Darktable vs Rawtherapee in 2024: 5 Differences You Need To Know

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Sign up for our darktable course for beginners: www.udemy.com/course/darktable-essentials/?referralCode=82ECED1844601E7119DC Also available in Brazilian Portuguese: Inscreva-se: www.udemy.com/course/darktable-essencial/?referralCode=F60361140FBB7765EB02

[@antonrosenfeld735]

I think a big difference with people using them for the first time is that RawTherapee has a starting point that looks very similar to the out of camera jpg whereas darktable generates a flatter looking image. This leads to lots of people saying darktable messed up my image and assuming it is no good. Rawtherapee is also able to use dcp files to get images very close to the camera colours (if that is what you want).

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Yes, this is true!

[@Vicky-il5yv]

What about Lightroom? Does it also shows flatter image like Darktable ??? I never tried it.

[@Eigil_Skovgaard]

It's interesting that while Rawtherapee seems to be simpler to learn than Darktable, it may take longer to understand the tools. Some tabs have sections and sliders that are very little intuitive. The capture sharpening is very good and should be adopted by DT. I use DxO PureRAW for denoising and initial sharpening, so I don't need it. Last time I used Rawtherapee it would have a problem with DNG files from e.g. DxO or Topaz, until the DNGs were run through Adobe RAW converter. That's not a problem with DT. When it comes to masking, light and color management Darktable is superior.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

That is true, Eigil. The capture sharpening does a good job. Though your workflow certainly is good also. The sharpening I've seen from DxO is decent.

[@Bizon-q2u]

I have been using both Darktable and Rawtheapee for several years. In RT I edit photos seriously, and in DT when I feel like having fun. Editing a photo in DT takes much more time, but the final effect is still better in RT. The main problem in DT is the sharpening tools. No matter how much I try, the sharpening is always much better in RT. And there is no way Darktable will sharpen the photo better than Rawtheapee. DT also lacks the option to use DCP profiles, which makes editing very easy. Mainly, the colors of the photo are immediately perfect. In DT you need to use the RGB mixer tool which requires a lot of knowledge. However, the big advantage of DT are masks, which are missing in RT. But overall, for my needs, RT definitely wins.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Not so sure about sharpening. To me, the diffuse and sharpen module with masks make the sharpening in darktable a lot more natural.

[@CY3ER]

I guess I'm downloading both 🤷🏻

[@randall.chamberlain]

Ditto for the sharpening. The capture sharpening in RT renders way better results by default and is easier to use and more consistent too. DT has some awesome tools but it is just more difficult to push the sharpening there in the same way RT does.

[@Bizon-q2u]

I agree. I have never been able to sharpen an image in DT as well as in RT. In Rawtherapee all I have to do is turn on the sharpen tool and I get better results than in the two modules in DT (diffuse and sharpen) In Darktable I get either a bland image or an over-sharpened image that never looks natural. Masks are the only thing that gets me in DT​@@randall.chamberlain

[@joaovtaveira]

Difference #7 darktable has a module to transfer images from the memory card or from the camera to the drive.

[@mtbboy1993]

A weird thing with Rawtherapee I noticed is there's a magenta fringing at trees when there's actually not one, I zoom in there's nothing. But this was after de-fringing it, there was minor fringing, but for some reason after it shows massive fringing, which is actually not there. But it's only on with images with trees with sky behind it. But I usually just zoomed in never been a massive issue, but yes not idea.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Some Rawtherapee modules only show their effect at 1:1.

[@mtbboy1993]

A major con of Darktable enabling each module adds the effect, so have to adjust it each time. Also it doesn't read the embedded camera profile. so all pictures will look wrong from the start, so lots of work to get it done. 'What am I doing wrong? Maybe I have to enable all modules, and set all to a neutral setting so they actually don't do anything. and then save the layout. If it's possible. But depending on the picture, some settings have to be adjusted just for the picture to look somewhat normal, as it looks way too dark, contrasty. So even if I were to save it maybe I would need to still edit other photos more. Some photos I shot are almost perfect just need minor tweaks but in Darktable I have to do a massive edit to make it look as it does out of the camera. This processes makes no sense. But maybe I'm missing something. Looks like I have to enable Adobe RGB then edit, as lens correction enables Adobe RGB without enabling it. But once I've went trough long battle trough the modules, results are good. But instead of a simle tweak it's a massive edit. I will look into this further to see if I can make it usable for me.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

I don't really understand your first line about having to adjust it each time.

