8 ms·

Darktable 2.4.0 released

234 points by trop 9y ago

IgorPartola 9y ago
I only started using darktable recently. It’s been great with the exception of speed and the MacOS UI having tiny controls. I have a reasonably powerful MacBook Pro and would have expected it to handle things like changing exposure levels pretty quickly. But honestly I can’t complain because this thing allows me to make decent photos fantastic.
- sowbug 9y ago
  Since you recently climbed the learning curve and might have this fresh in your mind, how do you understand the history function? Sometimes do something and then want to undo it. This isn't easy for me in darktable -- it seems control-z does nothing, there are no standard menus, and every time I've touched the history section on the left side of the application, I end up destroying much more work than I intended. In case that is an X-Y question, how do I undo in darktable?
  - ePierre 9y ago
    > it seems control-z does nothing Normally v2.4.0 improves this. As stated in their release notes: “Add undo support for masks and more intelligent grouping of undo steps”. Basically, in v2.2, even low-level operations that didn't have a visible impact were in the undo list, so when you pressed Ctrl+Z it would undo something, but you wouldn't see any change. You would actually have to press Ctrl+Z several times to finally see something on the screen. This was changed and should be more human-friendly :) > how do you understand the history function? This is indeed a little bit more complicated that just a list of things to undo. You can read a bit more about it in the user manual: https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.html#pixelpipe https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.ht...
dysoco 9y ago
I somehow confused this with 'Lighttable' and was really confused about why printing was such an important issue.
SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
So, is this a good replacement for Picasa on windows? In my case, mainly for viewing and editing Canon raw format photos?
- Andrenid 9y ago
  It's nowhere near as good as Picasa or Lightroom for bulk editing, sharing, and general photo library management. But it absolutely destroys Picasa for the actual editing of raw files. I'd say if post processing is your focus, it's without a doubt worth the switch. If you're more of a "shoot lots and manage in bulk", then no. I personally find the file/library management aspect of Darktable so lacking that it's personally useless to me. I absolutely despise Adobe and would pay double what I give them for a decent Lightroom alternative, but it just doesn't exist yet and won't anytime soon.
  - k2enemy 9y ago
    I'm in the same boat as you. I tried Darktable, Capture One, On1, AfterShot Pro, etc. None of them were close to Lightroom. Then, with low expectations I tried Exposure X3 (https://www.alienskin.com/exposure/ https://www.alienskin.com/exposure/) and now I've completely replaced Lightroom with it. It might not work for you, but I was pleasantly surprised.
- frik 9y ago
  I succeeded in installing the discontinued "Windows Live Photo Gallery" on Win7, despite M$ efforts to burn down all old pre-Win10 tents. On Win both Picasa (also discontinued), Lightroom (non-cloud also discontinued), and various open source alternatives are less polished and slower than Photo Gallery. I will try out Darktables 2.4. The cool thing of Windows Live Photo Gallery is that everything is saved back to the file. If you tag a photo (even hierarchy tags like Places/City/NewYorkCity) the tag is stored also in the photo file, so when you copy somewhere else, all metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPC) is still there. And all photos are NOT-imported to a central database. So you can organize the photos like you want and Photo Gallery just indexes the folders and stores thumbnails and metadata in a central database file for fast viewing and searching. Most a alternatives to a Photo Gallery want to import all photos to a special directory or even to a central database (see Picasa, and Lightroom) which is like iTunes where all your metadata like the 5 star rating sits then in a central database - that is soooo wrong!! - instead of storing the changes back to the photo files.
contravariant 9y ago
Is the home page supposed to contain placeholder like phrases? Such as: >Mention that having (photographer) developers as part of the target audience is good for understanding the real world problems, challenges, and workflows. >Something about capability - highlight about some big important features! Maybe mention flexibility here (ease of writing new modules). >Something about community, mailing list, maybe discuss forum, and the Flickr page? Number of contributors (indicate health of the project and users). Some other metric of vitality of the community (possibly how to get involved)?
- randoaccount108 9y ago
  Can't say, but it actually seems pretty forced, like a joke. All of those placeholders actually link to the resources they'd want. I'd guess it's a poke at regular start-up style "We are awesome because X" statements on their home page.
  - coppolaemilio 9y ago
    It is a joke :)
    - randoaccount108 9y ago
      I actually appreciate it, it seemed a little too curated for placeholders :p
- ePierre 9y ago
  I just assumed it was a work in progress... the rest of the pages seems finished, maybe they didn't put the final version of the index page online :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
acidburnNSA 9y ago
