For many, it is important to keep track of where their images are taken. Darktable makes this easy for everyone, regardless of whether a given camera has built in GPS or not. The easiest is of course to have a camera with GPS, but unless you take your pictures with your phone, this is not guaranteed. Most of us do have a mobile phone with GPS, though, and this can be a valuable tool, although I suspect it is widely ignored. I myself didn’t actually think seriously about this until I started researching this video, but from now on I will use it on every trip.
Darktable’s map view gives a very good overview of where your photos are taken, and after using the Find Location module to find the area, there are three different ways to place them on the map. The simplest way is if your camera has GPS built in. Then the images will have the position in their EXIF data and Darktable will read this on import and place the images automatically.
The next method is to use a dedicated GPS device or an app on your phone to record a GPS track. This can be imported into Darktable and attached to all relevant images at once.
Finally, if you don’t have access to any of these methods, you can always drag images from the film strip onto the map manually.
Here are some GPS tracking apps for Android and iOS. Sorry I couldn’t find a way to link directly to a search in App Store.
And when your curiosity gets the better of you and you want to learn how to use the map view, look no further than to the video below:
In part 1 of the preferences videos I went through the GUI options tab of the preferences dialog in darktable. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend you take a look here.
In part 2 of the series I go through the rest of the options, divided into four more tabs: Core options, Session options, Shortcuts and Presets.
Core options
These options are all about controlling the inner workings of Darktable. Memory management, color management of thumbnails and how to store thumbnails are only a small part of it. There are also options for image quality, the handling of sidecar files, choose to enable OpenCL for faster rendering using your GPU or not and other options.
Session options
These options control how darktable sets up the folder structure and renames files when you import images from a camera or taking photos via tethering. If you set up a good system here, you don’t have to worry about where to place your images, it is all taken care of for you. You can use a series of predefined variables or your own names, or a combination of those.
Shortcuts
Here you will find all the keyboard shortcuts Darktable uses. You can also customize them to suit your taste and build your own personal set of shortcuts. Complete sets of shortcuts can be exported to a file for backup and can also easily be imported.
Presets
Just like with the shortscuts, here is a collection of all your presets from all the modules. The presets that come with Darktable as default can not be altered in any way, but you can manage the ones you have made yourself. Change the name, save them as separate files or set them to be applied automatically to matching images or to only be visible for matching images. You can also set the criteria for matching, and you can import presets.
An important part of any software is the preferences, or settings dialog. In here you can to a varying degree customize your experience to suit you tastes or needs. Some applications let you change just about anything, others are more restrictive, but there are almost always things you can do to feel more at home. Darktable is no exception.
Darktable works very well right out of the box, but there will always be something you can change to make it a little bit better just for you. So what are you waiting for? Click the cogwheel and start exploring all the options. You’ll find the cogwheel at the right hand side of the upper panel. Don’t see it? Then the upper panel is probably disabled. Click the little white triangle at the very top of your screen to enable it.
The preferences open in a separate window. Along the top is a row of tabs with different categories: GUI options, Core options, Session options, Shortcuts and Presets. If you have Lua scripts installed, there will also be a tab called Lua options.
In this video I go through the GUI options tab. These options are all about how the interface behaves, like your choice of language, what to do when you delete images, what metedata to appply automatically on import, and a whole lot more.
In the next video I’ll go through the other tabs. Until then, enjoy this video:
Like the last few Christmases have done, this one too gave us a brand new version of my favourite image processing software, Darktable. This time we got a whole lot of new toys to play with. A whopping three new modules, significant updates to several others and lots of smaller tweaks all around makes this one a really great release.
New module: duplicate manager
We have always had the possibility to make virtual copies of images in Darktable when we wanted different versions. The new module duplicate manager takes this to the next level. Now we can give the different versions names and we can compare edits quickly with a single mouse click.
New module: filmic
This is one of the most talked about news. It’s a new approach to shaping the contrast and fitting the relatively high dynamic range of modern cameras into the lower dynamic range of a jpg file, and at the same time mimicing somewhat the image characteristics of film. The author of this module, Aurélien Pierre, has written a long and very good article about this module on his website, which is well worth reading: http://bit.ly/2RXFQue
New module: retouch
This is a replacement module for the old spot removal module, with new and advanced tools. Spot removal is still available for compatibility reasons, but it is no longer necessary.
Where spot removal only used cloning, retouch uses “intelligent” healing by default. Cloning, as well as blur and fill is also available. And where this module really shines is in its ability to work on different detail levels due to frequency separation.
Updated modules: raw denoise and profiled denoise
Both these modules have got a graph like the equalizer module, where you can ajust which frequency bands the noise reduction will affect. For profiled denoise this is only with the wavelets mode. This gives greater control over the noise reduction, minimizing unwanted artefacts. Profiled denoise has also got two presets, meant to be used together when you use two instances to separate color noise and luminance noise.
Updated module: color balance
The color balance module has been reworked and has got some good additions, making it much easier to use. You can now use two sliders in each of the shadows, midtones and highlight areas to select a hue and adjust the amount without having to balance the R, G and B channels separately. The old method is still available too.