[@mtbboy1993]

​@@JasonPolakPhotography Just enabling a module changes the image as it has adjustments already made, all adjustments are to insane level, I have to turn tweak it. it makes simple editing harder as I can't just do a simple adjustment I have to adjust almost every slider there is. And as different photos look differently, like a sunny photo, looks too dark with harsh shadows, crazy shadows, blacks. And a darker pic with shadows, looks way too dark and flat. So if this would mean I would have to save each module presets to suit those images I guess. this would be a mess to deal with if I would have many different sceneries. I simply want the image to be the standard camera profile that's embedded in the raw file. I haven't figured out a way to do this. Imagine if someone went crazy with all sliders, and you would have to correct it. that's what I have to do. While Lightroom Classic uses Camera ST profile. Darktable doesn't seem to read any profile at all just read the ARW file and make it's own crazy image. I read that Darktable works in RGB, but for some reason it starts off as a crazy image, and enabling lens correction makes it look like Adobe RGB, seems like a bug. I want to avoid having to use almost most of the modules just to do one simple adjustment, as Darktable ruins the image, at least for me with ARW. nothing makes sense, nor that I have to adjust every slider in every module I enable.also seems hard to set them to 0. I will come back to it. and see what's possible. Once I go trough all of the hassle I get good results. I saved some modules with presets. I experienced weird bugs with magenta infestation, if I used Standard color prefix, but when I changed it to RGB or enabled lens correction it was gone. Other modules did it too. I seem to have sorted that. Just keep it in Adobe RGB.

[@mtbboy1993]

@@JasonPolakPhotography But enabling Adobe RGB makes some images super dark. But sometimes with some images or it happens randomly I'm not sure, but enabling lens correction basically turns on Adobe RGB without doing it. Maybe I have to reinstall it. Standard color prefix is overly flat, and not what the embedded Camera ST profile is. If conditions are good, minimal editing would be needed. Which is not cases in Darktable, so no decent starting point.. but Lightroom uses it, but not tested other software yet. Rawtherapee uses this profile. so looks fine so I can do the fine adjustments on those pics that need it. But in Darktable I have to use many modules. The software seems to be buggy making things inconsistent. Which version do you use? I'm currently testing 4.6.1. I can't make sense of why it enables Adobe RGB look when enabling Lens correction, sometimes and sometimes not, maybe it depends on the picture. so it darkens the image, so I have to correct that. Adobe RGB, sRGB make darker areas and shadows almost completely black. If I leave it in standard color matrix if it's a bright image I can just tweak some sliders make it more colorful and blacks blacker. But when Darktable decides to make image super dark, I have to tweak the shadows. and when original image looks too falt I have to make it look colorful. One picture is just dark and have to brighten it up, do minor tweaks in Lightroom, but in Darktable, it's flat. I'm not sure what to do. I will try to find a solution.

[@arthurhoornweg7894]

I am using both and I'm beginning to prefer RawTherapee over Darktable. RT gives me good results in less than 10% of the time I would need in DT. In RT, the initial starting point matches the out-of-camera jpeg quite well, it gives me those "Nikon colors" that I love by default. In DT, the colors and the contrast are way off by default and I have to take numerous steps to make the image look how I (and Nikon) prefer it to look and even then the colors are not accurate. It's simply too many steps that I have to repeat for every image. Also DT's demosaicing algorithm produces aliasing in places where RT's algorithm does not. To make matters worse, DT has too much redundancy. There are a dozen ways to adjust the same thing, it really neads a cleanup. For me, RT gives me the results that I want very quickly and DT was just never quite satisfactory.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

That's a fair assessment.

[@desotopete]

I find dt module names non intuitive maybe based on the ego of the developer instead of what the module actually does.

[@paullafleur6112]

That was a great overview. Thank you

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

You are welcome!

[@joaovtaveira]

Difference #6 darktable has a map mode to manually geotag images and a module to add .gpx files to automatically geotag images, RawTherapee has neither of them.

[@karlstenator]

Editing countless photos of runners from a weekly park run, speed is my game. Not wanting to just upload a dump of raw images to the community each week - many of which are duds, near duplicates or poorly framed, I need speed to: 1. Sift through thousands of images, deleting the duds/dupes 2. Of the remaining images, crop them. 3. Rare images might get further editing to make them pop a little more. I initially tried Darktable, that I thought was excellent - but eventually I got caught up in the options/UI, and any image I touched would be unwantingly altered. I got caught up in terminology and processes that as a hobby photographer were just a little beyond me. I then found RawTherapee, but didn't have the same struggle. It allowed me to quickly go through each image, remove the duds/dupes, and crop select images, and alter a few select images. For the purpose's of quickly parsing thousands of images of runners each Saturday morning, RawTherapee wins that race - but that said, I'm sure if I did a course to learn more about Darktable I'd probably resolve the config issue and then they'd both be just as suitable as each other for my photo processing.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

True, one thing about Rawtherapee is that it is faster in some regards. I don't tend to process enormous numbers of photos but when I do, darktable can be a bit slow.

[@danieljimenez1989]

I don't think those options in the LAB tab of rawtherapee look random at all, moreover they're quite useful. You can change Hue, Luma and Chroma as a function of any of them, and even as a function of itself. They're a nice tool to have, and don't seem out of place to me.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

You are right but what I meant was that they are rather confusing to a beginner, especially in how they are presented.

[@danieljimenez1989]

@@JasonPolakPhotography yes, I can see that it could be hard to grasp. I think both tools have their strengths, and have been trying to improve my understanding of darktable recently. Curiously, rawtherapee has always seemed more intuitive for me, although some of the tools in darktable are tremendously powerful.

[@mtbboy1993]

I did some testing with Sony ARW. I see Rawtherapee upscales and display a wider image, it adds few pixels to the side, making the picture wider, so you actually get a wider image than Darktable, Lightroom. The image is not stretched out, but actually you see more of what the sensor/camera captured. Make sure to use the latest version of Rawtherapee if you have a Sony camera, or right side pixels will be stretched. This has been fixed in 5.10. Rawtherrapee works well with Sony ARW files now. But none of them offer the embedded profiles from the ARW file, sony has six of them. But Rawtherapee uses the standard profile, Camera ST as is shown in Lightroom but Rawtherapee doesn't show the name. And can't select a different profile. But Darktable doesn't show a good starting point at all, no matter what I do. it's completely useless. Standard color matrix shows pale image, Adobe ARGB shows oversaturated, overexposed, over contrasted image. I stil lahven't figured out how to have decent starting point. Also some bugs, so turning on lens correction in Standard color matrix makes highlights magenta, switching it fixes it. same with other color features. I don't know if it's only with ARW files. A big plus forr me with Darktable is the map uses Open Street Map, so I can accurately place the photos on the map, as it shows trails and objects I can't see in Google Satellite image in Lightroom. So can place the pic on a specific spot on a trail. Rawtherapee doesn't have a map. The Lightroom map is useless if it's not pictures from a street, if it's in the forest on some trail, I had to use Geosetter to solve it. But In Darktable I don't have to as it has OSM. And I contribute to OSM so my local area is very accurate.

[@donperegrine922]

"For example, Look at this random set of option in the LAB area.......hhmm" Thanks for the insight...I have no idea what the problem is when you don't discuss it.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

I assume your post is sarcastic. However, in my opinion, it is self-edvident that it is a user interface nightmare. And that's enough for me. No need to discuss it. Thanks.

[@sherab2078]

Ok... I won't argue with the general conclusion. I've been using RT for a couple of years now, but even after a few days of getting to know DT, I can admit it feels better in some respects. However, I feel that the topic of interface wasn't very objective. I guess this is a case of getting used to. When switching from RT, for me it is the DT interface that feels unintuitive, to be honest. And I constantly make the mistake of scrolling over it to... well... to scroll, but instead I change some settings. There is the option in DT to display images as already processed for export, but by default, DT uses a simplified display similar to RT and this view is very misleading when it comes to saturation and contrast levels. I'm not sure isn't this even worse than in RT. Of course, the option to see the final high-quality render saves the day but it is really slow indeed. What annoys me too is that despite using 'intents', such as 'perceptual' or 'relative colourimetric', if we don't bring the out-of-gamut colours back into it manually, they will stay blown in the exported picture. According to DT checkers, they are blown in gamut but not in luminance - in luminance they should be well in the export colour space. Still, those pixels are substituted by white in the final picture. Despite all the effort put into them by creators, highlights recovery modules seem to be doing a relatively poor job. Their counterparts in RT are not perfect either but somehow I got better results with them. But those things aside, I feel DT better indeed. However, I would say it is somewhat overengineered for pictures that do not require so much precision tweaking. On the other hand, I find more difficulties with saving crappy images - I get better effects in RT in this department. But this may be on me, and I am not getting to know the tools at my disposal well enough in DT.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Thank you very much for your comment. I respect that. To some extent, it is almost impossible to be unbiased WRT to user interfaces. I do think the darktable one is a bit simpler, especially because the masking system is unified across all modules BUT I also know that darktable can appear unintuitive, too. Regardless, it's great to have your perspective!

