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I understand why this turns you off, but I wanted to note that what you want: some default magic settings that make the photo look like Canon's in camera proces

by auxym 4y ago

I understand why this turns you off, but I wanted to note that what you want: some default magic settings that make the photo look like Canon's in camera processing, is an explicit non-goal for the DT devs. Don't get your hopes up. What you are looking at when entering the darkroom is an "undeveloped" raw. Darktable's philosophy is that developing this raw photo should be 100% the user's responsibility and that whatever the camera maker's JPEG engine does is irrelevant. I still use DT because it is very powerful, but I do agree that it has a very steep learning curve, and therefore is frustrating for anyone who isnt fully committed to learning about digital color science, etc, myself included.

Someone1234 4y ago
This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. Both Lightroom and Photo Lab do exactly this. If Darktable cannot support reading that information and importing it as a preset, that's fine, but pretending it is an artist choice seems to misunderstand what is going on here. To get specific Picture Control settings (e.g. sharpness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc), High ISO noise reduction, White balance, and color space are typically important as defaults or presets.
- mikae1 4y ago
  > This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. You are right, but I'm very sorry to say that attempting to faithfully recreate the look of the manufacturers JPEGs will likely never be the goal of darktable (or any serious photographer for that matter). What happens when you buy a camera from a different brand? You will likely want to normalize the output between your cameras and not to have every other picture rendered with Canon's interpretation of the the scene and the rest with Nikon's.
  - deanc 4y ago
    Simply not true. That’s exactly what I want and DT already has a reset button by which I can undo those base edits anyway. It’s again, another thing that puts people off and is confusing as hell at first.
    - mikae1 4y ago
      > Simply not true. Sorry, I don't understand. What is “simply not true”?
  - franga2000 4y ago
    It doesn't have to be "faithful" and I agree it's not most people's "goal", but here's why I still want it and appreciate that Lightroom does it very well: - I've been shooting mirrorless, and consequently using EVFs, since the NEX 6 came out. When I take a photo, I have already seen it. I have a vague idea of what tweaks I want to make, so having to start from scratch just interrupts that. Of course, sometimes those tweaks will override basically every default setting, but that doesn't mean having them wasn't valuable - I often shoot RAW not because I want to painstakingly develop each photo to perfection, but because I simply need more latitude to "fix things in post". Especially when shooting events in suboptimal lighting or when I need to raise the ISO to make sure a critical event gets captured.
    - auxym 4y ago
      FWIW I agree with you, but DT devs don't, which is their right to put in their free time to develop their software according to their own preferences.
      - franga2000 4y ago
        Of course! I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. But these kinds of discussions are still important because if enough of us got together we could start a community initiative to develop this and either get it merged or maintain a live fork with these features.
- auxym 4y ago
  It's not a simple case of reading data from the raw though. Out of those you listed, yes, white balance can be trivially read from the metadata and applied to the processing automatically, and in fact DT does do exactly that. "Color space", by which I assume you mean input color profile aka the color matrix of the camera's sensor, has to be calibrated or reverse engineered by shooting standardized color targets under standard illuminants. DT does have this data and applies it automatically, but the calibration is provided by users and might not be ideal. You would probably get better results by doing your own calibration, but that is somewhat involved. Picture control things like saturation etc that you select in camera are post processing steps that the camera applies to the raw in order to get a "developed" jpeg. They are proprietary to the camera maker and not published. Even if you can read settings like "saturation" and "portrait mode" from the metadata, you don't know which algorithm exactly that implies. Lightroom and other commercial software works with camera makers under NDA in order to reproduce the camera's processing. Could it be reverse engineered by open source software? Maybe, but the DT devs decided that they prefer to go in another direction.
bb88 4y ago
> ... is an explicit non-goal for the DT devs. Don't get your hopes up. The older I get the less time I want to be in front of a computer. I would prefer my photography software to do the workflow I want it to do, not what someone else thinks I should do -- regardless of whether it's free or not. Besides, the more I'm behind a camera in nature, the better I usually feel. The more I'm behind a screen, the worse.
- auxym 4y ago
  That's quite OK. It's just that DT then is not the right software for you, since the dev team has an opposing viewpoint to yours. Rawtherapee I think has a feature that tries to apply curves in order to match the built in jpeg preview. Otherwise you might be better served by commercial software such as Lightroom or Capture One, as they work with camera manufacturers in order to match the in-camera processing.
  - bb88 4y ago
    And that's what I do. I just find it too bad because it's interface is really not bad, and it's fairly capable at what it does. To me, I don't care really, but in 2022, photography is still an underserved segment in the open source software world. I feel like they can have their opinion, but then allow others to have a UI element to turn it on if they so choose. There's a lot of high quality gear floating around ebay for fairly cheap compared to when they were new.
mijamo 4y ago
Do you have any link explaining this reasoning? It does seem weird to me because not handling camera specific color management seem contradictory to a good experience. Raw files are actually not in any way "neutral" or standard, they are pretty specific to the camera and brand depending on how they calibrated their censor and other considerations such as potential treatments etc. Not handling that at the software level and leaving it to the user means that you would have to do a repetitive and complex work for every single picture when other softwares give you a "neutral" basis (even though any attempt at neutrality is always limited. True neutrality could not display the image with RBG at all...) to work from based on calibrated color profiles for the cameras (some are better at giving you a good basis than others of course). This would seem like a weird choice as anyways you have to do a bunch of conversion, so not using camera profile just means the conversion is less faithful.
- auxym 4y ago
  Sorry for the misunderstanding, DT does handle the color space of the camera sensor, via the "Input Color Profile" module but this camera calibration data is not published by camera manufacturers. For Canon for example, DT has a single generic "Canon" color matrix profile, which was probably created by a user. You would get better results by calibrating your specific camera. Commercial software makers are able to obtain camera profiles (and other stuff like processing algorithms to match in-camera processing) under NDA from camera makers. Sorry, not specific link, just stuff I picked up by following the pixls.us forum, where the DT and RT devs hang out.