Updated module: tone curve
The tone curve module has also got a few nice updates. Linked RGB channels is now the default mode, which for many will be the expected way. The curve graph can be viewed in logarithmic mode, which gives much better control in the low light areas. There is also a selection of three different algorithms to calculate the curve smoothness.
Updated module: spot removal
Not much here, but for those who want to continue using spot removal, you can now change the opacity of each shape intividually.
Updates to parametric masking
Parametric masks are now even more powerful and easy to make with the new edge aware feathering option. I wasn’t aware of this when I made the video, so I don’t mention it there.
Other updates
You can have scroll bars on the sides of the image when zoomed in. This is available in Preferences.
The file type in lighttable view is more visible, as it it displayed vertically for portrait oriented images. It is still hidden for square images, though.
An option in Preferences makes it possible to display some EXIF data when you hover over an image in lighttable.
Some new sorting options are introduced.
I am sure there are things I have not mentioned here. For a complete list of everything new and how to use it, read the blog post on the Darktable website: http://bit.ly/2RSwwrL
Black and white is a genre as old as photography itself. Back then it was the only way, if you wanted colours you had to get out your crayons and colour the print. These days we do it the opposite way. We take a colour image and make it black and white.
Of course black and white means essentially that there’s no colour. But you can’t make a great black and white image by simply turning the saturation to zero. The colours are an important part of a colour image, and if you remove them you will have to compensate with something. And what is left when you take the colours away is contrast. To make a striking black and white image, we often have to increase the contrast, not only for the whole image, but also locally.
One very useful way of manipulating the contrast of a black and white image is to adjust the brightness of individual colours. In Darktable, we have essentially three tools for this:
Channel Mixer: Decide how much each of the red, green and blue channels contribute to the final image.
Monochrome: Mimics the way coloured filters are used with black and white film.
Color Zones: My favourite. Adjust the brightness of up to seven different colours in the image, and also decide the exact hues to adjust.
In the video below i explain how to make stunning black and white images in darktable.
When making local adjustments in Darktable, one of the ways to isolate a part of an image is to use drawn masks. These can be combined in a number of ways, more than you can accomplish directly in the module where you make them. They can also be reused in other modules, and organized in different ways. The masks can even be named, so you can easily see which is which.
When you have just started out with Darktable it may not be that obvious. You see the drawn masks in the different modules, but there’s a limit to what you can do with them. Now take a look at the left side of the screen and you’ll find the Mask Manager. Starting to use this will open up many new possibilities for your drawn masks.
It is important to keep in mind that the Mask Manager can not handle parametric masks. These are always dependent on current pixel values, so they can only be used when and where they are made. That said, I think I saw somewhere that the ability to store parametric masks may come at a later date.
But for now it is all about your circles, ellipses, patches, brushes and gradients. View the video below and learn how to handle them like a pro.
Sharpening is a very delicate subject. It should be used with great care, and mostly to give a little bit of extra pop to already reasonably sharp images. It may be tempting to oversharpen in order to «fix» bad focus or motion blur from camera shake, but as this would be the same as restoring detail that just isn’t there, it should be avoided.
There are three ways to apply sharpening in Darktable: Sharpen, Equalizer and the High Pass filter. They work in different ways but the results are very similar. Therefore I don’t want to say anything about when to use which method. You should learn them all and decide for yourself in each situation.
Also, Sharpening should be done at the very end of your workflow, and ideally you would sharpen for each output resolution. Say you export a small file for Instagram, a medium sized file for a web site and a full size file for printing. If you zoom in to 100% and sharpen the very finest details, this sharpening will never be visible in the Instagram file. Small file sizes require sharpening on a larger scale. And if this sharpening is done in the full size file, it will look more like overdone local contrast than sharpening.
To learn about the different sharpening tools, watch the video here:
Noise from high ISO can be a pain sometimes. Darktable has several tools to help you get rid of it or at least reducing it. In this week’s video I show you the different tools and how to work with them.
There are however a couple of things to remember that I did not mention in the video. Noise reduction is very processor intensive and has a tendency to slow down the editing quite a bit, since all the edits are recalculated every time you make an adjustment. Therefore it is important to think about when you apply noise reduction in your workflow.
If you do it early on you will have a cleaner image to work with. This will make it easier to set up good parametric masks, but Darktable will become slow. If you leave it to the end you may have not so perfect masks, but Darktable is quicker. So it is a balance you have to find for yourself, also taking into account the power of your computer. If you have a beast of a machine you may not notice much difference, so you can have noise reduction early on without problems.
I tend to do it this way: if it is an easy edit without much work, I just apply the noise reduction early in the workflow and leave it on. If the edit is more complicated, I like to do it quite early and then turn it off, only keeping it on when I set up critical parametric masks. Then I turn it on again before I do final sharpening. If I during the process send the image over to Gimp for some extra work there, then I do noise reduction before the export. In that case I don’t sharpen anything before export, I do that either in Gimp or when I get the image back into Darktable.
One of the most important aspects of photo editing is to adjust the colour balance. In Darktable there are many ways to do this. Check out my latest video if you want an overview of the different methods.
Colour saturation is another of those things that can be adjusted in a number of different ways in Darktable. Did you know that even the Levels module can be used for this? Check out the video below for more!
H P Birkeland fotografi 