Hello, I've been following the project for a while but finally decided it's time to fully adopt it into my workflow.. My only concern is that I didn't keep up to date on the status post forking.. is the community still with darktable or has there been a migration to Ansel? thanks :)

After I have imported images into Darktable, various modules are automatically activated. For example “output color”, “demosaic”, “highlight reconsrtuction”, “raw black/white point”, “white balance” and some more. This seems to vary from image to image. Sometimes I have one module more, sometimes one module less. However, this results in most images looking dark and washed out. The original images, on the other hand, are more colorful and brighter and have a much greater dynamic range.

I had previously assumed that this was due to the workflow setting. That's why I set it to “none”. Nevertheless, the modules are activated automatically.

How can I prevent this? I would generally like to activate the modules myself, if I need modules for an image at all. How can I prevent this behavior so that I don't have to deactivate the modules individually?

Hello! I greatly enjoy using Darktable and I'd like to hear how others use it for processing B&W negative scans. For me historically before using darkoom, I'd simply just invert the colors, convert to monochrome and then fiddle with black/gray/white sliders in levels. In Darktable I use negadoctor without touching anything, then monochrome and do editing simply by moving about the 3 sliders in rgb levels.

Where I get a bit lost is with the default exposure and filmic rgb modules which have their own sliders, as well as more in negadoctor itself. To me who just wants to do minimal touchup to get tones to look nice, it feels like I have 10 different sliders which all are basically doing the same thing, and they all seem to fight against each other more often than work together. I know the job of filmic rgb is to get things mapped nicely for digital display, but I've often found that when I do my editing via the workflow I mention in the paragraph above, if I switch off filmic rgb then suddenly things look more natural, it's sort of hard to explain. This could be a problem with my current approach, however.

Any suggestions for workflow? Does filmic rgb come into play differently when processing B&W images? Should I perhaps only be trying to edit tone via negadoctor, skip rgb levels and leave everything in filmic rgb and exposure at their default values?

Thanks!

Hi. I just found out that OM has a free AI Noise Reduction software compatible with my Olympus EM5iii. I’m pretty pleased with the results (I almost ordered DxO Photolab). The thing is, the noice reduction is great, but I would like to improve automatically the exposure, white balance, etc. This was pretty much automatic with DxO. Is there anyway to do this with the OM Workspace? What can I do to not lose the Noise Reduction changes from OM Workspace and then use for example Darktable? Any advice? Thank you.

I have developed a bunch of photos from last vacation and want now to export them as jpeg. Some photos should not be exported, because they are to bad. Thats why i have clicked on the "discard" button at the thumbnail. the thumbnail is now some sort of grayed out. But when i export the photos, also this greyed out photos are exported. Is there some way to prevent exporting such photos?

So I made a post about this before, but I brought some negatives to a photo store and a woman has been scanning them for me and coloring them. I’m not sure what program she’s using. I didn’t ask. It’s probably not Negadoctor in dark table. But she hands them back to me on my external hard drive exported as tiff files so if I want to do further denoising cropping white balance, filmic RGB, and sharpening then I can. Just curious if there’s any other modules or steps that I should be doing in my workflow (It depends on the image and what it needs), but I wasn’t sure if there was another module or step that I should consider given that they are scanned negatives. Thanks.

I know how to offset the time for a group of images. But when I tried it with the year it didn't work. How can I change the film role to the right year?

Anyone know why Darktable is saying this: “darktable” can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.

Hi all, I have noticed that my exported JPEGs are a bit different from what I see in DarkTable. I was wondering if this is due to the fact that a 8-bit JPEG does not have all the initial information contained in the RAW file or if do some mistake in visualizing and/or exporting. The image has been exported in JPEG-8bit using sRB (web-safe) profile. I apologize if my question might sound stupid to more expert photographers.

At first I thought the problem was due to the Windows Photo viewer, so I re-imported the JPEG in DT, but I see some differences. I know it is not the best example, but you can see the JPEG to be darker and more contrasted (see especially the blacks on the rock in the bottom left corner).

RAW Edited in DT

JPEG Exported from DT and re-imported in DT

As display profile, should I edit using the system display profile or using sRB (web-safe) when I edit a photo?
In case I want to print, I work with display profile: system display profile plus soft proof activated, using the paper ICC softproof profile. Is this correct?

Previously I was using LR, but since I moved to free software, I got pickier and I am evaluating DT a lot, in order to check if this can be my only and permanent tool for post-processing.

EDIT: you can follow the discussion I opened on pixls.us here.

Hi, have a problem with exporting monochrome image as a B&W greyscale. DT version 3.6 and now with 4.6.1 after upgrade as well on Windows 10, RAW files from Olympus (ORF).