The big news with this release is that it's the first to support Windows. I've been using this on linux for a year as a hobbyist Photographer and it's exceedingly glorious. Have not tried out the Windows build but apparently you can do that now [1]. Also if you want to learn a lot about "developing" digital photographs (it really is a digital darkroom), I learned a lot from this youtube list of 42 Darktable tutorial edit sessions [2]. Very powerful and fun stuff. [1] https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-windows/ https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-windows/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-zRRM1...
- old-gregg 9y ago
  What kind of camera are you using? I've been trying _hard_ to switch from Lightroom to Darktable and so far I have been failing to even match the output of in-camera JPEG engine of my Canon 5D Mk4... The skin tone is just not there... like it knows what highlights are and what shadows are but loses something in the middle. Well-lit RAW are fine, but when the light is challenging I always get better results in Lightroom or Canon's RAW converter (or even in-camera JPEGs) although that's actually when RAW is supposed to help the most.
  - pvdebbe 9y ago
    You may have to experiment with different base curves or even make your own one. I don't know much about the underlying theory but I lamented how I couldn't push the shadows in Fujifilm files (halos like hell) and people suggested that I should make my own basecurve and that would help a lot. My new camera has an excellent base curve that hasn't needed any adjusting.
  - acidburnNSA 9y ago
    I'm using a Canon Rebel T5i with Magic Lantern. It gets tones really well for me. Sorry it's not performing for you well.
    - deftturtle 9y ago
jaaames 9y ago
It's a shame open source projects with great features still have astoundingly bad copywriting. No one cares about it having a database behind the scenes or the upgrade/downgrade process, tell me what it can do and how it compares to the real alternative, Adobe Lightroom.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Adobe Lightroom is not free so its the not at the same level. Nobody compares Blender on the same level as Maya either.
  - jwagenet 9y ago
    I'd disagree with the Blender example. I think GIMP and Inkscape are a notch or two behind their counterparts, but Blender can do almost all the things Maya or Max can, with the primary downsides being ui/workflow shortcomings and industry adoption.
    - frik 9y ago
      3DMax, Maya, SketchUp, FreeCAD, SolidEdge, SolidWorks, CREO, CATIA, etc all have a traditional Win95 style UI with menu bar, toolbar and/or ribbonbar. Only Blender is the ugly swan, that still has this inhouse-style homegrown UI from the early 1990s UNIX where Blender originated. Nothing in a Blender works as expected, the mouse buttons are opposite to everyone else, the toolbars go all over the place and spam the workspace, no tabs, weird floating windows, keyboard shortcuts from hell, camera controls like coded by 5 year old kid, and so on. Even GIMP has a more sane UI, it's actually not that bad at all. But don't get me started on Blender. Blender needs a complete new UI, otherwise it would be such a shame, the program is good but it's very user hostile and the interface has a step learning curve for no reason at all, and the devs see no reason at all to get over their pride and will never change Blender's UI, which is unfortunate. So maybe someone forks Blender and scraps the old UI and adds a sane UI comparable to industry alternatives - it would help adoption of Blender a lot. Sometimes it looks like they get paid to keep Blender lower key, so that Maya and co still can be sold.
    - 9y ago
pmoriarty 9y ago
As a long time GIMP user, coming to Darktable has been a revelation. I'm super impressed with how powerful and polished Darktable is, and overall I really love it. On the other hand, Darktable has some serious issues that make it less than ideal for me. First, on my old laptop Darktable is super, super slow... especially when the image I'm editing has lots of operations performed on it. In that case, performing a simple operation on top of the existing ones or just zooming in or out could take a full minute, and exporting a single image could take 30 minutes or more (compared to GIMP, which takes less than a minute). Just going from lighttable to darkroom or back could take multiple minutes. Second, some operations are just much easier and more intuitive to do in GIMP. For example, making perspective changes in GIMP using the perspective tool -- you just drag the corners of the image where you want them. In Darktable you're limited to moving sliders around, which is far more annoying. Finally, Darktable is mostly geared towards improving photograph quality, while GIMP is more of an all-around image editor and drawing/painting program which can improve the quality of photographs but is not limited to that but can do much more.
- unixhero 9y ago
  Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop handles a modern software, even a brand new version, with shitty performance. Media processing be it images or video isn't made for old laptops.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    "Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop handles a modern software with a shitty performance." Well, GIMP has new software releases all the time, and works quickly on my old laptop. You can't blame the fact that Darktable is slow on it being new.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    I think he/she can and did. I used Adobe Photoshop on a 60 MHz Power Macintosh in 1996 and was quite productive with it. The word "software" is a mass or uncountable noun. It has no plural form. Thus "a modern software" is grammatically incorrect.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
