Darktable 3.2.1 | Hacker News Reader

Darktable 3.2.1

darktable.org

170 pointsmycernerapi47 comments

Workflow changed with darktable 3 and to get the most out of it I recommend reading this article: https://pixls.us/articles/darktable-3-rgb-or-lab-which-modul... Many modules - that still work - are now deprecated in favour of RGB workflow new modules. The article above suggests proper alternatives for each of them.

It's mostly the same since 3.x though. The filmic rgb code got a pretty spicy color science update though. I'd even wager it's better than Lightroom in that aspect.

I will definitely give this update a try today!

After switching to Linux I had trouble replacing CaptureOne, mostly because of its simplicity. Pretty much every setting has a sensible default, and making the most important changes to a photo (exposure, sharpening, noise reduction, levels, etc) can be done without being exposed to any overly-complicated UI.

For awhile, I switched rapidly between Darktable and RawTherapee, not really satisfied with either. Even after doing my best to learn the ins and outs of each, I could still make my photos look much nicer in 10mins in CaptureOne than in 30mins in Darktable/RawTherapee.

I settled on RawTherapee over DarkTable last month. It's still the case that I can't get as good results in RawTherapee as I can in CaptureOne (not because RT is not powerful, but rather because there are SO many knobs/switches/etc and it's hard to find the ones that actually do what I want).

The moral of this rant is, I'm exited to try this new version of DT, and hopefully I can finally settle on a RAW editor that only shows me the knobs that matter to me by default without making me feel like I'm playing with a 747's control panel.

I still use an iMac for CaptureOne for post and printing but I've moved my DAM process to DigiKam [0].

I'm inclined to try RawTherapee and DarkTable again. Years ago I tried but they never worked as well as the proprietary alternatives.

[0]: https://www.digikam.org/

I was a Lightroom Classic user before fully moving to Darktable, and now I get better results with Darktable. Not because it is easier to work with, but because the rendering engine for Fujifilm RAW files is miles ahead of whatever Adobe uses.

Still miss my film simulations, though. They were great starting points when editing a big photo shoot.

I should give RawTherapee a try. The UI with Darktable is definitely its biggest disadvantage.

Lightroom is known for being terrible with Fuji X-Trans files. Capture One is much better.

Still not enough to beat Darktable, though. Plus, it does not work on Linux, which is what I use.

While I did keep a Windows VM for Lightroom for a while when I switch back to Linux from macOS (and could do the same for Capture One), it is just not worth the hassle, and loss of privacy with Darktable being so good.

How long did it take you to get used to it? I am now so in tune with Capture One that I am very reluctant to change. It takes a long time to get a feel for this kind of software.

A week or two, for about two hours a day. Making changes out of nowhere is something I am used to since I was a kid, so it might have been easier for me.

But if you are happy with Capture One, and do not plan on switching your operating system anytime soon, I do not really see a reason.

Darktable has a better rendering engine, but only pixel peepers will notice, and the fact it is open source only matters to a limited amount of people, myself included, but might not matter to you.

There are great free LUTs out there that can emulate the Fuji film simulations quite well. That might be worth a try.

Stuart Sowerby[1] released a few that I will try as soon as the pandemic is over, and I can go outside for photo shoots again. From the comparisons I saw, they look pretty damn close to the real thing.

[1] https://blog.sowerby.me/fuji-film-simulation-profiles/

Same here. Capture One is the last thing that’s keeping me on the Mac. I have tried DarkTable and RawTherapee several times over the years but never got the same image quality out of them. Maybe it’s possible but the learning curve is very steep. Same with the Gimp. It seems very powerful but Affinity and Photoshop are much easier to use.

make sure to read this: https://pixls.us/articles/darktable-3-rgb-or-lab-which-modul...

I bought capture one and was never able to use it because I couldn’t figure out what it does with my image files...

Lightroom is simple - everything is in one folder. Capture one creates some kind of magical folder system and I’m unable to find anything.

What resource can help me understand its organization?