When loading resulting tiff into the Gimp I get an error message that: ICC profile validation failed: Color profile is not for grayscale color space. However in the output color profile are RGB profiles available - so the question is how to export BW TIFF to not have an RGB color profile. The problem is that if I ignore this error message I see the image too dark in Gimp and the same problem appears in the photo laboratory - they have to adjust lightness on their own. What works well export monochrome as RGB - however it produces not so great results from contrast point of view.

Hi! I'm brand new to Darktable. I'm running Windows 11 and I've got the latest DT version.

I'm using it to prepare some raw image files for research. Basically, I've got off-white objects that I've photographed against a black background, and I've been able to use DT's tools to manipulate it into a white-on-black shape. That's great, but I need a need a black shape on white background (i.e. a silhouette). It seems like there should be a way to simply invert the colours, but I've been unable to figure it out from fiddling with DT or looking online.

Can anyone help?

DarkTable Version 3.8.1, MacOS 10.13.6
Camera Model: Nikon D7200
Lens Model: AF-S DX Nikkor 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR
Hi, I'm a decent bit out of practice with photo editing (read: over a year). I did read the github link addressing this, but it didn't quite answer my question--the thumbnails shown in lighttable DO match what is shown in darkroom, but not the original file. When I open the NEF in Preview, it is very saturated and accurate to the scene IRL. However, in darkroom, it's pretty lacking. From what I've looked up, this is a common sentiment, but I noted the histograms of the two differed substantially. Is that to be expected?

I've tried messing around a lot to get a decent result, but have yet to have any luck. What settings would you guys recommend applying to get similar results between the two programs?

Image in Preview (left) vs. darkroom (right)

​

Histogram in darkroom (above) vs. Preview (below)

This might be a stupid question. I am a hobby photographer and have been using Lightroom since my father recommends it. But I have had enough of paying for the subscription. So I decided I would try darktable. But I have a question.

Lightroom stored files in a Library or catalog on my pc (not sure what you call it) and I could choose this location. Can you do the same with darktable easily?

Do darktable even use such a feature? Does it take alot of space? Asking as I would prefer not to have it stor files that takes alot of space on my C drive.

I make some pretty intricate shapes with many nodes, and the dotted line added around my shape is usually always too far away, and I've been having to click on each dotted node and drag it closer to the mask line. This takes forever, is there anyway to select all nodes and bring them closer to their source node?

I'm a novice so I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense.

Hi there, just hoping to have the automatic lens corrections (distortion, CA, Vignetting etc.) disabled by default. I'll use for the images for photogrammetry, which relies on images having distortion kept in them. I can see there's a way to set the "corrections" to "none", but just wanted to know if there's a default setting somewhere that can make this out of sight and out of mind

I am really new to darktable and I am wondering why every photo I upload (being either jpg or arw) comes out blue? I feel like I have googled and messed with all the settings for hours to no avail. Darktable version is 4.6.1.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

https://preview.redd.it/67jfla5ufquc1.jpg?width=1906&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=24d429e38305becacbcf1515372588c749c2cc6d

Any tips or YouTube videos For editing scanned negatives that have been saved as tiff files? I’ve been mostly denoising and sharpening. Increasing saturation doesn’t have the effect that it normally would if I was editing digital shot and raw.

Hello everybody, short question: Are the TIFF compressions offered by DarkTable lossless, and do they work on 16bit TIFFs?

A few weeks ago I did use the program to edit about 100 pics without any problem, and today I fired it up to work on a few files and it just crashes whenever it goes into the darkroom. And it's apparently only with JPG images, RAW, or other formats work flawlessly is there a simple way to solve it or will I have to reinstall/update?

I work on a x86 2017 Macbook air

Hey, I have this problem working with Darktable:

I stored my photos in a cloud storage that works like a drive in Windows (so it´s P:\…). I started to save all fresh photos from my camera there. I can import them into Darktable, edit them, and continue the editing the next session as one would expect. So far all is well and it all works as if the photos were on my computer´s hard drive.

However… I store the photos on the cloud drive because I work from two computers in two different locations. So, today, I edit a photo on computer A, and the next day, I want to continue on computer B (where the photo already had been imported before, but not edited). Both computers load from, and save to, the same folder of the cloud drive.

Here is where the problem starts. Computer B does not recognise that the photo has been edited when I start Darktable and view the thumbnails in the folder. It does not recognize that the photo has been edited when I open the photo for editing. I then tried „import“, importing not only new photos but all photos of the folder. Because I hoped this would also import the ´edited´ XMP-file. But this didn´t work either.

