A plea for more guidance in the darktable manual

We are certainly missing other types.of documentation, such as quick starts, specialized workflows, and conceptual information mingled with examples.

I find the User Manual to be reasonably complete, and i wouldnt expect any major additions… The user manual isn’t an end-all be-all manual. The goal of it is not to document every single little darktable bit.

That being said, we need more youtube videos and more conceptual information with examples. @s7habo has been doing great with posts here in the forum explaining things, but he is only one person. We need more.

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At the risk of swerving off-topic…

This is a most helpful analogy…

The analogy is exact. The pixel values can represent the position of a loudspeaker cone at points in time, tracing the x-axis. For example, here is an image:
toes2snd
We can run a finger, I mean the loudspeaker, along the first line, then along the second line, all the way down.

I made the image and the sound file with these commands:

%IMG7%magick ^
  toes.png ^
  -colorspace Gray ^
  ( +clone -flop ) +append +repage ^
  +write toes2snd.jpg ^
  -crop "x1^!" +append +repage ^
  +write toes2snd.tif ^
  -depth 16 gray:toes2snd.u16

"%SOX%sox" --rate 11025 toes2snd.u16 toes2snd.wav

Incidentally, I couldn’t upload the .WAV file to the forum. It says:

Sorry, the file you are trying to upload is not authorized (authorized extensions: jpg, jpeg...

That’s a great shame: I find this idea absolutely fascinating, so would have loved to listen to this image! By the way, does the mini-player shown not play because this wav file is not available, or is there some setting in my browser which I haven’t breathed life into yet?

The forum shows a mini-player for me, too, but it won’t play for me either.

I uploaded the sound file to my website and pasted the URL to the file, and the forum shows the mini-player. In Firefox, if I right-click on the player, I can “Save Audio As…”, which will download the file toes2snd.wav to my laptop, so I can play it. It sounds maybe like a helicopter taking off, with weird echo.

Consider the image and sound file to be Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Tim, the selection is usually the right hue but can often be too strong for that reason if I don’t initially like the look I go immediately to custom in the drop down box. This does nothing at first but it gives you a hue and chroma slider…Drop the chroma to 0 and its like the module is not applied so usually I find I am dropping the chroma a bit to reduce the strength in a sense of the color cast or wb correction…I don’t think of cooler or warmer…I just find this to be the nicest way to fine tune this module…give it a try and see…in your example just dropping the chroma until there is enough correction applied will get you there…

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@LateJunction My ah ha moment with the tone eq was to use two or three instances and to keep the adjustments of a reasonable magnitude. Even with a pretty good mask random dodging and burning I find messes things up. I often use one instance just to target darker regions and then add more instances for contrast or other adjustments…I found in this way I did not have to rely on the mask settings. I pretty much just use the simple tone curve preset. That seems to land my histogram in the middle even sometimes and then I just make a small adjustment. For bigger global changes I try to use blend modes to help. When I first started with the TE I saw some videos doing random adjustments but this rarely worked for me…someone may read this and say you just need a better mask …but I think I have heard others taking the same approach…thats my shared experience for what it is worth…Understanding what you want to achieve goes a long way and may be one of the hardest things (its hard for me) …For example @s7habo recently demonstrated how to mimic a LR preset. He explains how he looks at the image and how he attacks it and most importantly he reorders the modules to achieve that. When you take this sort of informed logical approach your are not constantly pushing and pulling image tones and colors …you attack one part and then the other and you reorder the module so that they don’t interfere with the process…However this is not the sort of thing you will ever get from a manual…Check this out…How to use Darktable to acheive stylized image effects - #5 by s7habo

Back to the topic of documentation:

There are four kinds of documentation that need to exist to cover all the bases.

  • learning-oriented tutorials
  • goal-oriented how-to guides
  • understanding-oriented discussions
  • information-oriented reference material

This forum provides understanding-oriented discussions thanks to the people who author the tools, and the manuals for darktable and RawTherapee are very information-oriented for when you want to know what something does, but the other two are lacking.

I know Pat started PIXLS.US itself hoping to make a place for more tutorial type content, but most of the activity has been concentrated on the forum side of things rather than the website.

Goal-oriented guides are missing overall. There need to be lists of desired end results, like “My red flower petals are turning nuclear, how do I fix this?”, each with potentially several ways to achieve the result.

In Filmulator’s case I rely on the fact that the tools are few in number to help guide the user, but the other more powerful applications need to provide more guidance for a user who has an idea of what they want but not how to get it.

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Writing is hard and time consuming. We welcome submissions.

We get a lot of good tid bits in here, but even organizing them is time consuming.

Also videos are good here.

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I keep meaning to redo my intro to Filmulator video but I can’t seem to get through it in one take and don’t want to edit together multiples ugh…

Perfection is the enemy of done.

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The ‘invalid’ (non-)issue has been discussed several times. It’s not an error indication. Some examples:

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I think this is key. The darktable manual right now is very much like the manual you get with your camera. The camera manual tells you what all the settings do, but it doesn’t help you with how to approach your photography and take better photos. Similarly, the darktable manual doesn’t really help you learn how to approach editing of a particular photo. Arguably, that’s not the job of the manual, but these kinds of resources need to exist.

