Thread 4461369

Is Darktable a meme? At least if you're not already a pro at editing. I tried using it again and I'm this close to just buying an Adobe license.
Like yeah sure it seems to have a ton of options but what is the point if there are no good resources for beginners to learn how to do photo editing using (the current version of) Darktable.
And good luck figuring it out yourself(oh you want to correct white balance in your photos? Great, Darktable has a white balance module! Too bad it will throw up an error every time you try to use it because it's a depreciated module and you're supposed to use the color balance module instead, good luck figuring it out)
Feel free to correct me if you know some resource that actually covers the basic for new users, because google sure isn't helping(my personal favorite was one of the top results being a seemingly super useful guide that specifically talked about using text instead of making it a video so it can be easily updated, and then it just ends at the setup part without any further chapters because the author lost interest)
I fucking hate free software.

Freetard sofrware is shit because it lacks all the sensor color and lens profiles. With Adobe you can literally just open the RAW, select "Adobe Colors" and you're 3/4 of the way to a usable image. Not to mention the infinitely superior noise reduction

I don't like Darktable UI either, and the fact that I cannot use Adobe's DCP camera profiles in it. RawTherapee is somewhat better in both respects (at least the UI issues are different) and it's what I use when I get tired of Olympus' raw editor being slow and buggy as fuck.

>>4461372
You normally install Adobe's DNG converter, which includes a bunch of camera profiles.

I've had the most success doing RAW demosiacing and NR from 1st party software. For me that's DPP4. But from there I export as a TIFF and take it to a freeware photo editor because I prefer the workflow. The freeware's NR and interpolation is ass compared to the native software because it doesn't really know what the fuck to do optimally. Even though it has a lens-corrections section with supposedly the right data and info, it just always comes out way shitter and requires far more effort.

Basically I'm recommending you check out your camera maker's software if only to get the RAW > TIFF part down, then pick whatever software you feel most comfortable with the do the rest of it. If that happens to be the 1st party software then there you go, the consensus on /p/ seems to be pick up C1 on sale.

>>4461380
Sometimes you lose tools though. I think, RawTherapee (or was ot something else) does not have the same white balance tool for tiff files.

>>4461369 (OP)
if you're not on linux, affinity is easier to use. with darktable it pretty much assumes you know what you are doing. i use them all at one point or another.

>>4461380
What I don't like is that Olympus thing can only properly export sRGB files and I get anxious that I'm LOSING COLOR DATA REEEE. It has a setting for Adobe RGB export, but sometimes it exports an image that doesn't look the same as in the editor. But yeah Olympus thing has better default denoise, better chromatic aberration and what not.

>>4461380
>interpolation is ass compared to the native software because it doesn't really know what the fuck to do optimally
They let you mix and match algorithms until you find the correct defaults yourself because the $0/hr literal communist software devs would rather write spaghetti code for fucking MIDI shortcuts than work on an editor that works for photographers

You must understand that they have aspergers. They are basically incapable of understanding that other people are not programmers and do not enjoy playing with the order of algorithms to create the best defaults.

>>4461382
I've used Darktable and Digikam (mostly for organising) for a year or so now with no noticable lack of tools when I import a TIFF. Then again, once i'm in either of those I'm down to tweaking gamma curves or sharpness, not the fundemental edits. DPP4 loses a whole range of tools if you're editing a JPEG versus a RAW, but I can't remember the last time I did that / I don't know why I would even go that route.

>>4461444
Going from sRGB to AdobeRGB, or not having colour managed software (which sounds like was the case) defeats the entire purpose of using a colour space. I'd hope there's a workaround or there's a setting you missed, but... I believe you.
I owned an E-PL7 for a short while and putting aside the performance of that camera, I immediately noticed how much of a steaming pile of horse shit OM Workspace was. If that's your first party option, I unironically emplore you to buy something else. It's a shame though because the fundemental steps being done better in-house is a no brainer, but their software is just... bleh.

>>4461445
Before I started doing TIFFs with DPP, I was just trying the freeware's NR and that alone made me realise how terrible the software is for the most basic things. Like really, some peoples' workflow consists of
>import
>resize
>NR
>sharpen
>tweak contrast and gamma
a-wallah. Basic but effective and done quickly.
>OH wait the devs of this expect me to dial in specific parameters for each of those steps
>Alright let me save a workflow I can use as a template!
>OH wait, I used ISO 1600 instead of ISO 800 on that photo... hmm that looks fucking terrible. I'm just gonna go shoot jpeg.
Normally I'm fond of open source tools that just get the job done, but this ain't in chief.

>>4461448
I hate how Oly... err... OM is shilling "computational photography", while their OM Workspace hasn't been updated since 2022 (I think). Meaning that among 2000 employees there isn't even one person consistently working in it. And then we'd make fun of free software.

>>4461453
They’re a dead brand. They don't exist to improve and compete. They exist to spare olympus from losing face and their legacy. It’s an asian cultural thing.

US gun companies do this as well. New management buys them and rehashes crap forever after they go under.

Honestly, I do like Darktable. I was pretty pissed off when I had to switch from trusted 2.6 version to newest 5.2 because it no longer would recognise half of my lenses for some reason and how 5.2 had tons of things changed (like getting rid of contrast-brightness-saturation module because "color correction is better" and sure, it might be fun to adjust contrast separately for shadows, midtones and highlights but I often really just need to pump contrast by 10% or something). But after day or two, I got used to it. I tried using NX Studio before (since I use Nikon camera) and while it does work for sure (and fix some things automatically on its own like intense blue light related chromatic abberations that otherwise require tweaking settings in at least two modules in DT), I felt that I actually work slower and have less control. And call me blind but didn't notice much difference between noise reduction in both (DT would "melt" details in high strength but in low I wouldn't notice a difference).

