Don't Break The Bank on Lightroom, Try Darkroom Instead!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 พ.ค. 2022
- With almost every software jumping to subscriptions, its time for new software to rise to the usefulness of the giants of yesterday.
Darkroom is a universal iOS, iPadOS, and macOS app that has an affordable pricing point and features that challenge the traditional Lightroom workflows.
With darkroom's latest update adding masking, I won't ever need to pay for a Lightroom subscription again. That was the only feature I was missing from Lightroom and thanks to my lifetime subscription to darkroom, I got the update for free. They still offer a lifetime subscription so if you are considering an alternative I highly recommend this app.
It is simpler to use than Lightroom, however some features of Lightroom are not directly available in the darkroom app. Those features are more useful for paid photographers and the general hobbyist does not usually need those.
This video was made using my new screen casting setup with a few amazon video lights, a blue yeti x mic, my canon 90d with 17-55 f/2.8 ef-s usm lens, a calming 4k, screenflick 3, Final Cut Pro x, audiio, m1 Mac mini, and darkroom.
If you liked this video, feel free to like, comment and subscribe for future episodes of Blaine Miller Photography. Im planning on taking some photography trips this summer and will hopefully be making more videos much like this one.
Great review! Also thanks for the info on the masks, I have only been using the foreground and background masks but I will haft to try the others one day.I love this app to edit my movie screenshots.
Glad it was helpful!
Yes, very helpful info on masks, thanks.
Great video
just FYI DR with just icloud photos library. If you have a different workflow such as shoot from digital camera or take raw photos on iPhone but manage them locally, it will not work.
hi Blaine. Great overview. im looking to move away from LR. can i ask if there is an option to export to icloud folders as i already have that setup how i like my folders. also does it have a healing brush and is it good. cheers in advance.
I still like using Darkroom and it works great for my simple workflow that uses Apple Photos for my primary working storage for my photos. What that means is I use iCloud with Apple Photos and Darkroom can read and write directly to my assets in Apple Photos which in turn syncs to my iCloud account. As for using folders on iCloud Drive Dark room can export to any folder on your Mac but it doesn't necessarily read and write in the app after that, so If you wanting a way to sync edits of sorts using Apple Photos with your iCloud account works great. All albums in Apple Photos show up in Dark Room making it easy to flip between them any time. As for a healing brush, I know the tool you're referring to and sadly Dark Room doesn't have that feature yet. For things like that I like to use Affinity Photo or if it's a simple edit Apple Photos I believe has a similar tool but less powerful than Affinity Photo's toolset. Affinity Photo is like photoshop though. For mobile I think the crew behind Pixelmator that has won several apple awards has a new app named Pixelmator Photos that has some rather powerful tools including the healing brush feature. Overall there are other options that offer pay once and use as long as you want pricing models that work great and are easy to use. Adobe doesn't have the strongest hold for photography software anymore. There tools are still great and if you have the budget for them then I think they will work great, I just don't see the value spending hundreds of dollars every year for software I maybe use 8 times out of the year seeing as I'm a hobbyist photography and don't make money from my photography.
@@blainemillerphotography Thanks for taking the time to reply Blaine. I dont like using files located on my hardware so i went for affinity 2 which seems more compatible with cloud use. still a few quirks but more usable. ill check back over time to see if darkroom becomes more friendly
Nice review. I don't see the exif data such as Shutter speed, aperture and iso anywhere. In lightroom you can see this under the histogram.
In the 3 dots menu it has a show metadata button and that pops up a view where you can read the exif data.
Love the video man, but next time please turn down the back ground music. I was straining to hear what you were saying the entire video.
Sorry yeah I was still figuring out how I wanted to mix my audio and I think I got it dialed in for my next video.
I switched to using AI tools to mix the audio better than I can. I tried watching TH-cam videos to learn and I think with AI being as good as it is now I will just use it instead. The latest video about mobile photography used the noise removal and does not have background music and I now have more AI tools that handle EQ, Compression and Limiters and it really sounds great so next video should sound the best. I’m not an audio engineer and I don’t know much more than “oh that sounds so much better” haha. Thanks for watching though, I appreciate it!
Hello Blaine!Are you happy editing videos instead of photos on this software?
I honestly prefer to use Final Cut Pro X to edit videos to share, but for simple single clip edits for color grading and even watermarking Darkroom works just fine for quick on the go edits. For more involved mobile edits I like to use another paid iOS app named VideoLeap and it is quite capable but I have also used several other options to varying degrees including Luma Fusion and a few apps that were bought by GoPro a while back. With the iPad having Final Cut Pro X for a surprise though could prove useful if I don't want to take my MacBook Pro for whatever reason. There are so many different options and apps for different purposes each with pros and cons but Darkroom fills a niche for my use case.
Wrong question surely. If you think that Darkroom will suffice instead of LR you were looking for the wrong solution. They are very different products. BTW I prefer Photomator to Darkroom but use the LR Adobe suite for most of my photography.
Yeah since I made this video, I released a video about Photomater and I prefer it over this and have used Photomater almost exclusively for most of my photo developing needs. Lightroom is a photo organizing, and culling software with some really good raw developing features. It is useful and for some it's worth the monthly ongoing costs associated with it. For many though its more features than are needed and thats why the market has several viable alternatives at varying levels of features to fit each persons needs. The roadmap for Photomator has me excited though and the features they already rolled out have been very helpful to my workflow.
BRING BACK APERTURE
Yeah, I was introduced to Aperture a few months before they pulled it from availability and I do agree that Apple should have some pro tool offering for photography in their current pro tools lineup. I mean they have FCPX for video and Logix Pro X for audio. I am surprised Apple dropped a photography pro tool from their lineup. I do think that iOS 16's Photos updates with Bulk Edits is nice to be included for free. I also like to use Serif apps like Affinity Photo but they are not quite as simple to use as Aperture was. I truly think Dark Room still fills a void that Lightroom charges way too much for.
Darkroom works great on iOS and iPadOS as well if you have either.
I don't wanna break the bank on buying mac
Factoring in all variables the Mac was the best investment I ever made in my career and has saved me countless hours from troubleshooting windows or linux issues. By all means use the tools that work best for you, just for me my Mac works well.