Long-term DT user, just upgrades from DT 4.2.1 to 4.4.0 (running on Fedora 38). Something seems off with the lighttable preview. When expanding an image to full view or comparing 2-3 similar using ‘dynamic culling’ (Ctrl-x) I see that the images are not updated – they become unsharp/fuzzy. Opening them in darkroom shows them sharp (also when maximised through ‘w’ or when removing borders (‘tab’). I also lack the usual …Working… messages on screen when a new preview needs to be calculated. The ‘high quality processing from size’ option (under lighttable preferences) was and is set to always. Changing this to other values does not change the behaviour.
Any suggestions how to troubleshoot this? I am eager to start on sifting through my holiday pictures and my workflow relies a lot on dynamic culling where I can quickly compare 2-3 images of the same scene shot with marginally different settings.
Thanks and normally yes, but not if you (as I have) set ‘use raw file instead of embedded JPEG from size’. Also, this would only apply for the initial load and not when going over (in lighttable) alrady processed images (where the preview is thus out of date).
I have in the meantime reproduced the issue also with DT4.2.1 suggesting that this is not related to the upgrade of DT, but to something else that was upgraded – at the same time I got upgrades of a bunch of other packages including libX11, mesa. Not enough knowledge to see how that would affect things, but looking at the files in ~/.cache/darktable I find it suspicious that even the most zoomed in previews have a max dimension of 1348 (whereas I have a 4K monitor). The search continues.
Anybody who can clarify how the previews in lightTable are generated and whether my analysis of images under ~/.cache/darktable/mipmaps is relevant?
They were set to always start from raw (and not use the embedded JPEG) and high quality processing from 720p (default). I have set that last one to always as well, w/o seeing change – the previews that are generated in the ‘mipmap’-cache have a long dimension of ~1350 pix max and there is no difference between what gets generated in the more detailed previews (directories 5-8) have no difference in resolution.
Deleting ~/.cache/darktable did also not resolve the issue.
I have rolled back distribution (security) updates to libX11 and mesa as I would not be surprised that these somehow introduced this; no change.
Lastly, I have removed ~/.config/darktable to start with a clean slate. This in itself did not resolve the issue, but when going over the various tabs to change a few deviations from the default that I had I noted that on tab ‘Storage’ both enable disk backend for thumbnail / preview cache were unchecked. Checking these did instantly resolve the issue. The strange thing is that my daily snapshots show that this was not even unchecked, even when DT was not rendering previews at full resolution. I am happy things work, but whether this is by luck or design …
