r/DarkTable

I am wanting to move over to Darktable from Lightroom (non classic) I have tried Darktable before and was overwhelmed and felt lost that I couldn’t seem to get what I wanted the picture to be with it as well as I could with Lightroom. I think I’m a better editor than I was back then and could bring some of those skills over to Darktable.

My question is, how did you learn Darktable? Did you study it by reading guides and or watching YouTube videos? Play around until you figured it out? Or watch a video before editing specifically on the subject?

I’d appreciate the advice as I think this is a really cool piece of software!

After upgrading to 5.6.0, the performance of editing absolutely tanked for me.

Previous version were quite smooth, but now any edits turn DT into a slideshow. Especially using snapshots, and working with any contrast/sharpening module, but many other modules are also affected.

Zooming out or in the image straight up freezes DT for few seconds, which is very painful.

Does anyone else experience this? Any tips on performance boost? I hope the next update is going to be optimization related.

Hi everyone,

im rather new to darktable and tried reading up a lot. Theres still a ton of information out there but darktable seems much more technical/adjustable than other software i used, so i´m still a bit overwhelmed.

One thing that concerns me during my edits is which modules i should/should not use. As far as i understand the "best" or at least standard tone mapper right now is AgX. Every now and then I read on some reddit-posts that certain modules are generally outdated or should not be used with AgX because it is a display referred module or that simply another module works better with AgX. I do know that darktable has a list of outdated modules and you can hover over any module to see if its working display referred. I´m still unsure when using some modules if that is the right one or if there is at least another module who would work better. Would hate getting used to a "wrong" workflow.

Is there a definite list which modules should or can be used with AgX?

Hi everyone,

I need your help. I've been using Darktable to edit my photos, but when I try to upload them to Instagram, I get a huge downgrade with quality, specially when looking in PC. (I know Instagram has a lot of limitation when you try to upload something).

I tried everything I could think of.

- Landscape 1080x566 (in pixels for file)

- Portraits 4:5 1080x1350 (in pixels for file)

- Turning on max quality upload inside Instagram app

- Quality of the image when exporting 90

- Profile is sRGB

- High quality resampling Yes.

What you should know:

- It's not a problem with downloading the image. I use Dropbox to save my images from Darktable to my mobile phone and when I open them in my gallery, they are perfectly fine and also when previewing the image when making a post.

- They look decent when you're viewing with your phone (smaller screen) but really bad when viewing with your browser on PC.

- I looked up on YouTube for tutorials, saw Mariens video but I'm still having trouble. The images I'm trying to upload are ideally on a landscape format (I used the golden cut crop)

If you have any experience with this, PLEASE share your wisdom and tips😭 I'm desperate. Thank you.

I have the Viltrox 9mm f2.8 for my Sony A6700. It takes some great wide angle shots, but it has some decent correction built in where the edges don't get that fisheye distortion.

But what if I want that fisheye distortion? Not all the time, but there are definitely situations where it would look good for how wide it is. Is there a way to do that?

I tried manual lens corrections, but setting distortion to 0 doesn't do it and image scale basically just gives me pixel stretching or zooms. Is there a different module I can use?

Hello, I am wondering whether I should enable this option or not. If I understand correctly, it auto-enables a tone-mapping module (for example AgX) from the start, with some (static?) default values.

From what I understand, when processing an image with DT it is recommended to apply modules in a certain order, and the tone-mapping module is far from the first step. Also, I have tried this auto-apply thing anyway, and most of the time, when I arrive at the tone-mapping step, the pre-applied default values don't make much sense (especially when significant cropping has happened beforehand). Also I'm suspecting that having some tone-mapping pre-enabled makes the exposure-setting step only harder (because tone-mapping sort of dampens the effects of exposure setting).

So I wonder: what's the use case for this "auto-apply" feature, when should one enable or disable it? I have a hard time figuring that out.

Please note that I am by no means an expert, so I may be missing some important info or concept.

Thanks.

I know there is probably no hope but I recently lost my SD Card with a few thousand photos and raw files for a film project I'm working on and I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is any way that copies or backups or anything is still lingering on my main device. I work off of a 2023 Macbook Pro and used the programs Davinci Resolve and Darktable (for video and photo respectively) literal minutes prior to losing the card. I haven't found any way to access anything but I figure it couldn't hurt to ask. I'm really only looking to salvage the files I was working on just prior to losing it (about two weeks of content, 10 video files and 500 photo) since I did backup most everything else prior, though I have more than learned my lesson about the importance of regular backups. If anyone has any ideas that could help, they would be incredibly appreciated.

Since dtstyle.net crashed and is not rebuilt. Is there a similar database with styles? Like a community project where we can collect certain styles for example the film emulations of https://github.com/t3mujinpack/t3mujinpack (which is btw super nice!)

As a photographer I liked (lightroom) presets for a quick look&feel of photos.

Would such a common database be useful? Or is there something similar, something in the making? Would love to hear your pov

Running the latest build of DT on a Mac Mini (Tahoe 26.5.2) and cannot get DT to reliably load.

Usually it hangs (spinning beachball) on "loading utility modules: midi" for about 2 minutes; during that time the system shows DT as "not responding".

I've waited it out a couple of times and finally got DT to load and set the default parameters, only to find I couldn't quit the app! It gives me spinning beachball and system says "not responding"; after waiting 5 minutes I finally force-quit the app.

Restarted the machine, deleted DT and its config files, re-installed it from a freshly downloaded file, and it's still hanging on the "midi" module, but now (assuming I have the patience to wait it out) DT it hangs indefinitely on "initializing Lua" (at least 5 minutes) and I have to force-quit.

Before I give up completely and trash DT for good, do you have any suggestions?

I have some photos that I've processed for screen and I want to create prints from them on both gloss and matte paper.

I thought I could use soft proofing to help me with this, and I've set up soft proofing profiles so that I can preview the print results on screen, but it doesn't seem to really do anything other than act as a print preview.

When I switch soft proofing on, I can see that my print versions need more contrast for them to match the screen version, but I can't find a way to add the right amount of contrast just to the print versions. Applying it applies it to everything, and then toggling soft proofing leaves it applied to the original pipeline, so there's no way to check my print adjustments to the original render, and snapshots don't help because they don't remember if soft proofing was enabled or not.

In short, I can't find a way to adjust my prints until they match the original.

The only thing I can think to do so far is to render a tiff from the original image, open it in a separate image viewer, try to put it next to the DarkTable window, and then adjust the soft proof until it matches the tiff.

I can't believe that's the intended workflow, but I can't find anything in the manual or in the app itself that indicates what I'm supposed to do. Is soft proofing just not finished, does it have a feature I'm missing, or is it used for something I'm not aware of? How do people deal with this?

Have about 250+ images in a collection and Darktable is running very slow. Every time I make an adjustment it gives me "working..." for about 10 seconds. Is there any easy way to fix this. Do I have to move my images into different folders in windows to fully break the link?

Hi! I have a client and I'm using darktable for the first time since i recently just made the full linux switch. My client expects the pictures within the week and I cant send the images. Every time I upload the files to google drive or gmail to send them over, the file gives an error saying it contains 0 bytes or that the file is unreadable.

Please help asap.