Hello everyone! I recently changed from Lightroom to Darktable and I’m pretty fascinated by the program. I already watched hours of YouTube videos about DT to quickly learn the basics but there’s one thing I wonder. My file structure for the past decade has always been as follows:
“Raw” contained the raw images, “select” the selected raw images for editing, “edits” the edited psd’s that came back from Photoshop and “output” two folders (web and print) with respectively sized JPGs.
This structure got imported as is into Darktable. Unfortunately now only the raw and the select folders appear in my DT folder structure. The edits don’t show up and as far as I understood, DT can’t edit PSDs. But isn’t there some workaround to be able to see those files from within DT and maybe open them in Affinity Photo or any other picture editing software? It would help my workflow so much. I don’t wanna have to go into my huge library (100.000+ images) and convert all PSDs into tifs.
I appreciate that LR has an efficient catalog system for find and organize your images. DT has a reasonable system to do this which has improved overtime, however, it may be unlikely it will every read PSD files as these are Adobe’s work in progress files (in my opinion) which can contain layers and masks which may be unusable by any non-adobe program. However, there are some good digital asset management programs out there that are free of charge. Adobe Bridge is available as a free download https://prodesigntools.com/free-adobe-bridge-cc.html and could fill your needs. Also there are some good FOSS solutions. Some more knowledgeable people will be able to recommend these.
The thing is that PSD is an adobe format but as an example - affinity Photo or designer or publisher all can read and export to PSD.
Yes - I agree. DT probably will never be able to handle these files but would it be too hard to add previewing capabilities? I’m kind of eager to have a centralized solution that lets me handle the process of developing raw images to looking at (past) results of my work all in one library without having to open different programs or navigating from my program library to windows explorer…
Yes I understand your point. GIMP can read and write PSD files but some compatibility may be compromised if it is not an Adobe program. I also would like to manage my video files in DT even if I can not edit them. It would be good for the importing feature as most new cameras are equally a video and still camera. BTW, darktable is a great editing program. I own Adobe licences, but choose DT because it is just so good in my view.
Yes in deed. I think preview support (and thus the ability to view a complete folder structure including other formats) plus the option “open in…” would be amazing. Such as windows does …file formats it can’t edit get the “open in” dialog. But windows can Display PSD thumbnails as far as I know although it can’t edit them.
PSD is not one uniform format. It can be a single layer file or it can contain layers, adjustment layers and smart filters. When layers are used, using the “maximize compatibility” option when saving your file makes sense. This saves a preview image within the PSD, with all the layers flattened, that a lot of third party applications use to preview the file.
darktable could probably support that preview image or a regular single layer PSD, but I heard the PSD format is a mess. I would guess the developers have better things to do than to implement support for it. It would make migrations from Adobe land a lot easier though…
At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns. If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that these particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should not be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more. Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format. Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
I guess you’re right. As the old dog that I am, I guess I tried to hold on to habitual structures and processes that took me years to hone. However - by leaving the Adobe ecosystem I guess now is the perfect time to adapt a new workflow including file formats and habits that maybe I even didn’t realize were bad. Turns out that Digikam is working great for me - for one thing: Finding all my old PSDs and converting them in batches to TIFFs. Once this chunk of work is done and I’m PSD free (and probably a bunch of disk space richer), Digikam can go (I’ll keep it on the system for whatever it might come in handy) and use Darktable as the start to my workflow. I’m still figuring out, which of the two programs works best for me for importing photos but that’s something for the future. Right now I’m gonna consolidate my library within Darktable and then start playing with it more in detail. The initial fear of getting used to a new environment is maybe just that - unnecessary fear of something new. I should embrace it
Instead of worrying about change. See it “oh so many new things to discover and learn about”
How many times you will have “oh this is cool” “wow didnt expect that great result” in your near future.
Krita and gimp and darktable and RT and ART and gmic. so many new things to enjoy in your immediate future!
Yeah I don’t know. I guess I prefer an uncompressed or at least lossless compression such as compressed tiff. I have to admit though - I know nothing about Jpeg xl. What have I missed?
Oh and also (without knowing anything about this format) - I want to keep layers in my master files. Not sure if jpeg xl can do that.
Thanks for writing back. What is a lua script?
I would guess the developers have better things to do than to implement support for it. 
It would make migrations from Adobe land a lot easier though…
