Adding Camera Support to Darktable

I have a Nikon D780 at the moment and wanted to contribute whatever I could to get support into Darktable… but in this case I can’t figure out what’s needed. I click on the RAW file in Lighttable and it just shows a blank screen in the darkroom view with a message “loading image…”

Dcraw seems to have support, as I can convert to Tiff using dcraw -v -w -o 1 -f -T path/to/file.NEFas per this document: What’s involved with adding support for new cameras | darktable (which is maybe outdated?). In fact as far as I can tell, all the system-related libs have support.

Anyway, wondering if anyone could help point me in the right direction…

Yes, submit some samples to https://raw.pixls.us – the site holds the test material for rawspeed, the raw decoding library used by darktable. Specific instructions are on the page. If you have any questions, please ask!

1 Like

Okay, great I will do that, thanks.

Hi there… I have just purchased the same Nikon model and found out quickly that my older version of LR will never support my camera’s raw files, missing out on camera calibration info… well, I guess you’ve heard this story. Anyway, darktable certainly looks more promising. I have four questions: How long it takes to incorporate new camera data into darktable? Will I have to wait for a new release? There are already images uploaded to raw.pixls.us for this camera (I assume from luxagraf), will that be sufficient or should I go ahead and shoot a few as well? Is there a suggested subject that will provide more accurate results? Thanks so much from a willing to learn but total noob to darktable.

Generally they’re incorporated by the next minor point release, so long as not a lot has changed, which is what I’d expect for the D780.

No, you can build it yourself or find some build here that has the changes incorporated. That comes with some gotchas, not using the stable release.

It is likely sufficient, but you can check https://raw.pixls.us – there are instructions on the page.

Thanks so much… I’m going to go look into those gotchas :wink:

From my point of view it is (1) master or Dev builds might crash, possibly often (2) once you use master or Dev build, you cannot use your database or xmp or edits with a previous stable build, you have to wait for the next stable build if you want to use stable again.

Probably not a huge deal if your camera isn’t supported in the latest stable build.

1 Like