For those that (like me) have never heard of it before (since the info isn’t on the linked page): darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
bedros 9y ago
I wish they support photo management, at least import photos into organized folders by date
- jasonjayr 9y ago
  I was excitedly looking for how they manage this, but alas, it looks like not well :( Is there any tools nowadays that: (a) Lets the user keep Favorited/marked images in a local storage location (b) 'ages-out' other files to secondary storage pools (removable disks, cloud storage) (c) Keeps Low-res thumbnails of all images in the collection? I keep trying to find something that would help keep tabs on a growing collection of images, with growing file sizes from newer cameras, but it all seems like doing it manually is the only way to go :(
  - kam 9y ago
    For my workflow, I copy from the camera SD card to an external HDD, then import to Darktable from there. It stores its thumbnails and database under my home directory, and I can ensure it has thumbnails and medium-resolution previews of all photos with `darktable-generate-cache`. On any photo, I can click "copy locally" [1], and it syncs it to my internal SSD so I can edit without the HDD plugged in. [1] http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/local_copies.html http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/local_copies.html
- vvanders 9y ago
  Yeah, this is where Lightroom really does well at. For a good photo workflow you not only need something that can process raws but also let you deal with 500+ images in a manner where you don't spend hours culling/sorting.
- PuffinBlue 9y ago
  Yep, and they steadfastly refuse to do so. Its myopic. Photo editing requires photo management to do efficiently. Even the built in filesystem access is poor. Nothing on Linux is acceptable though, so they're not alone, it's just sad that something so promising is so hobbled.
bitL 9y ago
As Adobe has released the very last non-cloud Lightroom, I guess it's time to move to its "negative" - Darktable.
- kyriakos 9y ago
  Thats not true. There are two versions of Lightroom, the cloud one and Lightroom Classic. The Classic is the continuation of the regular desktop version and from what I understand its not going anywhere. Adobe cannot afford to take the desktop version away from photographers cause unlike photoshop there is good (or even better) competitors (e.g. Capture One is chewing up Lightroom's market share being faster and according to a lot of photographers gives better results).
  - pvdebbe 9y ago
    The new Classic is what was formerly known as Lightroom Creative Cloud. So yes, it's a true desktop software but you need subscription.
  - bitL 9y ago
    I guess you are going to weep: https://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/12/6-14-now-available-last-perpetual-update-of-lightroom.html https://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/12/6-14-now-av...
    - PuffinBlue 9y ago
      I'm fine thanks. That's lightroom 6. Lightroom 7 (lightroom CC Classic) will be continuing just fine as a non-cloud product.
      - bitL 9y ago
        It's subscription, rent-seeking based now. I won't call that non-cloud. Cloud is useless anyway as it doesn't allow to upload RAWs and they obviously slapped it on Lr to justify switch to their individual user hostile model.
kyriakos 9y ago
First Time User on Windows, its a bit slow during import compared to lightroom (you can't see thumbnails unless you highlight the image file name - maybe I am doing this wrong so I am not sure). a couple of UI/UX issues I found: = When I open a tool panel from the "more modules" the panel is added to the tools but its collapsed instead of expanded. = some filters should be toned down (the sliders have very extreme results with minor movements, this makes it hard to fine tune) its a much more polished effort than gimp though. I'll keep an eye on darktable!
distagon 9y ago
Does it support Mac Os for current version? the display on my Linux box is not as good as on Imac.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bartvk 9y ago
  Yes: https://www.darktable.org/install/#macos https://www.darktable.org/install/#macos
pvdebbe 9y ago
I slowly warmed up to Darktable as I began to shoot raw in the summer. During the holidays I had access to a Winblows machine and tried the hyped Capture One... doesn't seem to hold candle for DT!
rcarmo 9y ago
This is great news. I’ve been using 2.2.5 for the past year on Mac and Linux, and it Is a great RAW editing tool. It does take some getting used to UI-wise (hopefully this release lets me use the trackpad more intuitively), but the non-destructive editing and effect masking are awesome.
phkahler 9y ago
One thing I really want DarkTable to allow is deletion of images. They say that any kind of file manager features will not be implemented, but IMHO it's a great preview tool and the ability to just delete poor shots would make it much better for triaging a new batch of photos.
- kqr 9y ago
  Darktable does deletion. If you press "delete" instead of "remove", files are deleted from the file system as well as the library.
wishinghand 9y ago
It's been said on Darktable's site and in here that it's not an option for maintaining a catalogue of photos. What would be a good companion app then? Until I figure something out, I'm waiting for Luminar or whatever Lightroom competitor that Affinity Software is going to come out with later in 2018.
- bakoo 9y ago
  Love the Affinity products, just wish they'd support linux.

