It’s a lot easier to do this in Darktable. Each adjustment brick allows user to create a parametric mask. What’s a parametric mask? Parametric mask allow users to mask based on conditions such as hue, saturation, RGB channels, LAB channels (awesome for outdoor shoot where you have a lot green leaves and need seperation), etc. 

i’m thinking of migration from OS X and Aperture to Ubuntu and Darktable when I leave Yosemite and Aperture behind. No Lightroom or Capture One Pro for me. I am not getting trapped by any company especially Adobe.

I’m primarily an Aperture user because that’s where my master library is located. As you know, moving from one workflow to another is rather difficult. With a large library, i’m still wondering the best approach to move forward. When i Apple announced the death of Aperture, I started trying a lot of options out there. I have long experience with unix and unix-like OS’s so the open-source Darktable is an option for me. The good news is Darktable is available for the OS X.

Compared to Aperture and Lightroom, it’s more like Lightroom in the sense that it is modal based Lightroom. For example, there’s a mode for development, for importing, tethering and maps. This would be a somewhat strange setup for Aperture users.

There are some quarks. The folders don’t sync like they do in Lightroom when the references change. For Aperture users, the concept of folder is different so they will not understand what I’m talking about.

I also want to mention, Darktable has an insane numbers of setting. is that good or bad? whether, that depends on the user. Some users like set every possible option like how Open CL is rendering images in real-time. For others, that be really confusing.

I found Darktable to have a relatively refine UI for an open-source software. Here’s what I found that’s most amazing about Darktable.

It’s easy to do frequency domain editing!! Can’t do that in Aperture. Can’t do that in Lightroom. You can do a high and low frequency separation in Photoshop but it’s a multi-step process. The beta of Affinity Photo (i’ve been using it) can do it in one filter step. Gimp is can breakdown more than high and low frequency. It can breakdown as many mid-band passes as the user sets. Darktable’s Equalizer adjustment brick has a continuous spectrum from low frequency to high frequency. Sweet!!!!

The masking features are a learning curve for sure. it also maintains a history of masks and users can create pre-sets of the masks. Cannot do that with Aperture. I couldn’t even do lift and stamp on a selection in Aperture.

I personally think you’ll like Darktable because you like digging around into the minute details of everything!!!

It works on unix and unix-like OS’s. No Windows support. OS X, Solaris, BSD, Ubuntu, Mint OS and other gnu/linux distros.

To answer your questions, I’ve used Darketable but it’s not my main workflow since I’m an Aperture user and that’s why I read your content which i find to be excellent.  Let me know how I how can contribute. I’ll have to see if I can schedule for it.

Thanks.

Actually, Aperture’s Vibrancy is a special case of this and mask out skin tones (instead of luminosity). we can adjust the saturation and with skin colors masked out. i often use this when i want to adjust the saturation on everything but red (such de-saturate everything but the red rose).