by auxym 4y ago

Someone1234 4y ago

This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. Both Lightroom and Photo Lab do exactly this. If Darktable cannot support reading that information and importing it as a preset, that's fine, but pretending it is an artist choice seems to misunderstand what is going on here. To get specific Picture Control settings (e.g. sharpness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc), High ISO noise reduction, White balance, and color space are typically important as defaults or presets.

mikae1 4y ago
> This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. You are right, but I'm very sorry to say that attempting to faithfully recreate the look of the manufacturers JPEGs will likely never be the goal of darktable (or any serious photographer for that matter). What happens when you buy a camera from a different brand? You will likely want to normalize the output between your cameras and not to have every other picture rendered with Canon's interpretation of the the scene and the rest with Nikon's.
- deanc 4y ago
  Simply not true. That’s exactly what I want and DT already has a reset button by which I can undo those base edits anyway. It’s again, another thing that puts people off and is confusing as hell at first.
  - mikae1 4y ago
    > Simply not true. Sorry, I don't understand. What is “simply not true”?
- franga2000 4y ago
  It doesn't have to be "faithful" and I agree it's not most people's "goal", but here's why I still want it and appreciate that Lightroom does it very well: - I've been shooting mirrorless, and consequently using EVFs, since the NEX 6 came out. When I take a photo, I have already seen it. I have a vague idea of what tweaks I want to make, so having to start from scratch just interrupts that. Of course, sometimes those tweaks will override basically every default setting, but that doesn't mean having them wasn't valuable - I often shoot RAW not because I want to painstakingly develop each photo to perfection, but because I simply need more latitude to "fix things in post". Especially when shooting events in suboptimal lighting or when I need to raise the ISO to make sure a critical event gets captured.
  - auxym 4y ago
    FWIW I agree with you, but DT devs don't, which is their right to put in their free time to develop their software according to their own preferences.
    - franga2000 4y ago
      Of course! I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. But these kinds of discussions are still important because if enough of us got together we could start a community initiative to develop this and either get it merged or maintain a live fork with these features.
auxym 4y ago
It's not a simple case of reading data from the raw though. Out of those you listed, yes, white balance can be trivially read from the metadata and applied to the processing automatically, and in fact DT does do exactly that. "Color space", by which I assume you mean input color profile aka the color matrix of the camera's sensor, has to be calibrated or reverse engineered by shooting standardized color targets under standard illuminants. DT does have this data and applies it automatically, but the calibration is provided by users and might not be ideal. You would probably get better results by doing your own calibration, but that is somewhat involved. Picture control things like saturation etc that you select in camera are post processing steps that the camera applies to the raw in order to get a "developed" jpeg. They are proprietary to the camera maker and not published. Even if you can read settings like "saturation" and "portrait mode" from the metadata, you don't know which algorithm exactly that implies. Lightroom and other commercial software works with camera makers under NDA in order to reproduce the camera's processing. Could it be reverse engineered by open source software? Maybe, but the DT devs decided that they prefer to go in another direction.

bb88 4y ago

> ... is an explicit non-goal for the DT devs. Don't get your hopes up. The older I get the less time I want to be in front of a computer. I would prefer my photography software to do the workflow I want it to do, not what someone else thinks I should do -- regardless of whether it's free or not. Besides, the more I'm behind a camera in nature, the better I usually feel. The more I'm behind a screen, the worse.

auxym 4y ago
That's quite OK. It's just that DT then is not the right software for you, since the dev team has an opposing viewpoint to yours. Rawtherapee I think has a feature that tries to apply curves in order to match the built in jpeg preview. Otherwise you might be better served by commercial software such as Lightroom or Capture One, as they work with camera manufacturers in order to match the in-camera processing.
- bb88 4y ago
  And that's what I do. I just find it too bad because it's interface is really not bad, and it's fairly capable at what it does. To me, I don't care really, but in 2022, photography is still an underserved segment in the open source software world. I feel like they can have their opinion, but then allow others to have a UI element to turn it on if they so choose. There's a lot of high quality gear floating around ebay for fairly cheap compared to when they were new.

mijamo 4y ago

Do you have any link explaining this reasoning? It does seem weird to me because not handling camera specific color management seem contradictory to a good experience. Raw files are actually not in any way "neutral" or standard, they are pretty specific to the camera and brand depending on how they calibrated their censor and other considerations such as potential treatments etc. Not handling that at the software level and leaving it to the user means that you would have to do a repetitive and complex work for every single picture when other softwares give you a "neutral" basis (even though any attempt at neutrality is always limited. True neutrality could not display the image with RBG at all...) to work from based on calibrated color profiles for the cameras (some are better at giving you a good basis than others of course). This would seem like a weird choice as anyways you have to do a bunch of conversion, so not using camera profile just means the conversion is less faithful.

auxym 4y ago
Sorry for the misunderstanding, DT does handle the color space of the camera sensor, via the "Input Color Profile" module but this camera calibration data is not published by camera manufacturers. For Canon for example, DT has a single generic "Canon" color matrix profile, which was probably created by a user. You would get better results by calibrating your specific camera. Commercial software makers are able to obtain camera profiles (and other stuff like processing algorithms to match in-camera processing) under NDA from camera makers. Sorry, not specific link, just stuff I picked up by following the pixls.us forum, where the DT and RT devs hang out.