I’m growing more and more impressed with its capabilities the more I use it! Wrapping my head around its approach to masking, and its “scene referred pipeline” took some time, but now that I’m getting the hang of it, I think I can say I genuinely prefer it to Lightroom.
Combined with digiKam, which is excellent for photo collection management, I’m a very happy photographer :)
I am trying to make the switch from lightroom to darktable but I cant figure out the import process, I go to add to library and I select the top most directory and clicked on recursive mode but the add to library button is greyed out, not sure what to do, are we supposed to only open one photo at a time?
edit: nvm after finding the right spot in the manual I guess Im supposed to import folder by folder and I have to wait for the photos to populate on the right pane so that I can then select them to be imported, I was trying to do all my 70k photos in one go haha, this is going to take a while x_x
You don’t need to import your library in to darktable. Darktable isn’t great at photo management and workflow.
What I do is use digiKam to manage my old Lightroom collection. In lightroom, make sure you’ve set it up to store metadata in sidecar files. Write your sidecar files out (this can take a long time). Open digiKam, and you can import all of your lightroom photos and data.
Then photos that need editing get sent to darktable from digiKam
Ohh gotcha, so it’s more like digikam is lightroom and darktable is like if you were to open a photo from lightroom into photoshop
Yep! Exactly (though I did most of my image editing in Lightroom)
Also, when you are playing around with darktable, it’s worth spending the time learning how to use parametric and drawn masks. If you ever use masks in your editing, mastering those in darktable will be the missing piece that makes it all come together for you. It’s very different to masking in Photoshop or Lightroom, but IMO, more flexible and more powerful. But you need to really play with it to understand how to use it best.
Will do! Thank you
I also want to make the switch away from Lightroom and it looks like that you here might have the solution for my problem. The Lightroom feature, where I can import everything on my PC and then sync these “smart previews” to their cloud and then hand out a link or just a tablet to my wife, friends or anyone, makes everything so much easier. They can then decide which photos they want to keep or be deleted and also label those, which I should develop first. Is there a FOSS (or at least non-Adobe) solution that would give me similar possibilities? I’m not afraid of hosting something myself.
We rsync the jpgs (not the RAW files) to our self hosted photoprism instance. Not for the same reason you do, but it could easily be used the way you describe it!
Alternatively, if you don’t shoot in jpeg+raw, or if you want to reduce the size of the jpegs before you sync them, digiKam has a batching tool that would let you automate exporting smaller versions of all of your files as part of the import process.
Ideally I would love to have the votes synced back to digiKam, especially if it’s about sorting out hundreds of photos. But that sounds like a workable solution until I found or developed a plugin, that can do this. Thank you!
We don’t sync back so I haven’t tested it, but as long as you have a gallery that writes back to a sidecar file, digikam can work with it.
Digikam has direct integration with Exiftool as well as batching, so anything you can get in to a sidecar file, you can get out with Digikam, and then stick in custom albums/categories etc.
Some quick searching turns up a tool called Piwigo (which I haven’t tried) that has the ability to run contest modes via plugins. Assuming it can write the votes/results back to the sidecar file in some manner, you should be able to get to it in Digikam
Thank you that is really helpful! I’ll look into it! It’s probably a bit of work until it is a smooth workflow but I’m willing to try it. Maybe then I can finally ditch Lightroom :)
I recently picked up photography a bit more seriously again having used Nikon Capture NX 2 for years. I tried all the linux and FOSS options but I ended up buying DXO Photolab 7 and found it far superior for my needs. I’ve had to setup a dual boot system to get it to work but it’s definitely worth it. Dark table is good, but it’s a long way off the commercial offerings in terms of ease of use and image quality.
I’m seriously doubting the image quality bit
In terms of noise reduction which greatly affects image quality it is nowhere near the big commercial players.
Have you tried the “Denoise (profiled)” feature? It applies auto de-noising per your camera model and metadata quite nicely. You can then fine tune it after enabling the feature.
I usually leave it at chroma only as well. Luminance noise is far less unpleasant on the eyes.
