Darktable

[Fenris]

What with all the messing around with T&C that Adobe are doing at the moment I've been looking at alternative RAW editors and catalogues.

Has anyone tried Darktable?

I've just downloaded it and added photos to the catalogue and about to edit a few photographs to see how it works.

Would be interested in anyone else's comments on Darktable. (not looking at other packages at the moment)

[neilt3]

I have the stand alone Lightroom 5 on my computer, not the CC subscription crap that does my needs .
Unfortunately it doesn't recognise the RAWs of my current main cameras, an a7Riv, a99ii and a6000 , but I can collect convert them Adobe RAWs via DNG if I want .
I've installed Dark table to replace this with it's extra features, including converting film negatives into positives after scanning them with a digital camera.
It's a steep learning curve as I've been using lightroom for at least fifteen years.
I figured out how to import the images , and how to convert the negatives, done a little PP on them , but found it a nightmare to store the final image in a specific folder like I do with lightroom,
I think I've filled up a default folder / the harddrive!
So that's the next thing I need to figure out .
Then delete my multiple stored files !

The programme seems very capable, it just takes some learning, especially if you're not the best at figuring out computer stuff .

[zou]

It's really powerful and has some useful features. What I really dislike about it is there being multiple modules that do more or less the same thing, in different ways, with similar names. Hard to discern which is the 'right' tool for the job and where to place that in the workflow.

Also when editing it's never refreshed the changes on the images in anything like as little time as Lightroom does. I keep it installed as I use gimp for various things and it links well for 16 bit things, but I'll be sticking with my old once-bought/always-mine Lightroom 5.7.

[peterba]

My experience with Darktable was similar to zou 's. It's a powerful program, but not very intuitive.

Amongst the range of freeware programs, I found Rawtherapee (though hardly the simplest of programs) more intuitive.

[skyehammer]

Bought a physical copy of LR 6 back in the day but never got round to updating it to 6.15 [ or whatever the very latest update was ] -

Then back in September while in the Patient Block at Raigmore and having only my 12" Dell Latitude with me I downloaded NX Studio and played around with it .

It's fairly intuitive and for the bits that ain't there's always Youtube -

Being the lazy git that I am I'm finding myself using NX more and more .

[JohnY]

Let's not forget the catalogue aspect of LR. Is the DAM in Darktable as good as in LR. Just looking at the Darktable documentation, it seems not.

[zou]

Jun 12, 2024 15:54:41 GMT JohnY said:

Let's not forget the catalogue aspect of LR. Is the DAM in Darktable as good as in LR. Just looking at the Darktable documentation, it seems not.

DAM? Lol. There's just a save dialogue box.

[JohnY]

Jun 12, 2024 18:20:57 GMT zou said:

Jun 12, 2024 15:54:41 GMT JohnY said:

Let's not forget the catalogue aspect of LR. Is the DAM in Darktable as good as in LR. Just looking at the Darktable documentation, it seems not.

DAM? Lol. There's just a save dialogue box.

You seem to confirm my suspicions. The only photo processing system to include DAM is Adobe.

As some of you know I am quite supportive of Affinity for editing and publishing. Sadly they do not include DAM.

These days when we accumulate many thousands of photographs DAM is so important. Preferable DAM with AI person and location identification.

This was only a professionals' need a few years ago but is now relevant to amateurs.

[skyehammer]

I downloaded Darktable from the link above and I'm not sure if something went wrong during the process but I can't seem to import any photos into it - the YT tutorials aren't much help either - think I'll stick with NX Studio for now .

[peterob]

Jun 12, 2024 21:18:59 GMT JohnY said:

Jun 12, 2024 18:20:57 GMT zou said:

DAM? Lol. There's just a save dialogue box.

You seem to confirm my suspicions. The only photo processing system to include DAM is Adobe.

As some of you know I am quite supportive of Affinity for editing and publishing. Sadly they do not include DAM.

These days when we accumulate many thousands of photographs DAM is so important. Preferable DAM with AI person and location identification.

This was only a professionals' need a few years ago but is now relevant to amateurs.

I think there are standalone DAM products, can't remember the names now, it is just a database after all but the integrated nature of Lightroom is very useful and doesn't require as much discipline on the part of the user as a standalone or home-written system.  I'm very unorganised.  Before I got into Lightroom I used Canon DPP as an editor and Flickr as my DAM - the Flickr "Albums" provided a rough subject grouping and once uploaded keywords could be added.  I still use more or less this organisation in that I add keywords in Lightroom (usually generic for the day - not necessarily image by image) and then some of those images get entered into a Lightroom publish collection named after the destination Flickr "album" and uploaded to Flickr.  So most images I choose for the themes are linked to a publish collection called "APmonthly" [for historic reasons], go up to that album on Flickr where they reside until used on the forum.  On disk everything is by date - some organised folk can order by subject but I can't do that. I'd start creating similar named folders until I had flower[1] .....  flower [100] and never know which one I put a photo in.  

I don't think it is an amateur vs professional thing. It is a volume of photographs thing.  Our film photos [all of family] went into albums and were essentially filed by date.   Now the prints are fading I'm trying to digitise the negs [not a task I am temperamentally suited] but as we only kept the album prints I often have 36 negs within which is the one print we kept. I feel for photo archivists facing the challenge of indexing collections of negatives in the tens of thousands.  I guess some folk who espouse using [and keeping] a separate SD card [or whatever] for each days shoot, ultimately end up with the same problem of keeping track of what is on each card.