How to create my own "Workspace" in DarkTable

I think I am a couple of minutes ahead of you in this journey, so let me assure you that this feeling of ‘enjoy the program’ does not diminish as you learn more. Almost every day for the past year or so I have observed to my self, while using dt, such feelings as ’ that’s impressive’ - or words to that effect. And that is in the environment where I have tried a number of the alternative raw image editors that you listed.

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I don’t think that this is likely to happen for me, although I certainly am appreciating how well things work. To me, all of these editors are “tools”, and I’ve always thought one should use “the best tool for the job”. DT is more like a full toolbox than a tool, and with few exceptions, it seems to be able to do the things my other editors do. As I learn it, the interface becomes logical - all “issues” so far have been me, not the editor.

I am spoiled by “control points” and now “control lines” in PhotoLab, but I don’t yet know that DT can’t accomplish those things using a different technique. When I scan and edit my old B&W negatives, I sometimes have a zillion “dust specs” to deal with. Eventually I need to learn how DT deals with that. If I capture infrared color images, the resulting file has a very deep red cast - most editors have a white balance tool that isn’t strong enough, but PhotoShop has one that works. Then too, I end up wanting to do “channel switching”, and I don’t yet know if DT can do that… but this is far off in the future. I like what I can accomplish with DT, and as of today, it does a wonderful job of importing images from my Leica M8.2 camera, looking almost “finished” before I even do any editing. That was a very pleasant surprise.

I haven’t even started to edit this image, but what I see on the screen appears to be completely finished.

Until I watched the videos linked to above, every image I opened needed some work. All this needs is for me to activate the “watermark”. DT makes my Leica M8.2 camera look quite nice - and this was taken with a 7Artisans 35mm f/2 lens that sells for only $280 brand new.

When/if you have found an acceptable solution to the ‘zillion “dust specs (sic)”’ using dt, I would be very keen to copy your approach, as I have a similar issues on the large portfolio of slides I’m in the process of scanning. Vuescan won’t touch the Kodachrome ones and Nikon Scan (from decades ago) is sometimes too aggressive. SilverFast has, so I’m told, a good solution but for other reasons I won’t got there.

One reason why your Leica images look good with dt is because they are from a Leica, surely ?

I had a brief look at what those are, and they seem to be local adjustments. darktable has both parametric and drawn masks for local adjustments, and they’re available on almost every module.

darktable has a Retouch module with a heal brush, but that’s very manual. We’ve had a thread on using the infrared channel from viewscan as a mask for gmic inpaint to repair spots, but I don’t remember where that left off.

I capture color infrared with my converted X-T20. I use a custom white balance that was provided by the shop that converted it, and the channel swapping is done in the Color Calibration module. There is a preset to swap R & B channels.

Isn’t that the good ol’ Nik u point, rebranded? Darktable doesn’t really have anything exactly like it. But if you dig that you should really check out the RawTherapee nightlies. The local adjustments in it works much the same way. See here:

I agree with that, but the M8 was Leica’s first digital camera, released in 2006, improved as the M8.2 a few years later, and while I love it, many people don’t. It’s certainly not the world famous Leica lenses, as I had an inexpensive made-in-China-lens mounted. Get the exposure correct, don’t go past 640 in ISO, and handle carefully, and the results are usually excellent.

My negatives have been in a 3-ring binder with glassine pages holding the negatives - most of the negs slid right out, and I used a “rocket air blower” and if necessary, a brush to clean them, holding them over a small “light table”. I bought an “antistatic cloth” from B&H Photo which I could use to wipe off the negatives, and minimize the amount of dust that wanted to stick to them. Some negatives felt like the were “stuck” in the glassine, for who knows what reason, and they had an overabundance of “stuff” that needed cleaning, followed by an hour of editing to remove the dust. I don’t have a good answer, but if I continue to shoot film, I will be especially careful to keep the images clean - and have the blower, the brush, and the electro-static cloth handy in case they’re needed.

The Plustek scanner comes with SilverFast, and it’s supposed to be able to remove dust from color images, but not from B&W. I installed and updated the SilverFast, but haven’t tried it yet.

PhotoLab is the only image processor I know of that has “control points” and “control lines” as part of their “local adjustments”. I don’t know anything about the tools you noted in DT, but when I get better at the basics, I’ll probably look into them. I get spoiled easily - having used the PhotoLab tools, I expect to be able to use them on my non Leica M8 images.

My M8.2 has no anti-IR filter built into the camera, so it works well for both near-IR and pure-IR without “white” light. For B&W, the Monochrom filter seems to do quite well. I’ll remember what you said about channel swapping and the Preset to swap R&B channels. Does it also swap the Green channel?

Since DxO bought the Nik Collection from Google, they expanded it to do many other things, so yes, you are mostly right, but Control Points can do much more than Nik allowed. Speaking of Nik, since Google released it to the public for free, if you search, you will find placed to download it - for free. Control Lines. are something new.

I downloaded and installed Raw Therapee several years ago. I have version 5.8, so maybe I should update. Fun program. Can DT do the same things?

It’ll swap whatever you’d like.

Hello, it seems my question related to the module layout management should be posted here :wink:
I am currently (re)discovering DrakTable, and realy enjoy it. BTW I am facing an issue I cannot solve by myself. I have been trying to define my “own workspace” as stated in the thread title, by setting up a personnal module layout.
Therefore I created my own preset, and now I try to personnalize it. However, it seems I am facing a bug since the “+” button doesn’t offer any option to add a widget (or a module depending I am in Quick Access -not in the screenshot- or another module group)!
Indeed, when I click on the “+” button I don’t get the long list in which I am supposed to choose:

I tried to do this on DarkTable v3.8 respectivly on my MBA and Mac Mini, both running Big Sur 11.6.2.
Any advise to get rid of that bug (or my misunderstanding :grin: )?

One more info if it can help anyone resolving my problem: I can add or delete modules, but still cannot select a widget/module for each group:

I even tried the latest OSX build from @MStraeten but I still face the problem.

widgets are just usable for quick access group.

Yes. As explained I cannot add widgets to quick access group, nor modules in base, new or whatever other group :pensive:

Sometimes a short screen recording is better than words. Here is an example of the problem I am facing: no list of widgets or modules poping when clicking the “+” button under Quick Access or another group.

https://mesphotosetvideos.fr/CannotAddWidgetorModule.mov

I can only assume this is a mac-specific issue (perhaps with gtk). This works fine on Linux.

Ok, I will try with an older version of DT

N.B. : this is a new installation, not an update to v3.8

not an osx issue in general - it works fine on my machine.
Which dt version was used to define the newnew preset?
What happens if you define a new preset?

First with the official v3.8, and after that your latest OSX version :wink:
I installed an official v3.6.1 to check, but got the same result. And creating other presets, from scratch or by duplicating one, do not change anything.

One more piece to add to the puzzle: I just noticed other buttons don’t work correctly. For instance, in darkroom, the one that is supposed to hide / show thumnails at the bottom of the screen. I can use the shortcut shift+cmd+b but clicking on the button (actually an arrow) doesn’t modify the status.
Maybe I should think about sharing logs to the dev team?

That’s a good idea. Raise an issue with lots of info and more devs will look at it.

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Follow up in an official issue for those who are interested: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/10876

Problem solved! At least someone shared a workaround: use windows mode instead of full mode if you are facing the “+” button bug. It solves the issue, until the bug is fixed by developers :slightly_smiling_face: