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Darktable 4.0

darktable.org

51–60 of 116 posts

Re: Darktable 4.0

#51
About once a year I try DT but always bounce off of it pretty hard for one very simple reason: my Canon raw images in DT don't look anything like what they do in-camera.

I did a studio shoot on Monday: clean strobe light, a tame white background, all settings manual (so no auto-lighting-optimizer), and fired up my raws in 4.0 on my calibrated monitor.

I loaded the roll into Light Table and things look fine (because, I suspect, that the CR3 file has an embedded JPEG with Canon's recipe cooked in).

Then I double clicked to bring it into Darkroom and it goes crazy: the backdrop goes a crazy purple hue, the exposure is wrong by about a third of a stop, and the skin is zombified.

It's utterly incomprehensible to me. Every year I check and every year I'm baffled at how dreadful it is. Cya next year I guess.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#53

About once a year I try DT but always bounce off of it pretty hard for one very simple reason: my Canon raw images in DT don't look anything like what they do in-camera. I did a studio shoot on Monday: clean strobe light, a tame white background, all settings manual (so no auto-lighting-optimizer), and fired up my raws in 4.0 on my calibrated monitor. I loaded the roll into Light Table and things look fine (because,…

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#54

What's the reason behind this "As always, please don’t use the autogenerated tarball provided by github, but only our tar.xz file. The checksums are:"

No idea what the build system is, but for some you want users to download the prebootstrapped version

Re: Darktable 4.0

#55
post #53

About once a year I try DT but always bounce off of it pretty hard for one very simple reason: my Canon raw images in DT don't look anything like what they do in-camera. I did a studio shoot on Monday: clean strobe light, a tame white background, all settings manual (so no auto-lighting-optimizer), and fired up my raws in 4.0 on my calibrated monitor. I loaded the roll into Light Table and things look fine (because,…

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 whate…

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#56
post #49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is an afterthought. You guys have to deal with Adobe, or use a less advanced alternative.

For RAW editing DXO is great and runs native on Apple silicon. Recently bought ON1 and Affinity photos as well so there are other alternatives to Adobe, at least in the processing stage of RAW development.

MacOS supports RAW images as well. I’m wondering if DarkTable could/should leverage it.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212821

Re: Darktable 4.0

#58
post #50
post #29

I gave Darktable a try (never used Lightroom), and as an amateur, it is still kind of hard for me to achieve something better than the "out of camera" JPGs when post-processing RAW photos from my rather old Canon DSLR camera. I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture. Sat…

I occasionally try to come back to DarkTable, RawTherapee etc, but similarly for my requirements they feel like overkill, and require much more time than I have to properly understand the underlying theories. For a simpler interface that gets me (a naive user) half-way decent results pretty quickly, I'll drop back to LightZone. Whole bunch of ready-made presets that combine primitives (sharpness, contrast, saturation…

Gonna check it out, thanks for the tip.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#59
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now digikam won’t open! This is with the latest app image, and there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a bug report for the same error message that came up on a different program, and it seems app image isn’t as self contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this bug pre…

AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries, anything that depends on system libraries needs to be compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or libvdpau for hardware…

Interesting. Yeah it seems like the solution for digikam on my solution was something like unpack the app image and recompile something and I’ve not had the time to mess with it. I hope the maintainer can release a fixed image at some point. I really like that app!

Re: Darktable 4.0

#60
post #49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is an afterthought. You guys have to deal with Adobe, or use a less advanced alternative.

For RAW editing DXO is great and runs native on Apple silicon. Recently bought ON1 and Affinity photos as well so there are other alternatives to Adobe, at least in the processing stage of RAW development.

Does DXO still bundle rootkits (PACE) with their software?
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