People on /p/ were telling me I do this wrong and DT is shit but I honestly don't see it. Probably I am wrong. But keep using DT.

>>4461462
/p/ is mostly capture one users. They hold rendering to a higher standard. C1 rendering looks a lot like scans of 120 film.

Just use Rawtherapee, they at least seem to have someone with basic understanding of UI/UX

>>4461382
sorry id -

>>4461469
Agreed. Rawtherapee is MILES ahead of Darktable.

Capturing this thread here to ask about a different FOSS

Has anyone here ever taken Hugin to its limits? I'm talking panorama stitching a lot of Fuji GFX pixel-shifts together. Dozens of 400MP pics into one panorama?

>>4461448
There's some part of Olympus "color science" that I don't quite understand, but I feel the answer should be somewhere on the surface.

By default, OM Workspace produces relatively muted green colors. Setting Adobe RGB output in OM Workspace makes green more saturated, and on top of that I had a photo (incidentally with a lot of green in it) where OM Workspace itself displayed the exported image differently from the pre-export orf.

Here's some unedited foliage exported as srgb.

>>4461515
And here's an image exported to Adobe rgb and then converted to srgb with rawtherapee. Ideally, they should be more or less the same, but they aren't.

Not posting the adobe rgb version, since 4chan will probably delete the color profile, and it will show up wrong.

>>4461516
Ah yes, on my screen, this second picture looks the same before and after converting to srgb, meaning that it's more likely that OM Workspace is doing something weird than me having configured all the other software wrong. The fact that this mostly affects green, makes me think that Olympus Adobe RGB export is not a true conversion, but more like an artistic interpretation.

Then, there's another thing. If I load Adobe's profile for my camera in rawtherapee, the images look more like OM Workspace's adobe rgb export than its srgb export. Which could imply that Adobe people made their profile to match Olympus Adobe rgb export (makes sense), but not the default one.

Anyway, thanks for reading my blog.

>>4461476
Biggest I ever did was 200MP from a few 30MP pics.

Panoramas got issues. Even the best panorama will have artifacts. Especially with moving objects - including leaves in the wind.

>>4461444
you shouldn't use olympus's software because it forces the same degree of shitty over-sharpening as in-camera even when set to sharpen 0 because apparently they designed all their software around kit lenses and any other lens/body combo including chinkshit has way more sharpness and detail than you get using their own shitty software
fuck om workspace. shit even adds jpeg artifacting to tiffs. fuck it

>>4461476
I've never hit any limits in Hugin. I'm gonna guess you need the specs to support it, but it's not inefficient.

One thing that did take some time was figuring out a workflow. I did some scans of a 4x7 negatives composed of 1:1 33MP full frame pictures.
It took way more work than some of the paid options, but after several attempts, Hugin got me the best result.

Processing this 700MP output on a PC with 32GB RAM was no problem.

>>4461369 (OP)
Since we have this thread every few weeks here is everything you need to understand about darktable
>A weird shitty mix of lightroom and photoshop
>Default import profiles suck for RAWs creating flat, undersaturated images. Yes, they are fixable but its a needless workaround considering lightroom is also free software (pirate it)
>Has a couple fun creative tools which are missing from lightroom by default like the bloom, velviation and negadoctor for negative scanning.
>UI is designed by retarded trannies that have some weird moral objection to capitalization
>Runs really well, a lot faster than lightroom
Overall, it's more of an artistry software compared to lightroom which is intended to be used as a fast linear workflow for professionals. darktable works best when you hate the way the photos look coming out of your camera and you want to completely change them or try and do some cringe film simulations or something. In saying that it is entirely replaced by having both lightroom and photoshop on your computer.

>>4461690
>darktable works best when you hate the way the photos look coming out of your camera and you want to completely change them
So, snoy and om shitstem, gotcha.

>>4461691
Sony yes, because the issue with sony are their putrid, nasty, sickening colours and Rockwellian tonality, both of which can be plastered over with a heckin film silmarino, colour grading and alterations to the tone curve. OM system is a different story. The colours are fine, when someone has an issue with photos from m43 its usually something along the lines of not enough background separation or not enough micro detail resolved, neither of which darktable can fix.

>>4461690
Darktable is a half finished project

Basic things like demosaicing and NR algo tweaks are user settings. These objectively only have one good setting for each camera at each ISO and the rest are just blur of the kind you don't like (demosaicing errors) instead of the sick spherical ab/defocus blur you do want.

>>4461369 (OP)
I have trialed:

Darktable, RawTherapee, Lightroom, DXO, CaptureOne, and On1 PhotoRaw and of these, CaptureOne is easily my favorite.

Lightroom and DXO fight for a distant second. I think I might prefer Lightroom slightly more.

Darktable maybe behind those two. The UI is shit and takes way too much mental bandwidth to deal with but it's pretty strong.

>>4461380
>>4461382
Ok, I looked at a tiff in Rawtherapee, and it has the same WB tool, but the color temperature number is wrong (it interprets a tiff as if it was shot at 6500K). I think it's DxO where the tool was different, probably for a similar reason (whatever raw reader they are using cannot show camera's WB value as the baseline). Not THAT big of a deal, but I actually like entering a concrete value for indoor shots, given that most lightbulbs nowadays are 2700-3000K LEDs.

>>4461838
Open an issue bro. This shit is really helpful to the devs: https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee/issues Don't forget to link your example image and a screenshot of the WB number

>>4461846
If I decide to stick to Rawtherapee for most tiff edits, maybe it makes sense to go pester the devs, but I'm not expecting them to do anything about it.