234 points by trop 9y ago

I only started using darktable recently. It’s been great with the exception of speed and the MacOS UI having tiny controls. I have a reasonably powerful MacBook Pro and would have expected it to handle things like changing exposure levels pretty quickly. But honestly I can’t complain because this thing allows me to make decent photos fantastic.

sowbug 9y ago
Since you recently climbed the learning curve and might have this fresh in your mind, how do you understand the history function? Sometimes do something and then want to undo it. This isn't easy for me in darktable -- it seems control-z does nothing, there are no standard menus, and every time I've touched the history section on the left side of the application, I end up destroying much more work than I intended. In case that is an X-Y question, how do I undo in darktable?
- ePierre 9y ago
  > it seems control-z does nothing Normally v2.4.0 improves this. As stated in their release notes: “Add undo support for masks and more intelligent grouping of undo steps”. Basically, in v2.2, even low-level operations that didn't have a visible impact were in the undo list, so when you pressed Ctrl+Z it would undo something, but you wouldn't see any change. You would actually have to press Ctrl+Z several times to finally see something on the screen. This was changed and should be more human-friendly :) > how do you understand the history function? This is indeed a little bit more complicated that just a list of things to undo. You can read a bit more about it in the user manual: https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.html#pixelpipe https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.ht...

dysoco 9y ago

I somehow confused this with 'Lighttable' and was really confused about why printing was such an important issue.

SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago

So, is this a good replacement for Picasa on windows? In my case, mainly for viewing and editing Canon raw format photos?

