![]() While this is true of any image editing program, the relatively small Darktable user base means that there just aren’t as many resources available to aspiring users compared to Lightroom and others. It takes a great deal of experimentation, trial and error, and online searching to figure out all the tools at your disposal. ![]() The sheer level of complexity can also be a significant detriment. Here, the Lighttable interface is unusable until all the thumbnails can be properly re-loaded by the program. Glitches like this show up far more than I’d prefer. And while there is no doubt that Darktable can handle any image editing tasks you throw at it, including more advanced options such as tethered shooting, slideshows, and printing, there are a host of drawbacks, as well. This article is not meant to be a review of Darktable, but rather a tool to help you decide if this program is right for you. Proceed with cautionĪt this point, you might be ready to cancel all your editing software subscriptions and jump on the Darktable bandwagon.īut before you take the leap, I need to offer a few words of caution. There is also no mobile support, meaning photographers who rely on tablets or phones as essential components of their editing workflow will be left out in the cold. Drawing a mask, moving a slider, or even cropping an image often involves precious seconds of wait time, which can really add up when going through hundreds of images. Performing many of the editing maneuvers is an exercise in patience, even on a newer computer. You can create masks of all shapes and sizes in Darktable, which are useful for applying edits in specific image locations.Īgain, I need to temper expectations. For frugal photographers, it would be difficult not to recommend Darktable, and for everyone else, it just helps to have some patience. I am still kind of amazed that all these features are in a free program that continues to be actively developed. While speed is important, it’s not everything, and many quibbles with Darktable are mitigated by its price.Īfter all, despite my issues with Darktable’s user interface and lack of polish, it’s impossible to overlook the cost. That’s not necessarily the only peg to hang your editing hat on, though. The latter will get the job done, but the former will do it way faster. Not that Lightroom and Capture One are speed demons – but comparing them to Darktable is like comparing a Ferrari to a Toyota Corolla. Scrolling through images, selecting pictures, editing metadata information, and other simple operations take far longer than other programs. My biggest issue with Darktable is evident just from using the Lighttable module: overall responsiveness is not great. ![]() While things seem great up to this point, I do need to temper your expectations a bit. I would be grateful if someone could confirm whether the above behaviour is expected and if so, what would be a suitable work-around.You can customize many different elements of the export process. By contrast, if I load a JPEG file from the camera into GIMP, both tags are set to sRGB and there is no problem with thumbnails. This is obviously unsatisfactory in itself, but owing to the tag remaining as Uncalibrated, I cannot be sure the image has the sRGB profile embedded. Curiously, this does not change either of the two ColorSpace tags above. I have found the only way to show the thumbnail correctly in Gwenview is to reload the JPEG into GIMP, ensuring that the option to promote imported images to floating point precision is unchecked, specifically assign the GIMP built-in sRGB profile, then re-export as a JPEG. To add to the doubt, the Gwenview image viewer, while it shows the full-sized image correctly, displays the thumbnails much too dark. I have been advised that some images that I sent out as JPEG files did not contain an embedded profile, although GIMP's Image Properties insist that they have the GIMP built-in sRGB. The Colorspace information for the image that Darktable exports shows up in Image -> Metadata -> View Metadata as: In my case my starting point is Nikon NEF files. In most cases the desired final output from GIMP is a JPEG with sRGB profile but I can find no settings which give me confidence that this is working properly. This is logical since it is desirable to work with floating point precision in GIMP 2.10. When using GIMP's Darktable plugin, I think I am right in saying that that closing Darktable always imports the image into GIMP in the form of a floating point EXR file with profile linear Rec709 RGB. This issue refers to GIMP 2.10.8 and Darktable 2.4.4, running in Linux (KDE). I now believe this to be a GIMP issue, but I cannot be sure whether the behaviour described is effectively a bug in GIMP or whether I am missing something. I am new to this group, but was referred to it after posting a description of the problem below to the Darktable forum.
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