I've tried to use Darktable as replacement, and there's no comparison in terms of UX and functionality (within the specific use case that Lightroom is intended for).
I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.
I personally use Darktable to process my raw photos for some time. While I didn't use Lightroom for any considerable amount of time, I've found that Darktable can process relatively modern raw files (A7III in my case) easily and with pretty high quality.
What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far.
For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.
The problem is UX, so it's not missing something in the sense that it's not possible to achieve something, rather, that something is very easy to achieve for somebody who's not an expert.
The last time I've tested Darktable was quite some time ago, but, on top of my head:
- dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
- pano stitching
- auto retouching; experts clearly don't care about this, but for a non-expert, it produces an easy base to work on (assuming it has a very solid implementation)
- I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
I'm sure all of the above "can be done" in any software (in particularly, the last one), but that's not really the point - the point is how easy it is for a non-expert to effectively use all of them. I remember just going through each panel, and applying effects by moving sliders. That's a great UX experience for non-experts - experts can use Photoshop.
I understand for what you saying, but when I started to use Darktable (>=2.4.x and 3.x to be exact), giving an hour of poking allowed me to understand most of its basic operation. So latest iterations of Darktable is not obscure like earlier versions of Blender. It's much more discoverable.
> dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
Darktable has a dehaze filter and it works very well, but didn't compare with LR TBH.
> pano stitching
Didn't need it yet, so no comments here.
> auto retouching;
Darktable auto settings for some tools, but I didn't dig deeper since I don't use auto stuff much, TBH.
> I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
It's exactly the same in Darktable. Plus it has a very solid perspective detection and correction tool.
I'm not a photo pro. Just an enthusiast if you're eager to put a level. I explored Darktable exactly the way you've told. Just open an image, open a category and play with sliders, that's all.
Main thing I find Lightroom is superior compared to Darktable is being able apply adjustments consistently across groups of photos. You might have say 6 photos all taken of the same subject in the same conditions. You adjust one the way you want, and then literally copy and paste the categories of settings from one to all the other photos you want. Darktable doesn't seem to have that sort of workflow to get through hundreds of photos quickly.
This is perfectly doable in Darktable too. You can either save the adjustments you want as a style or just copy the history stack and paste to other images.
I have a Canon point and shoot that I use for underwater photos and Darktable really doesn't cope well with some of the RAW files. I believe it's related to the zoom. I also vastly prefer Lightroom's overall workflow. That may be something that could be fixed with adjustment, though.
I use Darktable. It is not as ergonomic as Lightroom but since it has enough actual functionality I gladly take it over having to deal with all that subscription insanity in general and dealing with Adobe in particular.
I just do not use software that has no perpetual licenses except when required by client and client pays for it.
Last year I used Darktable and Lightroom side by side. They were both steaming piles of crap. Lots of bugs, crashes, and extremely high CPU usages. Darktable was slightly less buggy on MacOS but not much. Lightroom was easier to figure out but I’m not really using anything but basic features on both apps.
Similarly I used Darktable under OS X and didn't hit to any bugs. Exporting files require some patience since it maxes all cores at once, but nothing crashed or burned during the journey.
I do not remember Darktable ever crashing on me (well I am not professional and maybe not using all the features heavily). Also I use it less than a year, maybe older versions were less stable. I use it on Windows which can be a factor as well.
I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.