8 ms·

Darktable 3.6

176 points by morsch 5y ago

fsloth 5y ago
For the benefit of myself and others checking this out the first time: How do open my DNG in Darktable? I've been fumbling around in the UI for 10 minutes. I'm definetly not a noob but the UI eludes me.
- fsloth 5y ago
  To answer myself - there is no "Open file" functionality. Images need to be "Imported to database".
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    The UI takes a long time to get used to. The concept of film rolls is a little weird and knowing which functionality is available in what context is also often not very intuitive.
  - morsch 5y ago
    You can actually sort of just open a file directly by running darktable <filename> which will open the file in the editor (the darkroom in darktable parlance; the file is automatically added to the database). I suppose if you don't care about the photo library management aspects of darktable, you could use it like this entirely, especially since apparently 3.6 adds an export button in the darkroom. https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/special-topics/program-invocation/darktable/ https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/special-topics/p...
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  I'd love to help but can you be more specific? Until then, taking a guess at what you mean exactly: - importing a DNG into the application: in the top-left there's an "import" button and a "folder" button to import files and/or folders. Navigate to the folder with your DNG. Select it, import it, like you'd expect opening files to work - after importing you're still in the "lightroom" section, which is the gallery of all imported photos. On the left you can filter by "film roll", representing photos you imported together. You can also rate selected photos zero to five stars, label them rejected or with a color (all on the bottom row), and then further filter out photos via controls at the top. - to edit a photo you need to go to the "darkroom" view. Either select a photo and click on darkroom, or just double-click. After that, well, there are a lot of options to explore, haha. There's quite a few YouTube tutorials that are a lot better at explaining the interface than a text description here would be. Good luck and have fun!
  - fsloth 5y ago
    Thanks, this is precisely the feedback I was hoping to receive.
LandR 5y ago
Dark table is incredibly impressive for free open source software.
- morsch 5y ago
  I honestly don't know how they do it. They also "stuck the landing" -- the release schedule for darktable 3.6 was posted to the mailing list in the middle of April, with a release date of today. - release - T0 : July 3rd - code freeze - T0-10 : June 23rd - start create binaries - string freeze - T0-12 : June 11th - start translation - feature freeze - T0-30 : June 1st - only code fix - safe mode - T0-45 : mid-May - only safe simple code More professional than most commercial software development.
mfsch 5y ago
The release notes are also published in the news section of the website [1] and there’s a separate blog entry [2], though I’m never quite sure what’s supposed to be the difference between the two. [1]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-360-released/ https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-360-released/ [2]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-3-6/ https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-3-6/
- aritmo 5y ago
  The first is for general consumption, the second is the dev blog entry of the changes.
- morsch 5y ago
  The second link is probably the best illustration of the new features. There's also -- as usual -- a video covering some of the new features by Bruce Williams (who's a pro photographer, not a dev, just to avoid misunderstandings): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lmrEEvOKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lmrEEvOKM
- paperd 5y ago
  The news post is supposed to be "change log" style, while the blog post is meant for regular user consumption.
IgorPartola 5y ago
I use darktable for my photography and really appreciate how powerful it is. I do wish the UI was a little more friendly. Throughout the versions I’ve run into a large number of quirks. Tool tips not being a huge thing means you have to learn what all the tiny greyscale icons mean by heart. Duplicating the exposure module to touch up a specific area means the histogram now controls the duplicate and not the original. Minor adjustments for any slider with a right click on the tiny slider knob we’re super broken for a while. These kinds of things would be great to not happen. But I think my biggest struggle with it is documentation. The docs are written in a way that seem to assume you know a whole lot of details of the software and the theory behind image processing. I am by no means an expert so when I start reading about how a specific module does it’s transforms at some specific phase in the pipeline and in this specific color space I don’t actually get what the effect of that will have on the photo. I understand that there is a lot you can do with the software but for example it took like an hour of YouTube videos from random people for me to figure out how to add a soft focus effect (apparently I needed to invoke local contrast?) or how to darken a specific spot on a photo in a way that blended nicely with the rest of it. Personally I have gotten comfortable with it and now can do what I need to do but at the same time that learning curve was super steep. I still wonder if I should give Lightroom a try just to see if that’s more user friendly.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  I mean this is in a non-snarky way but have you fed this back to the developers and considered writing documentation aimed at people like yourself?.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    I have not and I know that’s a thing I can do. I don’t think I could write the documentation because (a) time and (b) I honestly don’t think I actually have enough knowledge to do that well.
- morsch 5y ago
  I was consistently surprised how thorough the manual is. There are not many open source (or closed source!) pieces of software that come with a 220 page manual, with another 100 pages of appendices. Usually you have to pay another 30 bucks for a book, and then do it again when another version is released. That said, it sure is a complicated piece of software and I hear that the Lightroom UI is a bit more intuitive and polished.
FpUser 5y ago
I absolutely love Darktable and also Sagelight. My photo editors ever.
- e12e 5y ago
  > and also Sagelight. I take it that's?: https://www.sagelighteditor.com/ https://www.sagelighteditor.com/ 39.95 usd, life time upgrades photo editor formerly known as lightbox. Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete with Photoshop. Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess?
  - FpUser 5y ago
    Current version is actually free. >"Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess" It does not pretend to be photoshop at all. I found the concept and power of tooling brilliant.
