After many trials and tribulations with darktable since v3 came out, I’ve continued battling away, and finally think I’ve found a way forward.
I’d initially had a lot of bother getting images anywhere near to what I was wanting to see as a final result. Up until now, I had been trying to use the built in Lightroom import routine, and resetting everything to use Filmic et al.
What I’ve been trialling now, is I’ve copied my Lightroom storage only a spare HDD, and have deleted all the xmp sidecar files, so darktable no longer reads them as I open each image. That seems to have made a huge difference to the workflow now, and I am getting much more pleasing results, more quickly. I’m also not relying on too many Styles or Presets, just a few that set a handful of basic settings that I prefer myself, or suit a particular camera model.
Just a question on that, is it possible that something is hanging over from the Lightroom edits import that’s been mucking things up for me? On that point, as it hasn’t been updated for a long time, and IMHO never really worked well anyway, shouldn’t it be removed now, or at least have a user option to enable/disable it? (as there is for the Base Curve and Sharpening etc.)
If you removed the xmp files and then freshly imported the images into darktable I do not think that there should be any residual LR traces.
You could always, form within lifghttable view, select all the images that you don’t mind reprocessing (and/or those that haven’t been processed yet) and select discard history (history stack module). This should clean-out your stack and thus you have the original RAW’s to begin with (not counting any auto applied stuff).
I don’t have an opinion about the LR import thingy: Never used LR and I do not know how useful this function is in darktable is (now or in the past).
If you removed the xmp files and then freshly imported the images into darktable I do not think that there should be any residual LR traces.
Indeed, that’s the conclusion I’d come to.
You could always, form within lifghttable view, select all the images that you don’t mind reprocessing (and/or those that haven’t been processed yet) and select discard history (history stack module). This should clean-out your stack and thus you have the original RAW’s to begin with (not counting any auto applied stuff).
I had tried that in the past, but it never seems wot work very well, I’d often find many images with residual modules still active. That’s why I was wondering if there was something within the Lightroom import stuff that was screwing things up. The problem was always that there was no way to not import the Lightroom edits if the sidecar existed.
I don’t have an opinion about the LR import thingy: Never used LR and I do not know how useful this function is in darktable is (now or in the past).
Starting with dt 3.0.0 there are always 8 modules active:
7 orientation
6 gamma
5 output color profile
4 input color profile
3 demosaic
2 white balance
1 raw black/white point
0 original
These are auto applied. If these are what you are talking about then all is well and you are starting clean.
What I know about the import function this behaviour is correct. But, as stated before, removing the (foreign) xmp’s altogether and re-importing freshly gets rid of that problem.
Yes, I got (and expected) those, but still kept getting various other modules staying behind, such the Local Contrast, or others that might have carried across from Lightroom edits. Even hitting the ‘0 Original’ line, and clearing the history didn’t clear them. Sometimes they 'd reset properly, sometimes they didn’t.
Now I’ve started importing sans-sidecar, it seems to be working fine, and my darktable editing is looking much better, and faster.