Andrenid 9y ago
It's nowhere near as good as Picasa or Lightroom for bulk editing, sharing, and general photo library management. But it absolutely destroys Picasa for the actual editing of raw files. I'd say if post processing is your focus, it's without a doubt worth the switch. If you're more of a "shoot lots and manage in bulk", then no. I personally find the file/library management aspect of Darktable so lacking that it's personally useless to me. I absolutely despise Adobe and would pay double what I give them for a decent Lightroom alternative, but it just doesn't exist yet and won't anytime soon.
- k2enemy 9y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you. I tried Darktable, Capture One, On1, AfterShot Pro, etc. None of them were close to Lightroom. Then, with low expectations I tried Exposure X3 (https://www.alienskin.com/exposure/ https://www.alienskin.com/exposure/) and now I've completely replaced Lightroom with it. It might not work for you, but I was pleasantly surprised.
frik 9y ago
I succeeded in installing the discontinued "Windows Live Photo Gallery" on Win7, despite M$ efforts to burn down all old pre-Win10 tents. On Win both Picasa (also discontinued), Lightroom (non-cloud also discontinued), and various open source alternatives are less polished and slower than Photo Gallery. I will try out Darktables 2.4. The cool thing of Windows Live Photo Gallery is that everything is saved back to the file. If you tag a photo (even hierarchy tags like Places/City/NewYorkCity) the tag is stored also in the photo file, so when you copy somewhere else, all metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPC) is still there. And all photos are NOT-imported to a central database. So you can organize the photos like you want and Photo Gallery just indexes the folders and stores thumbnails and metadata in a central database file for fast viewing and searching. Most a alternatives to a Photo Gallery want to import all photos to a special directory or even to a central database (see Picasa, and Lightroom) which is like iTunes where all your metadata like the 5 star rating sits then in a central database - that is soooo wrong!! - instead of storing the changes back to the photo files.

contravariant 9y ago

Is the home page supposed to contain placeholder like phrases? Such as: >Mention that having (photographer) developers as part of the target audience is good for understanding the real world problems, challenges, and workflows. >Something about capability - highlight about some big important features! Maybe mention flexibility here (ease of writing new modules). >Something about community, mailing list, maybe discuss forum, and the Flickr page? Number of contributors (indicate health of the project and users). Some other metric of vitality of the community (possibly how to get involved)?

randoaccount108 9y ago
Can't say, but it actually seems pretty forced, like a joke. All of those placeholders actually link to the resources they'd want. I'd guess it's a poke at regular start-up style "We are awesome because X" statements on their home page.
- coppolaemilio 9y ago
  It is a joke :)
  - randoaccount108 9y ago
    I actually appreciate it, it seemed a little too curated for placeholders :p
ePierre 9y ago
I just assumed it was a work in progress... the rest of the pages seems finished, maybe they didn't put the final version of the index page online :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

acidburnNSA 9y ago

The big news with this release is that it's the first to support Windows. I've been using this on linux for a year as a hobbyist Photographer and it's exceedingly glorious. Have not tried out the Windows build but apparently you can do that now [1]. Also if you want to learn a lot about "developing" digital photographs (it really is a digital darkroom), I learned a lot from this youtube list of 42 Darktable tutorial edit sessions [2]. Very powerful and fun stuff. [1] https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-windows/ https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-windows/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-zRRM1...

old-gregg 9y ago
What kind of camera are you using? I've been trying _hard_ to switch from Lightroom to Darktable and so far I have been failing to even match the output of in-camera JPEG engine of my Canon 5D Mk4... The skin tone is just not there... like it knows what highlights are and what shadows are but loses something in the middle. Well-lit RAW are fine, but when the light is challenging I always get better results in Lightroom or Canon's RAW converter (or even in-camera JPEGs) although that's actually when RAW is supposed to help the most.
- pvdebbe 9y ago
  You may have to experiment with different base curves or even make your own one. I don't know much about the underlying theory but I lamented how I couldn't push the shadows in Fujifilm files (halos like hell) and people suggested that I should make my own basecurve and that would help a lot. My new camera has an excellent base curve that hasn't needed any adjusting.
- acidburnNSA 9y ago
  I'm using a Canon Rebel T5i with Magic Lantern. It gets tones really well for me. Sorry it's not performing for you well.
  - deftturtle 9y ago

jaaames 9y ago

It's a shame open source projects with great features still have astoundingly bad copywriting. No one cares about it having a database behind the scenes or the upgrade/downgrade process, tell me what it can do and how it compares to the real alternative, Adobe Lightroom.

