Yes it seems already doable with tags. We just need to get in the habit of it.
Category: darktable, raw therapee, etc…
Tags: theme, preset, style, lut, etc…
Tags like theme, preset, style, lut, may be used for topics discussing various aspects of such subjects in general. (It is much of a general tendency for this and other forums that the pearls may be difficult to retrieve from all the ‘noise’.) I would think that we ought to have one additional tag that identifies post where such discussions have condensed to something more of a final character and posted with an intent of being fit for download and installation (and maintenance?). Perhaps a tag that only someone in a kind of editor/moderator role can use as well as remove the moment something is identified as not working well anymore due to dt-upgrades?
Thanks, Terry. I do not feel disheartened at all. It was meant to gauge interest, it was never meant to be anything more than that, and to me it proved that there is not enough of it. You may not have known about it, but there were many people on that thread who knew, a lot of people clicked on the link and downloaded my example content. I also actively chased the two or three people who were sharing their CSS on this forum at that time, they said that it was a good idea and they said that they would contribute. As it happens, not one single person did.
Changing one or two variables may have yielded a different result. I am not very optimistic about it, but who knows.
I just don’t think that we have enough community contributions to justify a marketplace. I can count the people who are actively contributing themes, LUTs or styles on the fingers of a hand. The influx of new stuff is never going to be enough to justify all the code necessary to implement a full fledged automated solution for community contributions. At this scale, a curated repository of content hosted on a centrally-managed website would be more than enough. Everything else (my CSS sharing website included) would be overkill.
Again, this is just my opinion. I have no intention or desire to demotivate @martinus or anyone else, just reporting some facts that, if so they wish, they can use in their decision making.
2 Likes
A tag would be more appropriate than a category. I hope the community can get this off the ground and working.
As @mino noted, do you think a GitHub repository under darktable.org will be good? It will certainly help having more visibility and maybe also help to have more contributors? Let me know and I’ll arrange for that to happen.
4 Likes
Here we go 
– it’s called PoLUT, not ProLUT.
I’ll have to look for the Tone Equalizer presets later at home.
And here are the presets for the tone equalizer. I just stumble upon things like this by chance while following other discussions.
1 Like
A survey about DarkTable was made a while back, early 20ies. They got about 1000 responses. A reasonable estimation of the count of DT users is somewhere between 2000 and 10000.
VisualStudio and VSCode together have 50 Millions users. That’s a market.
I’d like to see all of these under a more general plugins/plugins tag, because I want to see everything that I should likely do to make darktable better that hasn’t yet made it into the master branch (or won’t, because it is niche, controversial, or is not applicable to all platforms).
But there are no relevant topics in this tag: Topics tagged plugin
I can’t find user contributed ICCs this way either:
https://discuss.pixls.us/tags/c/software/darktable/19/icc
https://discuss.pixls.us/tags/c/software/darktable/19/preset
It’s possible there are no contributed ICCs or color calibration presets, but that’s a little hard to believe, considering darktable ships with barely usable input matrices for some Sony and Olympus cameras. (I posted mine, but it’s not yet in a dedicated thread. If I make such a thread, will a new user with a Sony realistically be able to find it on demand?)
FWIW, I like the status quo, where you just download the presets you find useful from posts here (or even extract them from Play Raw xmps), because I can see the context, example images, discussion, etc.
Generally useful presets do end up being incorporated into Darktable. Ideally, that process should be slow, as presets evolve when users put them to the test in the real world. No need to rush this.
I have spend the last couple of days digging on this forum, google and github.
And this is what I have found and have in my repository at the moment.
99 .dtpreset files (177 including translations)
324 .dtstyle files
15 themes
107 LUT files
Regarding the LUT files, I only checked the pixls forum, and looked for higher quality one (depending on the number of likes in the topic). There are so many LUTs there that I don’t think it is worth going after many of them. Also because of the limit flexiblity.
Having said that, I stumbled upon the excellent work of Jonas Schäfer. He created a solver to extract as style file from the ‘diff’ of two images. (see jssfr/dtsolve: Create darktable styles from out-of-camera JPEG files. - Codeberg.org). This is involved process and takes a lot of cpu power. But it can be interesting to use his solver.
Currently, I am trying to use the darktable-cli tool to see if I can make example pictures for all .dtstyle files.
I am planning to do another pass for themes.
@finestructure I have stumble upon in total 52 camera profiles or so. I can share them later (after more rigorous checking). The thing is that I can’t check if they work since I don’t own the camera.
@Tamas_Papp, You are right. But I don’t have ‘just’ the .dtpreset or . dtstyle file, if I found them there on this forum, I have the url in data, so even if I build a store, there is a link right back to place it originated from.
5 Likes
Another thing to add, I have not yet looked into lua scripts. Since they are executed on your system, they should be curated very carefully.
@martinus, this sounds great as a starting point for realizing your idea for a ‘marketplace’/repository. Thanks for the effort so far.
Some were raising concerns of the difficulties/challenges of an automated system for extensions to dt. I don’t think we need that. We just need to find the various items and get some clear instructions on how to ‘install’ the various types – and that could be on darktable.org or here.
In any case it would be a good thing if it will be possible to comment on the various items.
If we use the forum as a repository, we should need to make some kind of separation between the actual items and any discussion around them – experience shows that otherwise the 'goodies" may be difficult to find between all the ‘noise’. That could mean f. ex. that discussions are kept in a separate thread, unless all the repository elements are stored as separate main topics on top of their own (possible) thread.
EDIT: As for lua scripts, unless creators can be persuaded to add them to the list of contributed scripts, I see no very good reason for not including them in the ‘marketplace’ (with the appropriate warnings).
The forum itself is not the best place, because it very unstructured. And not very suitable for finding and comparing. I am preparing a GitHub repo, and I am planning a front end a bit like the dtstyles.net
I agree with this idea that a person can post a preset or a style and show an example and others can chip in on the the conversation and maybe even add to the thread with a similar style and example. I just feel having a tag for this type of thread would be helpful. But that being said I am also pleased to see the effort @martinus is putting into the Github repositories.
1 Like
Let’s not reinvent the wheel.
GitHub - darktable-org/lua-scripts · GitHub has both an official and a contrib section.
3 Likes
As a side note: I have told my students regularly, first check if your tires actually fit… because sometimes, you have to reinvent the wheel:
But that remark aside… I know that repository, I might absorb into mine, but with a script (so updates are easy), so that is better searchable once I build a front-end for it.
2 Likes
As I understand, that repo is already integrated into the script manager, so adding scripts there would make life easier for end users.
1 Like
You are right about that. So we actually already have a kind of a store for ‘Lua scripts’… I see improvements in that repository as it not clear really what a script is doing - unless you read the script it self.
Well give me a bit more time to prepare my repo further so you all can see what I did.
1 Like
There is documentation in that in the lua docs: darktable Lua documentation - contrib
But yeah that is still fairly hidden.