Darktable is fantastic, if a bit of a beast to learn. It is what finally let me sever ties to Windows/Mac for Adobe software.

I put together a little guide [1] to FOSS for photography a couple of years ago that I think is still pretty relevant (happy to hear about anything I should update!), including resources for learning Darktable.

[1] https://9bladed.com/post/foss_photography/

How does one manage round trip to photoshop with darktable?

With lr it’s one click and the edited image appears in the strip.

Depends on what you want to do, if you want the edited photo in an external program, you can export it with a click to the open it elsewhere (and re-import it back if you need). If you want to do raw edits, you'll need to make sure changes are synced via a sidecar XMP file, but I'm not sure what things will overlap or not with external programs. So you can use Darktable for organization and then do edits elsewhere, if that's what you want, though Darktable is more about its editing capabilities than as a database. It does give you tagging and do all that too. You can also extend with LUA, so probably you can have a simple script to automate any trip out to another program (I've seen some for doing things like HDR editing, for instance).

I was worried when I moved to linux from Windows that I would miss Lightroom but Dark Table easily replaced it!

It's fantastic and I now I prefer it to Lightroom (Although I haven't used the latest version of Lightroom).

I tend to use https://rawtherapee.com/ for processing CR2 -> JPG images, and use my own filesystem for organization.

That said I shot a model this week and went back to trying to use Dark-table to go over the results as quickly as possible, it was actually pretty efficient to rate the images.

(In an hour-long shoot I'd taken about 500 images, and it was painless to look at each RAW file and star the ones that I wanted to keep. I went through everything and ranked about 50 as three-stars, then after a bit of thought and coffee marked the 25 I was going to hand over to her as 5 stars which I could then later process and edit with rawtherapee afterwards.)

> use my own filesystem for organization.

This got me interested. Care to elaborate?

I guess there are a lot of photo-managers that let you import your images, tag them, find duplicates, etc. I don't want to touch anything like that - I want to keep my images in a structure that makes sense to me.

Keeping my own structure is one reason why I don't use any software that won't work "in-place". So I chose rawtherapee because I can point it at a directory of raw images, get a set of JPGs out, and it won't try to move/file/organize them behind my back.

Anyway my structure looks something like:

    /srv/
    /srv/images/
    /srv/images/2020
    /srv/images/2020/08/
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire/RAW
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire/JPG
    /srv/images/2020/08/05.Claire/Results
    /srv/images/2020/08/12.Sanna
    ..

Basically data-based, but I also create a ".info" directory beneath each per-person tree which will have:

     location=Blah
     event=Random Shot|Birthday|Party|Event
     date=05.08.2020
     tags=model,claire,monochrome
     theme=pirate
     contact=phone-number|email|address
     ..

Then I have a shell-script that lets me search for all shoots which had a specific location, tag, name, or similar.

This is completely off topic, but you’ve triggered me with your date format of 05.08.2020. Why not 2020.08.05?? So much less ambiguity, plus then it will match your directory structure!

Typing away from the computer; we'll assume that if I checked what is currently setup I'm doing it the correct way!

YYYY-MM-DD formatted date strings also sort better when sorted as text.

AKA ISO 8601

I love Darktable, and it definitely is a replacement for Lightroom and way way more, but the UX is definitely not designed for beginners - nor is the tooling. I had a lightroom trial a month ago and ended up editing a huge amount of photos quickly and to my satisfaction. Darktable just slows me down and I never bother.

Would recommend going through tutorials from Bruce Williams https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u

I'm always glad to see this stuff move forward. I recently got back into photography and was delighted to see the state of OSS software. However, because I could never find a comparison between rawtherapee and darktable I downloaded both to try each, and I just never could understand how darktable really worked[1]. Rawtherapee just seemed instantly more intuitive. For those that have used both, is there anything I'm missing between the two? And does darktable just better mirror lightroom and therefore is better for Adobe converts?