Edits that are not visible on Computer B still used to be there the next session on Computer A (I just hope that the reimporting on Computer B didn´t delete all the existing XMP-files in the cloud drive folder, as this was a new idea of mine. I´m not at Computer A in the moment so I can not check).

Before I encountered the problem the last time so far, I made sure that Computer A and Computer B are running the exact same, and the very latest, version of Darktable. This is happening on Windows computers.

Fwiw, I saved my last edit on Computer A as an additional TIFF-file in the same folder. This TIFF file was imported into Computer B as one would expect. It is therefore, imho, very unlikely that the XMP-file did not go to the cloud drive correctly from Computer A, as the TIFF file did. I´m using pCloud Drive as a cloud service if that should matter. I´m not losing any other files there.

tl;dr: Darktable, pictures in cloud storage drive, used on two computers, doesn´t work.

Hello , I just noticed that my photos uploaded to Flickr do not have the Lens information. I checked in the export settings and the EXIF is enabled. example When I upload to Smugmug it is included. Is there a setting that I need to change in order for Flickr to read the data or for it to appear in the image?

My setup:

Color calibrated wide gamut monitor (88% Adobe RGB)

Windows 10

Darktable 4.2.0

.RW2 from my camera

Exported photo is sRGB

Display profile in DT is my calibrated icc profile

Issue:

The exported image has this happen to a bright part of the background while looking like this in DT. Here's the exported image.

This happens no matter the format (jpeg, jpeg2000, TIFF 16 bit, PNG, etc.) and no matter the export colour space. It happens no matter the monitor (my calibrated wide gamut monitor I edit on, my side sRGB monitor, my Galaxy S21, etc.) and no matter the image viewer (ImageGlass which is colour managed, other unmanaged apps). Whatever I do, the image looks good in DT and bad after being exported.

The photo looks identical in the exported sRGB image to how it looks in DT except for this issue.

Any ideas?

EDIT: It appears it was a bug as toggling off and the on the highlight reconstruction module fixed the issue. Pretty annoying but at least I can get back to editing

Hi all, I would like to print a photo album with Saal Digital, since I got a gift card with them, using the Fujifilm Crystal Archive Album Matt paper.

I have googled a lot, searched about profiles in the manual and here on Reddit, but couldn't find the answer to my question yet.

I have downloaded the ICC profile of this paper and now testing it with on Darktable. However for commercial software (i.e. Lightroom) there are several recommendations and settings (you can check their webpage, but for example "Black point compensation" or "Simulate paper colour") that are not there in DT, I can simply activate or deactivate the soft proof.

I add this second question: when I go for the soft proof the picture loses lots of contrast, saturation and looks faded: I know it is due to the printing process, paper and so on. If anyone has already gone through this process, do you have a list of quick adjustments I could try? I am now in the phases of re-editing every photo, in order to make them more similar as possible to the original exported JPEG, just to bring back my original style.

Finally one quick consideration: everything seems to be around LR and PS. I don't know if Adobe is sponsoring here and there, but I feel the world wants to bring you there, because "everyone" is providing info and making tutorials only about that, when there are good free tools.

EDIT: I activated always use LittleCMS 2 to apply output color profile and this brings more option. However I could do nothing for "Black point compensation" or "Simulate paper colour". I had the chance to work on a PC with both Lightroom and Darktable and checked a JPEG image and soft proof results were different.
In the end I went with Darktable without concerns because my monitor is quite cheap and not calibrated, so there was no point in being extremely peaky on the profile, but still these 2 parameters had a big impact in LR, therefore I look forward to something equivalent to be in DT.

Recently I install Darktable on my 16" Macbook pro with Intel i9 CPU, 16 GB RAM, Radeon 5500 GPU. However it feel sluggish to develop images. And then I realize that DT doesn't utilize the discreet Radeon 5500 GPU. I have changed all the settings but the problem remains.

Any solution? Thank you

Hello, is there a plugin that allows me to just select objects on photo with some AI magic?

Is there a way to stop Darktable from not allowing you to export an image when you haven't made any changes to the image before the last export?

I recently located my old Minolta Dimage 7 (just a 7, not a 7i or 7hi), which I bought new back in the day. I was on a Windows box back then; I’ve been on Mac for almost 20 years now. Minolta’s RAW files (.MRW) required either special software to read for the proper color translation or the proper settings in your software, be it LR or PS. I’ve heard that there are also translation settings for Darktable and ON1. Anybody know of these, have these they can share, or know where I could find them? Thanks in advance!

I've placed my photo on the map using the map module. After that I want to export it including the geo location. geo tags option is enabled. But the metadata is missing in the output file. Am I missing something?