Other presets are available, and I found that in some cases I could get an image I’m happy with much faster than in Lightroom. Sometimes the results (light painting or not) to look a bit over-processed, but this can be scaled back with a single slider if required. I found this to work very well in some cases (so well that limited further editing was required), but fall flat on its face with other photos. One of Luminar’s selling points is its Accent AI filter that can quickly, and automatically optimise a photo. There are plenty of online videos, a manual, and instructional web pages to help with learning how to use the software. When first starting up Luminar you just need to point it at the relevant location (or locations) of photos – easy. This finally gives a Lightroom style management of photo files. You can’t have failed to notice the heavy advertising for Skylum Luminar (who also make Aurora HDR) on social media, but does the advertising live up to the hype? After a long wait, digital asset management (DAM) functionality was added to Luminar 3 in December 2018. This review looks at my recent experience with trialling Skylum Luminar (2×14 day trials), and ON1 Photo RAW (31 day trial), and how they performed when developing RAW files from light painting photography sessions. However many photographers have a dislike of Adobe’s business practices (notably the subscription only model) and are looking for cheaper, but still capable alternatives. Adobe Lightroom is one of the most popular RAW converters for good reason. At typical viewing angles, this image looked much better with all the retained detail as before.Light painting photography can require RAW processing software to be pushed to the extreme, as dynamic range often needs to be maximised, shadows and highlights recovered, and colours controlled. Notice the graininess, which gave the overall image a busy, grainy look.ĭarktable 3.1, non-local means profiled denoise at 1.4 strength. In order to illustrate this, and without further ado, I took a screenshot of a segment of an image of the Varied Honeyeater I took at the Cairns Esplanade in Queensland (I tried to crop it to be illustrative, and about the right viewing zoom if I were to print or view on screen):ĭarktable 2.4 (2.6 is similar), non-local means profiled denoise at 1.4 strength. It smooths out more noise without losing too much detail and it looks great at "typical viewing distances and zoom levels". Even with the defaults it looks pretty good. I'm glad to report that darktable has a revamped "Profiled Denoise" module. Secondly, by turning it up to try and get rid of that grainy look, it obliterated a little too much detail.Īnd, as we birders know, high shutter speeds and dark rainforests do not make clean images, even with today's great sensors. First, on a typical viewing distance/zoom of an image, it left a pretty graining "look" to the image. Before darktable 3, I was never satisfied with the basic output for two reasons. Darktable's primary denoise module is called "Profiled Denoise", and uses "profiles" for each camera model to do custom denoising. That gap between the two has narrowed significantly with darktable 3. It was possible to get satisfactory results with some work, but this is the one area where Adobe Lightroom and Aftershot Pro were much easier to use. However, darktable has always had one drawback in my opinion, and that is with denoising. It's really hard to believe this is an open-source program. First, I'd like to say that darktable is still outstanding. There are obviously a lot of changes from the 2.x series to the 3.x series. In fact, I'm using 3.1 right now on Linux. Anyway, as another thread has announced, darktable 3.0 is out. I believe the first version I used was around 1.4. I've been a darktable user since about 2015.
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