    - e12e 5y ago
      > Current version is actually free. Oh, I looked at the FAQ which listed the (old) price, the current version is donationware/gratis indeed: https://www.sagelighteditor.com/purchase3.html https://www.sagelighteditor.com/purchase3.html > Reasons to Donate to Sagelight Editor > Current Version. The current version is the original release version, with some bug fixes and updates. Donations go to updating the current version and adding some functions. > Next Version 5.0. Version 5 is 75% complete, featuring a complete revamp of the UI, many new functions, and new a new-and-improved noise-reduction. Donations also go to finishing this version. > Get Version 5 free. If there are enough donations, I can give version 5 away for free. If you donate $5 or more, keep your information and you get Version 5 for free, even if it goes back to a regular purchase.
  - orbital-decay 5y ago
    >Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete with Photoshop. I mean, it's becoming easier and easier to compete with expensive software-as-a-service that doesn't even have a basic vectorscope included, so I also have to drop more money into 3rd party plugins just to be able to work with non-caveman tools. (not saying Sagelight has one, just disappointed with Photoshop lagging behind the other software for photo editing in many respects)
fsloth 5y ago
Are there any good tutorial on how to use Darktable that don't presume previous exposure to Lightroom? But man, the presets are already great and my RAW images are popping with details and color.
- olm_ 5y ago
  I learnt a lot from Aurelien Pierre youtube tutorials[1], one of the darktable devs. He also recorded very good videos on imaging (dynamic range, color theory...), that you'll need to understand to really benefits from darktable. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg
- morsch 5y ago
  I've mentioned him in another thread, but Bruce Williams has loads of tutorial videos that target novices: https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos The series Editing moments with darktable is also very interesting, though not a tutorial per se: https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos
- Derbasti 5y ago
  There's the Open Source Photography Course by Riley Brandt. It's a bit outdated by now, but remains a very gentle and well-produced introduction to (an older version of) Darktable, and image editing in general. Highly recommend.
jcelerier 5y ago
I like darktable but I have a hard try understanding why it (and lightroom) tries so hard to fit into the "darkroom photo studio" metaphor. For most of the people using digital cameras today, film photography was already dying or dead when they were born.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I totally agree with your main point. We see other comments here where the core metaphor just doesn't resonate for them. But is the latter part true? I got my first digital camera in 1998 and I was a pretty early adopter. It honestly was not much of a camera; it had an entire 1 megapixel of resolution: https://www.dpreview.com/products/olympus/compacts/oly_d400z https://www.dpreview.com/products/olympus/compacts/oly_d400z If we're looking to fix a date when film started dying, I don't think we could put it before the year film sales peaked, which was 1999: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-longer.html https://phys.org/news/2011-05-longer.html
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    People who start a photography curriculum in 2021 were born in 2002 / 2003. I'd say early adopters were users of 1992-1994 Kodak digital cameras - by 2002, both Nikon and Canon already had 6.something megapixels reflex if I'm not mistaken.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Sorry, I'm still not following. If 2002 is your marker for the beginning of the death of film, and if people born then are starting a photography curriculum in 2021, how could they be "most of the people using digital cameras today"?
      - jcelerier 5y ago
        I thought that the median age in the world was around 20 but it's actually ~30. Though I doubt a lot of 30 years old today ever had exposure (heh) to a traditional film workflow.
comeonseriously 5y ago
Looks great and all but I would love a desktop version of Snapseed.
- franga2000 5y ago
  I've been running Snapseed in Anbox on my laptop since I'm trying to stay away from Windows, which means no Adobe software (Lightroom). It's been really good, especially after switching to Wayland made touch input way smoother.
  - comeonseriously 5y ago
    Oooh, I'll have to try that. Thanks!
bschne 5y ago
From the README: > darktable is not a free Adobe® Lightroom® replacement. Does anyone know what the deal is with this remark? At a glance, the feature set/use case look sort of similar to me...
- fguerraz 5y ago
  darktable does very close to zero file management, or library management, they are purposefully staying away from this. Also, they don't want to be seen as a clone as feature parity is not their goal. Basically it just happen that the two pieces of software perform some of the same functions.
- Derbasti 5y ago
  The point is, the UI looks vaguely similar to Lightroom, and many people come to Darktable expecting a free clone of Lightroom. Scores of these people then hit the forums and complain about "missing features" and "incorrect behavior" and such. It's a real problem, and happens very regularly. That's why they try to put it front and center that Darktable is not Lightroom, is not trying to be Lightroom, and should not be expected to work like Lightroom.
- paperd 5y ago
  There are too many media outlets that peg darktable as "free lightroom" so people comein expecting that. Sure we do similar things, but we are the same like an F1 car and a Honda civic are similar. It gets really old listening to people complain how it isn't FREE LIGHTROOM
smnrchrds 5y ago
For a second I thought this was about Light Table [0] and got excited. What ever did happen to that project? [0] http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/
franga2000 5y ago
Are there any "serious" photographers here that successfully switched away from Lightroom to Darktable? How does the quality of the adjustments compare these days? Last time I checked, Lightroom was able to recover far more detail for example when raising the shadows of even a jpeg. Is that still the case?
- paperd 5y ago
  I consider myself serious, though I don't photograph for a living. The new scene referred workflow and specifically the Tone Equalizer module can pull a lot of details out of the shadows and does it really well. I've never used Lightroom but it seems their highlight recovery is better, but that's about it.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
Image-manipulation tools should stop trying to build a database of files, and instead operate on directories. Otherwise, the displayed library doesn't reflect new files when you copy them into the directory hierarchy. This always sucked about iTunes too, whereas EphPod simply used the files on disk and thus was always accurate.

