of one to five. These aspects are comprised of interface, tools, features, and more. For these two photography applications, we’ll take a look at how well they function under the most common issues for photographers.

Lightroom alternative darktable