I hope I don't start any flamewars, this is a genuine question. And I remember initially there was some statement that rawtherapee handled x-trans RAW files better but some other people said that because they use the same software it doesn't matter. I intended to write up a blog post on both of these at some point for people in the future who have these questions, but time is what it is I haven't had the time to sink into it to get an intimate understanding of both (I still have a lot of photos I need to go back and process generally).

[1]Admittedly have not put in the work of going through guides or anything it was just kind of fumbling around in the software.

edit: Didn't know asterisks italicized, though I should have... Replaces asterisk with [1] instead...

Please do try the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u

instantly more intuitive

For me, a photo editor is a tool I am likely to use for years...and indeed, I've been using Darktable continuously and frequently for almost five years. I'm still learning how to better use and discovering new things it can do.

This is not in any way saying it is better than RawTherapee...though it has proven to be better for me when I have used RawTherapee over the past five years to see what it offers.

Mainly, for me it is Darktable gave me a workflow that let me work through a few hundred just taken images in a few hours the first time I sat down to work through a few hundred just taken images in a few hours and allowed me to constantly improve that workflow over the years to shave hours off of the few hours to fewer hours.

One of the big differentiators for me was Darktable's support of GPU hardware acceleration via OpenCL. Googling suggests RawTherapee has not added it and LightRoom only got support in the last two or three years...at least for operations in the pixel-pipeline.

Darktable doesn't really mirror Lightroom because as commercial software, Lightroom exposes less of the underlying mechanisms to appeal to a wider segment of the market. Darktable's UI is much more "mathy", e.g. the tab showing the order of applied modules in the pixel pipeline (and the use of "pixel pipeline" as an explanatory term and fundamental concept).

I don't find Darktable's interface intuitive, but it's very familiar at this point and that's good enough or maybe even better.

Frankly, Darktable does not mirror Lightroom in anything but the basic screen layout. Its tools are by and large entirely different.

A few months ago, I tried to do a big comparison of RAW developers, maybe you'll find it interesting: https://bastibe.de/2020-05-01-raw-developer-comparison.html

What I learned from that is mostly that these are all massively complex programs that can't really be judged without investing a few months into them. But even at the superficial level that can be compared in a trial month, there are serious differences in how even the simplest tools work in all of these tools. And that many of them actually exhibit quite severe artifacts.

But Darktable and RawTherapee were among the best of them in terms of results. One truly does not need to invest money in a RAW developer if one doesn't want to.

If you don't already, head over to discuss.pixls.us for in-depth discussions of Darktable's and RawTherapee's inner workings.

I recently got back into photography and I've been seriously impressed by darktable. Its tooling is fantastic, and I was worried that I'd struggle now that I'm 100% Linux.

The only downside is the workflow and interface. In my opinion every piece of software on the market now has adopted the wrong workflow in separating photo management from the edit screen, e.g. the light table/dark room split in darktable. The film photography workflow doesn't make sense to me in a digital world.

Apple got it spot-on with Aperture, and I will forever resent them for abandoning it. Its interface and flow were basically perfect for me. Everything being on one screen made it so quick to adjust lots of photos. Everything since has gone the route of Lightroom and I find it really annoying.

But, darktable is free and the tools are good. I can deal with it having the wrong workflow. It has helped me get back into photography again.

> Apple got it spot-on with Aperture, and I will forever resent them for abandoning it. Its interface and flow were basically perfect for me.

Same here. I don't even care how much it costs, I'd pay dearly to get a supported and updated version of Aperture. Whoever worked on its UI is worth their weight in gold and then some.

The submit url should be changed to https://www.darktable.org/2020/08/darktable-321-released/, which is the actual url to the changes related to 3.2.1?