176 points by morsch 5y ago

For the benefit of myself and others checking this out the first time: How do open my DNG in Darktable? I've been fumbling around in the UI for 10 minutes. I'm definetly not a noob but the UI eludes me.

fsloth 5y ago
To answer myself - there is no "Open file" functionality. Images need to be "Imported to database".
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  The UI takes a long time to get used to. The concept of film rolls is a little weird and knowing which functionality is available in what context is also often not very intuitive.
- morsch 5y ago
  You can actually sort of just open a file directly by running darktable <filename> which will open the file in the editor (the darkroom in darktable parlance; the file is automatically added to the database). I suppose if you don't care about the photo library management aspects of darktable, you could use it like this entirely, especially since apparently 3.6 adds an export button in the darkroom. https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/special-topics/program-invocation/darktable/ https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/special-topics/p...
vanderZwan 5y ago
I'd love to help but can you be more specific? Until then, taking a guess at what you mean exactly: - importing a DNG into the application: in the top-left there's an "import" button and a "folder" button to import files and/or folders. Navigate to the folder with your DNG. Select it, import it, like you'd expect opening files to work - after importing you're still in the "lightroom" section, which is the gallery of all imported photos. On the left you can filter by "film roll", representing photos you imported together. You can also rate selected photos zero to five stars, label them rejected or with a color (all on the bottom row), and then further filter out photos via controls at the top. - to edit a photo you need to go to the "darkroom" view. Either select a photo and click on darkroom, or just double-click. After that, well, there are a lot of options to explore, haha. There's quite a few YouTube tutorials that are a lot better at explaining the interface than a text description here would be. Good luck and have fun!
- fsloth 5y ago
  Thanks, this is precisely the feedback I was hoping to receive.