ekianjo 9y ago
Adobe Lightroom is not free so its the not at the same level. Nobody compares Blender on the same level as Maya either.
- jwagenet 9y ago
  I'd disagree with the Blender example. I think GIMP and Inkscape are a notch or two behind their counterparts, but Blender can do almost all the things Maya or Max can, with the primary downsides being ui/workflow shortcomings and industry adoption.
  - frik 9y ago
    3DMax, Maya, SketchUp, FreeCAD, SolidEdge, SolidWorks, CREO, CATIA, etc all have a traditional Win95 style UI with menu bar, toolbar and/or ribbonbar. Only Blender is the ugly swan, that still has this inhouse-style homegrown UI from the early 1990s UNIX where Blender originated. Nothing in a Blender works as expected, the mouse buttons are opposite to everyone else, the toolbars go all over the place and spam the workspace, no tabs, weird floating windows, keyboard shortcuts from hell, camera controls like coded by 5 year old kid, and so on. Even GIMP has a more sane UI, it's actually not that bad at all. But don't get me started on Blender. Blender needs a complete new UI, otherwise it would be such a shame, the program is good but it's very user hostile and the interface has a step learning curve for no reason at all, and the devs see no reason at all to get over their pride and will never change Blender's UI, which is unfortunate. So maybe someone forks Blender and scraps the old UI and adds a sane UI comparable to industry alternatives - it would help adoption of Blender a lot. Sometimes it looks like they get paid to keep Blender lower key, so that Maya and co still can be sold.
  - 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago

As a long time GIMP user, coming to Darktable has been a revelation. I'm super impressed with how powerful and polished Darktable is, and overall I really love it. On the other hand, Darktable has some serious issues that make it less than ideal for me. First, on my old laptop Darktable is super, super slow... especially when the image I'm editing has lots of operations performed on it. In that case, performing a simple operation on top of the existing ones or just zooming in or out could take a full minute, and exporting a single image could take 30 minutes or more (compared to GIMP, which takes less than a minute). Just going from lighttable to darkroom or back could take multiple minutes. Second, some operations are just much easier and more intuitive to do in GIMP. For example, making perspective changes in GIMP using the perspective tool -- you just drag the corners of the image where you want them. In Darktable you're limited to moving sliders around, which is far more annoying. Finally, Darktable is mostly geared towards improving photograph quality, while GIMP is more of an all-around image editor and drawing/painting program which can improve the quality of photographs but is not limited to that but can do much more.

unixhero 9y ago
Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop handles a modern software, even a brand new version, with shitty performance. Media processing be it images or video isn't made for old laptops.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop handles a modern software with a shitty performance." Well, GIMP has new software releases all the time, and works quickly on my old laptop. You can't blame the fact that Darktable is slow on it being new.
- sowbug 9y ago
  I think he/she can and did. I used Adobe Photoshop on a 60 MHz Power Macintosh in 1996 and was quite productive with it. The word "software" is a mass or uncountable noun. It has no plural form. Thus "a modern software" is grammatically incorrect.

ComputerGuru 9y ago

For those that (like me) have never heard of it before (since the info isn’t on the linked page): darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

bedros 9y ago

I wish they support photo management, at least import photos into organized folders by date

