I take photos on my phone and on my camera. The workflow on the phone is easy: snap a picture, edit in SnapSpeed, post online through ImagePipe, done. On the camera, things are more cumbersome: take a bunch of photos of the same thing, download everything from the SD card to the Synology, and… forget about it.

Photos from the camera need work. At the very least, I need to shrink them (my Sony’s ARW files are around 10MB and 6000 pixels wide) and export them to JPGs. These two things are both done in Darktable. While I’m there, I’m doing some editing.

That last part, working with Darktable, is easy as long as you know what you’re doing. Finding help, even in the official documentation, is time-consuming. You can’t compare the amount of work done by 1.5 volunteers to the work done by 100 professionals.

LinkedIn learning videos give you 60 hits as soon as you type in “lightroom.” Darktable? Zero. Other video tutorials are around 2 years old and geared toward specific techniques. Still, I managed to learn Darktable and use it for three years.

I have hard time seeing my toolbar icons, which are in dark gray over black background, because the program picks up my Linux’s dark theme. Changing the color scheme is not always as straightforward as you’d think. The icons themselves can change from one version of Darktable to the next. Keyboard shortcuts don’t show next to the menu items, so you have to figure them out as well.

I want to reach for my camera more often. I’m itching to take photos. I’m going to Italy soon, and I want to fill up my SD card. Sitting in front of Darktable and scratching my head trying to understand how to make certain parts of an image stand out could be fun, but not when you have 10 of those; each one requires different adjustments. This is usually why I leave my camera behind. My phone is capable of basic photo editing which allows me to do what I want much faster.

When I bought the camera in 2019, I was excited to learn about photography (Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO = the holy trinity.) My photography skills have improved since then, but my software skills remain the same. Darktable started to slow me down instead of helping me to get the most out of my photos. It isn’t the lack of wanting to learn that did it: it’s the lack of finding information. Sure, you can search and find 10 good tutorials about Darktable, but they’re going to be outdated, too specific, or both.

And another thing. In GIMP, which I also use to edit photos, you need to search for “What is Free Transform in GIMP” to learn that you need “Unified Transform.” In other words, if you don’t know Photoshop, you’re going to have a hard time being proficient in its FOSS alternative. That’s what happens when professionals who use commercial products build a FOSS alternative. They use professional terms. Even the keyboard shortcut for Unified Transform in GIMP is Shift + T, imitating CTRL + T in Photoshop.

Can you explain how to use Mastodon without being able to compare it to Twitter? Sure. Will you write a manual from the ground up instead of explaining something like “On Mastodon, ‘retweeting’ is boosting”? Eh, not so much. We humans build on foundations we know.

It took me an hour to learn which version of Lightroom I need (Classic) if I want to work with photos on my hard drive, along with a complete set of features. Also learned in the same hour: how to open folders and collections from within the program, how to find the shortcut keys for zooming in/out and cropping, and how to do minor edits. The same things took me more than a day with Darktable.

If I want to take a photography course, I need to have Adobe programs. If I want to go on a photo walk with a local group and discuss photography, I better be talking Photoshop and Lightable. And if I want to spend less time learning software and more time walking around snapping pictures and not worrying about how to edit them later, Well…