LandR 5y ago

Dark table is incredibly impressive for free open source software.

morsch 5y ago
I honestly don't know how they do it. They also "stuck the landing" -- the release schedule for darktable 3.6 was posted to the mailing list in the middle of April, with a release date of today. - release - T0 : July 3rd - code freeze - T0-10 : June 23rd - start create binaries - string freeze - T0-12 : June 11th - start translation - feature freeze - T0-30 : June 1st - only code fix - safe mode - T0-45 : mid-May - only safe simple code More professional than most commercial software development.

mfsch 5y ago

The release notes are also published in the news section of the website [1] and there’s a separate blog entry [2], though I’m never quite sure what’s supposed to be the difference between the two. [1]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-360-released/ https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-360-released/ [2]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-3-6/ https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-3-6/

aritmo 5y ago
The first is for general consumption, the second is the dev blog entry of the changes.
morsch 5y ago
The second link is probably the best illustration of the new features. There's also -- as usual -- a video covering some of the new features by Bruce Williams (who's a pro photographer, not a dev, just to avoid misunderstandings): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lmrEEvOKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lmrEEvOKM
paperd 5y ago
The news post is supposed to be "change log" style, while the blog post is meant for regular user consumption.

IgorPartola 5y ago

I use darktable for my photography and really appreciate how powerful it is. I do wish the UI was a little more friendly. Throughout the versions I’ve run into a large number of quirks. Tool tips not being a huge thing means you have to learn what all the tiny greyscale icons mean by heart. Duplicating the exposure module to touch up a specific area means the histogram now controls the duplicate and not the original. Minor adjustments for any slider with a right click on the tiny slider knob we’re super broken for a while. These kinds of things would be great to not happen. But I think my biggest struggle with it is documentation. The docs are written in a way that seem to assume you know a whole lot of details of the software and the theory behind image processing. I am by no means an expert so when I start reading about how a specific module does it’s transforms at some specific phase in the pipeline and in this specific color space I don’t actually get what the effect of that will have on the photo. I understand that there is a lot you can do with the software but for example it took like an hour of YouTube videos from random people for me to figure out how to add a soft focus effect (apparently I needed to invoke local contrast?) or how to darken a specific spot on a photo in a way that blended nicely with the rest of it. Personally I have gotten comfortable with it and now can do what I need to do but at the same time that learning curve was super steep. I still wonder if I should give Lightroom a try just to see if that’s more user friendly.

noir_lord 5y ago
I mean this is in a non-snarky way but have you fed this back to the developers and considered writing documentation aimed at people like yourself?.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  I have not and I know that’s a thing I can do. I don’t think I could write the documentation because (a) time and (b) I honestly don’t think I actually have enough knowledge to do that well.
morsch 5y ago
I was consistently surprised how thorough the manual is. There are not many open source (or closed source!) pieces of software that come with a 220 page manual, with another 100 pages of appendices. Usually you have to pay another 30 bucks for a book, and then do it again when another version is released. That said, it sure is a complicated piece of software and I hear that the Lightroom UI is a bit more intuitive and polished.

FpUser 5y ago

I absolutely love Darktable and also Sagelight. My photo editors ever.

e12e 5y ago
> and also Sagelight. I take it that's?: https://www.sagelighteditor.com/ https://www.sagelighteditor.com/ 39.95 usd, life time upgrades photo editor formerly known as lightbox. Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete with Photoshop. Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess?
- FpUser 5y ago
  Current version is actually free. >"Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess" It does not pretend to be photoshop at all. I found the concept and power of tooling brilliant.
  - e12e 5y ago
    > Current version is actually free. Oh, I looked at the FAQ which listed the (old) price, the current version is donationware/gratis indeed: https://www.sagelighteditor.com/purchase3.html https://www.sagelighteditor.com/purchase3.html > Reasons to Donate to Sagelight Editor > Current Version. The current version is the original release version, with some bug fixes and updates. Donations go to updating the current version and adding some functions. > Next Version 5.0. Version 5 is 75% complete, featuring a complete revamp of the UI, many new functions, and new a new-and-improved noise-reduction. Donations also go to finishing this version. > Get Version 5 free. If there are enough donations, I can give version 5 away for free. If you donate $5 or more, keep your information and you get Version 5 for free, even if it goes back to a regular purchase.
- orbital-decay 5y ago
  >Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete with Photoshop. I mean, it's becoming easier and easier to compete with expensive software-as-a-service that doesn't even have a basic vectorscope included, so I also have to drop more money into 3rd party plugins just to be able to work with non-caveman tools. (not saying Sagelight has one, just disappointed with Photoshop lagging behind the other software for photo editing in many respects)

fsloth 5y ago

Are there any good tutorial on how to use Darktable that don't presume previous exposure to Lightroom? But man, the presets are already great and my RAW images are popping with details and color.