jasonjayr 9y ago
I was excitedly looking for how they manage this, but alas, it looks like not well :( Is there any tools nowadays that: (a) Lets the user keep Favorited/marked images in a local storage location (b) 'ages-out' other files to secondary storage pools (removable disks, cloud storage) (c) Keeps Low-res thumbnails of all images in the collection? I keep trying to find something that would help keep tabs on a growing collection of images, with growing file sizes from newer cameras, but it all seems like doing it manually is the only way to go :(
- kam 9y ago
  For my workflow, I copy from the camera SD card to an external HDD, then import to Darktable from there. It stores its thumbnails and database under my home directory, and I can ensure it has thumbnails and medium-resolution previews of all photos with `darktable-generate-cache`. On any photo, I can click "copy locally" [1], and it syncs it to my internal SSD so I can edit without the HDD plugged in. [1] http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/local_copies.html http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/local_copies.html
vvanders 9y ago
Yeah, this is where Lightroom really does well at. For a good photo workflow you not only need something that can process raws but also let you deal with 500+ images in a manner where you don't spend hours culling/sorting.
PuffinBlue 9y ago
Yep, and they steadfastly refuse to do so. Its myopic. Photo editing requires photo management to do efficiently. Even the built in filesystem access is poor. Nothing on Linux is acceptable though, so they're not alone, it's just sad that something so promising is so hobbled.

bitL 9y ago

As Adobe has released the very last non-cloud Lightroom, I guess it's time to move to its "negative" - Darktable.

kyriakos 9y ago
Thats not true. There are two versions of Lightroom, the cloud one and Lightroom Classic. The Classic is the continuation of the regular desktop version and from what I understand its not going anywhere. Adobe cannot afford to take the desktop version away from photographers cause unlike photoshop there is good (or even better) competitors (e.g. Capture One is chewing up Lightroom's market share being faster and according to a lot of photographers gives better results).
- pvdebbe 9y ago
  The new Classic is what was formerly known as Lightroom Creative Cloud. So yes, it's a true desktop software but you need subscription.
- bitL 9y ago
  I guess you are going to weep: https://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/12/6-14-now-available-last-perpetual-update-of-lightroom.html https://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/12/6-14-now-av...
  - PuffinBlue 9y ago
    I'm fine thanks. That's lightroom 6. Lightroom 7 (lightroom CC Classic) will be continuing just fine as a non-cloud product.
    - bitL 9y ago
      It's subscription, rent-seeking based now. I won't call that non-cloud. Cloud is useless anyway as it doesn't allow to upload RAWs and they obviously slapped it on Lr to justify switch to their individual user hostile model.

kyriakos 9y ago

First Time User on Windows, its a bit slow during import compared to lightroom (you can't see thumbnails unless you highlight the image file name - maybe I am doing this wrong so I am not sure). a couple of UI/UX issues I found: = When I open a tool panel from the "more modules" the panel is added to the tools but its collapsed instead of expanded. = some filters should be toned down (the sliders have very extreme results with minor movements, this makes it hard to fine tune) its a much more polished effort than gimp though. I'll keep an eye on darktable!

distagon 9y ago

Does it support Mac Os for current version? the display on my Linux box is not as good as on Imac.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bartvk 9y ago
Yes: https://www.darktable.org/install/#macos https://www.darktable.org/install/#macos

pvdebbe 9y ago

I slowly warmed up to Darktable as I began to shoot raw in the summer. During the holidays I had access to a Winblows machine and tried the hyped Capture One... doesn't seem to hold candle for DT!

rcarmo 9y ago

This is great news. I’ve been using 2.2.5 for the past year on Mac and Linux, and it Is a great RAW editing tool. It does take some getting used to UI-wise (hopefully this release lets me use the trackpad more intuitively), but the non-destructive editing and effect masking are awesome.

phkahler 9y ago

One thing I really want DarkTable to allow is deletion of images. They say that any kind of file manager features will not be implemented, but IMHO it's a great preview tool and the ability to just delete poor shots would make it much better for triaging a new batch of photos.

kqr 9y ago
Darktable does deletion. If you press "delete" instead of "remove", files are deleted from the file system as well as the library.

wishinghand 9y ago

It's been said on Darktable's site and in here that it's not an option for maintaining a catalogue of photos. What would be a good companion app then? Until I figure something out, I'm waiting for Luminar or whatever Lightroom competitor that Affinity Software is going to come out with later in 2018.

bakoo 9y ago
Love the Affinity products, just wish they'd support linux.