And here is a blog post going into the changes too: https://www.darktable.org/2020/08/darktable-3-2/

Darktable is one of those OSS gems that deserves more attention than it usually gets. It's usually positioned as an alternative to Adobe Lightroom. However, I think it's fair to say that there's very little left in Lightroom that Darktable doesn't offer at least three or four alternatives for. This is not like The Gimp vs Photoshop but more the other way around. IMHO, around the 2.0 release, it more than caught up in features. Since then, UI polish, a crazy amount of features, etc. have widened the gap in terms of features and utility. There are quite a few features unique to Darktable that Lightroom simply does not have and that people would normally use things like the Gimp or photoshop for. Masking alone (which works on pretty much any of the dozens of modules) just unlocks a ton of creative possibilities.

Disclaimer, I'm not a Lightroom user and have used Darktable exclusively for the last five years or so. I actually use the mac builds, which is hardly ideal given that OpenCL support on Apple is not great. Darktable definitely has lots of rough edges that make it less than ideal for some less experienced users to switch over to. While the UI has improved with this release, it is still quite complex. Many of the modules are not for the faint of heart and have steep learning curves. Simpler to use alternatives are available (there are usually multiple ways to do things in Darktable); some of which are explicitly intended for novice users. Most of the complex ones are awesome once you figure them out.

The highlight in this release for me is the improved integration between the exposure and filmic module. Both existed in previous versions and they were always intended to be used together. However, in the new version they finally replace the base curve as the default way to do tone mapping. The new default scene referred mode is basically about these two modules being turned on by default and the base curve no longer being used by default. I noticed already with 3.0 where I manually configured my defaults to do the same that this reduced the amount of work I had to do. Usually, I do some minor tweaks to the grey point with the exposure module and then finish the job in filmic. In 3.2, these seem to do a better job out of the box than in 3.0; even for (deliberately) under exposed photos. If it is too dark, you simply add a few stops in the exposure module and filmic dynamically updates the black and whitepoints. So instead of blowing out your highlights, it actually brightens the grey-point while compressing blacks and whites in a way that makes sense. Unlike the base curve, this is dynamic and unrelated to pre defined camera profiles for what would constitute a good base curve for a camera that you get with the old basecurve module. I never really got usable results with that.

I ended up deleting my settings and presets to get the new defaults in 3.2. If you upgrade from an older version and want to benefit from the new & improved defaults, you may want to do the same. I noticed when upgrading an old 2.x version on my Father's laptop that doing this may also be needed if it fails to start because of changes in its internal db (he was still on 2.4). Unfortunately it did not fail gracefully and I had to drop to the command line and rm -rf the old files. Stuff like this is exactly the kind of rough edges that make this product still a bit of a hard sell for less experienced users.

Fully agree with this view The variety of ways you can achieve your desired results is truly amazing. I also found Bruce Williams' tutorials very helpful https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u

Yes absolutely; his channel is great. I'd also recommend watching Aurelien Pierre's elaborate introduction to Filmic. He's the main developer of that module and one of the core developers of Darktable.

A lot of thought went into the last few releases and it shows.

I use Darktable on Clearlinux, OpenCL is absent here too because I'm using AMD Radeon graphic card which has proprietary driver blobs, and can't be accepted by Clearlinux. This sucks.

Have you tried ROCM (AMD's OSS OpenCL implementation)? It works well for my AMD on Ubuntu.

I'd give it a try.

Isn't it funny how every. single. landscape photograph edited in Lightroom or Capture One has serious halos on the horizon and every contrasty transition?

Thanks to Filmic and the Tone EQ, we can actually edit landscapes without these issues.

Or sunsets without false-color rings around the sun. Or the majesty that is Color Zones...

Good news, it's a great program.

It might be better to use the URL about the release: https://www.darktable.org/2020/08/darktable-321-released/ (rather than the "news" page)

Back in the day I bought a lightroom license because there was no stable version of darktable for windows. I should probably reevaluate that decision these days. (That was pre lightroom cloud. Also I can't find my lightroom key anymore and will not switch to a cloud solution.)

New dt users: be sure to read this: https://pixls.us/articles/darktable-3-rgb-or-lab-which-modul...

Does anyone know if Darktable supports Fujifilm film simulation profiles like CaptureOne?

Have a look at these: https://blog.sowerby.me/fuji-film-simulation-profiles/

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