olm_ 5y ago
I learnt a lot from Aurelien Pierre youtube tutorials[1], one of the darktable devs. He also recorded very good videos on imaging (dynamic range, color theory...), that you'll need to understand to really benefits from darktable. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg
morsch 5y ago
I've mentioned him in another thread, but Bruce Williams has loads of tutorial videos that target novices: https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos The series Editing moments with darktable is also very interesting, though not a tutorial per se: https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos
Derbasti 5y ago
There's the Open Source Photography Course by Riley Brandt. It's a bit outdated by now, but remains a very gentle and well-produced introduction to (an older version of) Darktable, and image editing in general. Highly recommend.

jcelerier 5y ago

I like darktable but I have a hard try understanding why it (and lightroom) tries so hard to fit into the "darkroom photo studio" metaphor. For most of the people using digital cameras today, film photography was already dying or dead when they were born.

wpietri 5y ago
I totally agree with your main point. We see other comments here where the core metaphor just doesn't resonate for them. But is the latter part true? I got my first digital camera in 1998 and I was a pretty early adopter. It honestly was not much of a camera; it had an entire 1 megapixel of resolution: https://www.dpreview.com/products/olympus/compacts/oly_d400z https://www.dpreview.com/products/olympus/compacts/oly_d400z If we're looking to fix a date when film started dying, I don't think we could put it before the year film sales peaked, which was 1999: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-longer.html https://phys.org/news/2011-05-longer.html
- jcelerier 5y ago
  People who start a photography curriculum in 2021 were born in 2002 / 2003. I'd say early adopters were users of 1992-1994 Kodak digital cameras - by 2002, both Nikon and Canon already had 6.something megapixels reflex if I'm not mistaken.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Sorry, I'm still not following. If 2002 is your marker for the beginning of the death of film, and if people born then are starting a photography curriculum in 2021, how could they be "most of the people using digital cameras today"?
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      I thought that the median age in the world was around 20 but it's actually ~30. Though I doubt a lot of 30 years old today ever had exposure (heh) to a traditional film workflow.

comeonseriously 5y ago

Looks great and all but I would love a desktop version of Snapseed.

franga2000 5y ago
I've been running Snapseed in Anbox on my laptop since I'm trying to stay away from Windows, which means no Adobe software (Lightroom). It's been really good, especially after switching to Wayland made touch input way smoother.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  Oooh, I'll have to try that. Thanks!

bschne 5y ago

From the README: > darktable is not a free Adobe® Lightroom® replacement. Does anyone know what the deal is with this remark? At a glance, the feature set/use case look sort of similar to me...

fguerraz 5y ago
darktable does very close to zero file management, or library management, they are purposefully staying away from this. Also, they don't want to be seen as a clone as feature parity is not their goal. Basically it just happen that the two pieces of software perform some of the same functions.
Derbasti 5y ago
The point is, the UI looks vaguely similar to Lightroom, and many people come to Darktable expecting a free clone of Lightroom. Scores of these people then hit the forums and complain about "missing features" and "incorrect behavior" and such. It's a real problem, and happens very regularly. That's why they try to put it front and center that Darktable is not Lightroom, is not trying to be Lightroom, and should not be expected to work like Lightroom.
paperd 5y ago
There are too many media outlets that peg darktable as "free lightroom" so people comein expecting that. Sure we do similar things, but we are the same like an F1 car and a Honda civic are similar. It gets really old listening to people complain how it isn't FREE LIGHTROOM

smnrchrds 5y ago

For a second I thought this was about Light Table [0] and got excited. What ever did happen to that project? [0] http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/

franga2000 5y ago

Are there any "serious" photographers here that successfully switched away from Lightroom to Darktable? How does the quality of the adjustments compare these days? Last time I checked, Lightroom was able to recover far more detail for example when raising the shadows of even a jpeg. Is that still the case?

paperd 5y ago
I consider myself serious, though I don't photograph for a living. The new scene referred workflow and specifically the Tone Equalizer module can pull a lot of details out of the shadows and does it really well. I've never used Lightroom but it seems their highlight recovery is better, but that's about it.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

Image-manipulation tools should stop trying to build a database of files, and instead operate on directories. Otherwise, the displayed library doesn't reflect new files when you copy them into the directory hierarchy. This always sucked about iTunes too, whereas EphPod simply used the files on disk and thus was always accurate.