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 Extrapolating from the past pace of progress, it would be outdated in a few years.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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I recently tried DT, and was kind of overwhelmed. I’m told that the user interface is similar to Light room, so I was wondering if using a LR book would help me with DT?
Since there are LR books, I don’t see why a DT book would be a bad idea. Like any technical book, it will be dated fairly soon, but that is the nature of technology.
Dave
Hey @Dave99 welcome to the community.
Sorry to hear that. You can start your own thread if you have specific questions. Have you read the manual or watched any YouTube videos?
No, sorry that someone mislead you.
Absolutely not.
(1) its a lot of work (2) YouTube seems to be the going preference.
I am a book or text reader, preferentially, but with darktable, I have just had to force myself to watch video tutorials. IMO, Bruce Williams’s are great for beginners, and Boris Hajdukovic’s give lessons in great detail. Both series are on Youtube.
This is very generally true and can cause a lot of problems when people try to do the knowledge translations…some videos out there are also really just people pushing sliders and again not that helpful…then on the other hand there is an old video by Robert Hutton which might be one of the best on the contrast equalizer…called just the equalizer back then… and rawfiners run through of all the DT denoising strategies from version 2.6 is still worth watching and his followups as well from version 3 for denoising and the CA module…and of course some other ones… so sometimes you just have to stumble around a bit…
I have looked at the manual. but it is like the manual that came with my guitar - here is the… and the… It took a few other books to really learn to play the guitar (to the limited extent that I can).
I have also checked out some of the videos. Some are really good at addressing specific topics. but not getting started.
I still believe a book for DT like the Dummies book for LR is a good idea - even if it is a collection of well edited notes from experienced users.
Dave,
Welcome Dave…you will likely find it way quicker to just dive in and “learn” to use the tools in DT to make the sort of changes that you would normally do in LR… Don’t try to learn by comparison as its not really that easy. I feel like there is a post in here somewhere that someone did and its a sort of “if you do this in LR” then do it this way in DT… but again this sort of thing might just hold you back… Gus does some nice videos about the approach to doing a DT edit… and he has some other nice video’s as well and there is a section in the manual that points you to most of the key resources esp the best YT channels to watch…
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Of course a good DT book would be welcome.
But, return on investment would be very low (or even negative, if you go for a printed book).
Writing is work, a lot of work. Most (including me) prefer editing photos. And those that are willing and capable of teaching DT, seem to prefer youtube (or get better response there).
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Yes, I agree about the manual. It tells you precisely what every little thing does, but there is no guidance on how to actually edit an image.
One reason Lightroom has books about it while darktable does not is that Lightroom has a much, much larger user base, hence more potential customers.