Hello,
Having tried On1, affinity and lightroom i have found that Darktable is the best fit for me.
However…why, for the love of all things holy, are there no books(not the pdf that comes with darktable).
This is an editor that hundreds of thousands of people have, do and hopefully will use with clear demise of lightroom at its present cost/subscription model.
Thus a great opertunity for books for beginners to get to grips with the editor and progress in a timely fashion.
Please.
Because no one wrote one (recently). And because darktable moves so fast, that any book would be obsoleted very quickly. Even the manual is lagging behind development.
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I bought „Darktable 4“ from Michael Moltenbrey.
This book is in german Language , I dont know of other Language.
But without this fine book I never master the darktable ….
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Most people now want video, and there are some good videos on YouTube.
You may find this blog (a collection of tutorials) useful: Mastering Darktable - Easily Learn Powerful Editing Techniques - Avid Andrew
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Maybe one day when I retire I might try and write a book for beginners that could be downloaded free. That could be a worthy contribution from me, but my biggest fear is that if you asked 100 users of DT what their work process is you would get more than 200 different answers. It is such a flexible and creative program.
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I still recommend that all dt users just play with everything and learn as they go. The manual may be hard for the untrained to understand, but after a while it starts to make some sense. Or, at the very least, the user begins to know what each module will do to their image.
If you are switching from other similar software, the concepts should be familiar enough so that the manual should be sufficient.
Most DT users just use a small subset of the available modules. You can go very far with 5–6 modules added to the pipeline defaults, they are the subject of various tutorials, mostly on Youtube.
Frankly, I don’t think that a tutorial-style book would make a lot of sense. Extrapolating from the past pace of progress, it would be outdated in a few years. Discussing individual modules with examples may be the best approach.
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Yes, even old videos about DT might no longer be relevant. That’s why I’m pretty hesitant to watch them, although in case of Boris Hajdukovic I could make an exception? I have his videos in the to-do list for a while, but haven’t watched anything yet.
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Sure, some of Boris’s earlier videos are less relevant (he has been making them for a long time), but anything from the past 2 years is still highly relevant, some videos from even earlier.
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Most videos since 3.0 should still be relevant. As long as you understand what has changed and why, there’s no problem in watching them.
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Further to what @Donatzsky there can be some old videos that are good even though they are dated…you just have to know what has changed …for example I don’t think there are too many video’s on the contrast Eq…which was initiallly called the Equalizer… Robert Hutton made some nice video’s and this one was a pretty nice demonstration of that including an explanation of the detail bars in the graph which I think many people ignore or have not taken the time to know what they visually represent…so I think it is good advice to generally stick to the last two years but there are some gems out there…another is the old video by rawfiner where he does a deep dive on denoising and all the methods and strategies that one can employ…
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