If we look at some of the commercial software out there, there are lots of tutorials on specific techniques: “How to sharpen in x”, “How to make your photos pop in x”, “How to colour grade” etc. Then there are tutorials on specific genres of photography: “Portrait photography in x”, “Create stunning landscapes in x”, “Better night photography…” etc. These goal-oriented how-tos are wildly popular and very useful (the good ones at least).

The darktable series by Bruce Williams is excellent and essential viewing for new users. But it by and large still takes a similar approach to the manual, i.e. “this is what each module does”. Bruce has done some more workflow-based videos to help with a particular photography style, but there are not many of these tutorials out there in the wild.

So why aren’t there? I have a feeling it’s simply that there aren’t enough experts at darktable. I spend a lot of time on here and on the Reddit and Facebook darktable groups, and almost everyone is still learning how to use it. After two years of using darktable myself, I still feel I could only do basic tutorials, and even then it would probably be a more “drag this slider until it looks good” approach, because I couldn’t explain when to use Bilateral grid or Local Laplacian Filter, for example. I simply have no idea.

Which brings me to my next point, which is the UI. The addition of more tooltips in recent builds is a big step forward, but they are still very technical, and many tools don’t have them. darktable is excellent for the sheer amount of options it offers the user, but of course this can be overwhelming. I would welcome more goal-oriented tooltips of the type “Adjust this to boost x”, “Turn this down if you see halos” etc. I know this could be very tricky, but I’m just wondering how we can help demystify some of the more obscure labels like “RGB Euclidian Norm” and “Bias correction”.

Incidentally, i wonder if the “Invalid” label in the color calibration module should just be removed. It seems to always scare people until they come across one of the threads that tells them not to worry.

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the best of these turorials are never made by the company that makes the software, but by users of that software.

Isn’t this always what we are doing?

This is when you go to the manual, look up what they do, then play with those options until you understand it.

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Here also plays a role sponsorship and competition between the beneficiaries (photographers or photo studios) who also offer services. Youtube is full of such sponsored content.

Good tutorials do not scratch the surface, but offer more in-depth knowledge that is independent of the tool used. This also means that the person offering the tutorial must have this knowledge and be well prepared.

But it also means that people who use darktble can also learn a lot from these tutorials. From topics that concern general knowledge such as color theory, to the use of concrete modules such as curves, local contrast, channel mixer, color balance etc. there are countless tutorials for another software that you can watch and then apply in darktable.

And also the topics that you have mentioned as examples are software-independent:

I will rather say, there are few professional photographers who use darktable, who are able to offer well-founded tutorials. This must change.

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Precisely. I feel that I’m at a point where I’m comfortable with darktable and can translate other software features it’s modules, but all too often tutorials that you’ll find for a style wind up being advertisements for someone’s LUTs or presets.

And frankly, I’m not interested in a canned product that’ll deliver a look (although I understand that a professional might need something like that for consistency).

I don’t even like using the DT color mapping because I’m not interested in copying someone’s style. What I want to do is improve my skills behind the camera and at the computer screen to create the look I’m after at that moment in time.

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I fully agree. And similarly, the “drag this slider until it looks good” approach is not really useful for me either. I can futz around with sliders all day until things look good, we don’t need tutorials for that. I really appreciate it when Bruce/Aurélien et al really try and explain what is going on with the slider, when it should it be used, when it shouldn’t, which module to use first, what particular technique it is good for, etc. It’s the old teaching how to fish rather than giving a fish analogy…

I’m not saying I have an answer. We just need more experts who have the will and the time to make these kinds of resources. Making great educational content is very time consuming.

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I hope not, or at least that’s what I try not to do. I’ve been spending a lot of time recently studying pictures to try to decompose why a look has that look and then I use the modules as I understand them to approach that style.

I don’t pretend to have the answer either. I have the utmost respect for Bruce, Aurélien, Rico, and others who take the time to explain what’s under the hood… often over and over again. I’m not sure I have that patience. And of course the play raws and Boris’ editing moments are incredibly useful.

I would say that instead of asking if someone would kindly produce a whole new round of tutorials, I think more discussion here on this site on the creative side of editing would go a long way. At least that’s my thought.

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Regarding your remarks on the luminance estimator description on the tone equaliser page, I agree it is quite terse. The reason we didn’t put more detail there was that luminance estimators are used in several places, and we didn’t want to be repeating information in the manual that can then become inconsistent.

The logical thing would be to place a reference to the description in the general Darkroom>Processing Midules>Curves section. However, that section itself refers to the “preserve chrominance” parameter description in the FilmicRGB reference page.

So, if you go to the FilmicRGB page, you’ll get some information about possible use cases for the different estimators.

@elstoc, maybe we need to try to organise this a bit better.

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Yes perhaps so. Could you raise an issue please.

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done:

Concerning the OP’s remarks about the preserve details description, I thought we’d already explained that the purpose of this is to preserve local contrast across edges where required, and the GF masks can be disabled if for some reason someone wants a simple tone mapping that doesn’t try to preserve local contrast.

I’m don’t know what more we can say in this section, as it is heavily dependent on the details of the image and what the user is trying to achieve. We’ve tried to communicate the key concepts behind what the module doing, but maybe this needs to be reinforced by modeling some actual examples. This would be getting beyond the scope of the user manual however. So, I’m not sure what to do…

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