[@JZStudiosonline]

I just tried to use rawtherapee and was immediately annoyed they don't have full screen preview, or at least it isn't an obvious choice and there's no hotkey. It's way faster in DT to load up your folder of images, hit F to fullscreen preview, and then just cycle through them and reject/rate photos. It also doesn't fill up the screen width in the file browser correctly, which is a personal pet peeve. There's just awkward empty space on the right side of all the images and zooming in and out is awkward and just makes that gap wider or narrower. The correct solution is to fit to width divided by images shown with zoom adding or removing images per row. Third, I took some images with raw+jpeg and by default DT stacks these and shows you the jpeg until you edit the raw, which then swaps over to raw primary. Rawtherapee doesn't stack them, it's a filter thing, and you can't have them stacked while also hiding trashed images. Then there's stuff like modules don't turn on automatically when you make adjustments, the zooming is weird, etc. The only plus it has over DT is using the scroll wheel without accidentally changing things. Even then though, that's a tradeoff because in RT you need to hold a key to make adjustments with scroll wheel and DT still has a scroll bar you can scroll on.

[@fintonmainz7845]

How does Darktable compare for Black and White?

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

I think darktable has some very interesting options for black and white, especially because you can be creative with tones using several modules like the color lookup table. I haven't experimented too much with Rawtherapee's version though.

[@Eigil_Skovgaard]

In Darktable a High quality processing button has been added lately in order to render the output on the screen exactly as it would be at the end of the pipe-line (it can slow the process down on less speedy computers, but it is very nice to have). The definitive killer difference though is between the masking systems. In this regard Darktable is superior and very, very useful. The attribute list for the masks, details, feathering, blurring, opacity, contrast, is impressive on top of the primary functionality of drawn and parametric masks. Likewise the Mask manager enables control and set logic (I wish the full masking features could be applied to the primary functions of the Retouch module too).

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

That is right. In terms of masking, with the exception of machine-learning subject selection, no software can beat darktable in its masking flexibility.

[@TheIvanDM]

Raw Therapee has nice real film emulation presets collection, called "HaldCLUT" or smth

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

NIce. Thanks for letting us know!

[@ahman324]

Darktable supports it as well in "LUT 3D" module

[@asificam1]

Would be nice if they would both work together so that you can process some things in one and the rest in the other. That would be nice to leverage RawTherapee's dark frame subtraction and then have darktable do the more advanced edits.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Indeed!

[@RickScheibner]

I completely disagree about the organization of DT vs RT. I prefer RT because of how it's laid out and doesn't look cluttered.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Maybe it depends a little on what you are used to. To me, RT looks much more cluttered.

[@zoubialazebrette6029]

Thanks for this video ! I would really like to hear more about the fact that you can't see the end result in Raw therapee until the photo has been exported. I'm quite surprised that this doesn't seem to bother anyone. How do you work around that ?? I would have thought that this would make a software utterly useless. Apparently not ! Can some users of Raw Therapee talk about this please ? Like is it OK if you're a pro or something. Thank you so much in advance !

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

It does make it faster. And you can see a LOT of the end result, like the effects of tone curves and color adjustments. But you can't see pixel-level sharpness. You can use the multi-preview zoom tool (shows 100% crops for small areas) to work around it.

[@zoubialazebrette6029]

@WildEarthPhoto Thank you very much for your answer ! Now to choose lol

[@GerhardBothaWFF]

I find RT lack things that matter like dealing properly with exif data and so on. I stopped using it because it discards most things from my R7 exif data files. Looks like RT only develops improvements for Nikon snd Fuji users. DT scene referred workflows are superior and the denoising is far superior. DT is now my preferred raw editor

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

I didn't know that it had trouble with EXIF data. Do you mean it just can't read the data or that it is not present in the exported JPEGs? But I agree with the rest of your post, especially with the filmic and sigmoid modules. They handle highlights much better than RT does.

[@training7574]

Very useful info and crisp presentation, thanks.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Thank you!

[@58Tommy]

Darktable can handle sony A7Rv raw compressed files.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Do you mean "can" or "can't"? If it can, that is good. If it can't, that is bad.

[@adamd3145]

I an just starting, that was very helpful. Thank you.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

You are welcome. Don't forget to try both to see which one suits your needs!

[@GeorgeStar]

Can you compare darktable and digiKam?

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

I will try.

[@LosingMyCool]

Technically darktable has before/after as well

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Oh yeah? Do you mean just using the history stack? That's not as convenient as other programs.

[@LosingMyCool]

@@JasonPolakPhotography Sure, I agree with you, it's not as good as a strictly before/after but very good for comparing before/after in your history, and very good if you make snapshots.

[@desotopete]

Darktable module names are confusing and not intuitive.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Will have to disagree on that. What's wrong with unbounded p-adic Fourier-Weissman Transform with Trisecting Wavelet Phase Decomposition?

[@desotopete]

@@JasonPolakPhotography lol.

[@maggiem1323]

Love your channel.

[@JasonPolakPhotography]

Thanks!