5 ms·

Aurelien Pierre, one of the lead developers on Darktable has been publishing lots of details on color theory and how it is applied in Darktable for things like

Aurelien Pierre, one of the lead developers on Darktable has been publishing lots of details on color theory and how it is applied in Darktable for things like the new Color Calibration module and how that relates to the white balance. His youtube channel is worth following if you are interested in this: https://www.youtube.com/c/Aur%C3%A9lienPIERREPhoto https://www.youtube.com/c/Aur%C3%A9lienPIERREPhoto Recent versions of Darktable include some amazingly powerful ways to deal with tone mapping, perceptual saturation, etc. that he implemented.

canbus 5y ago
RIP Adobe :D Darktable is great.
- franga2000 5y ago
  > RIP Adobe If only! Take an over- or under-exposed photo and try to correct it in Lightroom and Darktable. Lightroom is able to recover far more detail from those regions than Darktable. No idea how, but it can. Everything else is far better in Darktable, but edit quality is all that really matters in the end.
  - orbital-decay 5y ago
    This really contradicts my own experience, with both Sony and Nikon RAWs, as I see no difference in highlights/darks recovery with my photos. Thing is, Darktable is super technical unlike Lightroom or most commercial software, and hides very little from the user, so it's fairly demanding to user's knowledge. Just like processing in Photoshop that Lightroom doesn't replace for all cases because LR is more oriented towards magic. What I like about Darktable is vastly superior color uniformity and handling, and its tone equalizer module that allows for visual zoning control; it replaces most 3rd party plugins for Photoshop. PS really feels more and more outdated at this point for the de facto most popular software for photo manipulation, since it doesn't include modern tools and you have to construct massive workarounds or buy additional plugins. What I dislike about Darktable is lack of persistent masking; currently all masks are generated by previous modules in the pixelpipe, so going back in editing can alter the mask.
  - canbus 5y ago
    AI magic I guess. I'm just a hobbyist but it's given some good results for me with whatever i've thrown at it. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing out on with Lightroom but Darktable is more than good enough for my use case!
goblin89 5y ago
To those who, like me, have current Darktable crash randomly when you start working on your DNGs, I recommend RawTherapee (but get the latest build for your system, if you search discuss.pixls.us or GitHub issues you will see a link to one Dropbox shared a few times). RT, being also based on dcraw, crashes too but much more rarely and typically only with certain setting combinations applied (for my M1 MBP noise reduction in Lab space seems to be the only remaining trigger with latest build). RT also allows you more control over certain pre-processing steps, like turning off debayering and additional debayering methods, which I couldn’t find in DT. Sadly, neither app approaches LR or C1 in terms of stability required for most professional uses, but they do give invaluable for an enthusiast control over scene data interpretation. This is, of course, quite tangential to the article, which deals with display-referred pixel data only.

canbus 5y ago

RIP Adobe :D Darktable is great.

franga2000 5y ago
> RIP Adobe If only! Take an over- or under-exposed photo and try to correct it in Lightroom and Darktable. Lightroom is able to recover far more detail from those regions than Darktable. No idea how, but it can. Everything else is far better in Darktable, but edit quality is all that really matters in the end.
- orbital-decay 5y ago
  This really contradicts my own experience, with both Sony and Nikon RAWs, as I see no difference in highlights/darks recovery with my photos. Thing is, Darktable is super technical unlike Lightroom or most commercial software, and hides very little from the user, so it's fairly demanding to user's knowledge. Just like processing in Photoshop that Lightroom doesn't replace for all cases because LR is more oriented towards magic. What I like about Darktable is vastly superior color uniformity and handling, and its tone equalizer module that allows for visual zoning control; it replaces most 3rd party plugins for Photoshop. PS really feels more and more outdated at this point for the de facto most popular software for photo manipulation, since it doesn't include modern tools and you have to construct massive workarounds or buy additional plugins. What I dislike about Darktable is lack of persistent masking; currently all masks are generated by previous modules in the pixelpipe, so going back in editing can alter the mask.
- canbus 5y ago
  AI magic I guess. I'm just a hobbyist but it's given some good results for me with whatever i've thrown at it. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing out on with Lightroom but Darktable is more than good enough for my use case!

goblin89 5y ago

To those who, like me, have current Darktable crash randomly when you start working on your DNGs, I recommend RawTherapee (but get the latest build for your system, if you search discuss.pixls.us or GitHub issues you will see a link to one Dropbox shared a few times). RT, being also based on dcraw, crashes too but much more rarely and typically only with certain setting combinations applied (for my M1 MBP noise reduction in Lab space seems to be the only remaining trigger with latest build). RT also allows you more control over certain pre-processing steps, like turning off debayering and additional debayering methods, which I couldn’t find in DT. Sadly, neither app approaches LR or C1 in terms of stability required for most professional uses, but they do give invaluable for an enthusiast control over scene data interpretation. This is, of course, quite tangential to the article, which deals with display-referred pixel data only.