It may be simplest to use presets, and I have created a lot of my own. But I see them as more of a time saver than a good way to learn and improve. I prefer to be more intentional over my edits. I enjoy using sliders, but I need to know roughly what to expect when I use them. You know what will happen when you increase or decrease a Dehaze slider; and looking at it the other way, when I want to dehaze, I like to know where to find the slider (or sliders) that does that. This is why I’m not a fan of Diffuse or Sharpen and why it’s basically only good for presets for most users. I appreciate its results and its power, and I certainly appreciate anyone that can create something like this, but as a user-friendly tool, I consider it a bit of a failure.
But there are plenty of modules that are much easier to use, even if they are still complex and powerful. There are loads of sliders in Color Balance RGB, but almost all of them are fairly clear in terms of what they do. Yes, it’s not always clear at first what the difference between chroma, saturation, brilliance, etc., is, but you still generally know what kind of effect they will have.
I think the other thing that has not been mentioend here is that the suggestion that “My other editor does it like this and its good for me” is not in and of itself a compelling reason to do something that same way in darktable. The UX/UI of darktable may not be as terse as alternatives, but it does have its own ways of doing things, and bolting things from other editors on to dt in a wholesale manner will only lead to worse UX/UI than we have now.
I wonder if Ansel may be more to your liking as its developer has stripped away many features found in DT as he regarded them as bloat. For my part I like as many options as possible so what is a downside for you is a plus side for me. I have also created my own module layout to only show those modules that I usually work with. Doing something like this might help you with your personal DT journey.
It’s not difficult to agree on the hardly accessible inner workings of DorS, and its UI, but:
haze removal module is there as an alternative, anyhow – although with certain drawbacks and likely on its way out,
there are lot of good presets available in DorS as a starting point
for some users it’s part of the fun that dt presents complexities that we can grow into (from presets) and gradually get a (somewhat) larger understanding of. (I think of DorS as a “goodie” that awaits me for exploring. lt will be sad day when I have no more to learn …)
An aspect of DorS is that it covers so many functions/effects that it obviously is difficult to rename the sliders in a way that is befittingly to them all. It’s so that one can get a thought of some kind of pseudo-modules that each can serve as a more explanatory and “custom” front-end to a different instance of its own of DorS.
Sure, but for many users, it isn’t fun at all, and I don’t think this is a compelling reason for it to be non-user-friendly.
I myself have spent many hours learning this module, and I got to a stage where I felt I had grasped it. There are various threads on this forum with my thoughts and findings, where I attempted to draw parallels with Contrast Equalizer to help people understand it. But unless I use it all the time, I eventually forget what every slider does, and I find myself reverting back to Local Contrast, Contrast Equalizer and other modules that can do similar things.
I don’t want this thread to turn into me bashing Diffuse or Sharpen. I have a bit of an axe to grind with it, but it’s mainly frustration with myself and my inability to fully master it. And even though I wish it would change, I’m more than happy for it to stay in its current form and for other people to enjoy using it or learning it. I wouldn’t advocate for its removal. I just wish I had the skills to redo the interface or even suggest a much better interface for it.
My reason for bringing it up in the first place is I think it’s a good example of a module that really isn’t user-friendly and could be improved, which is what this thread is about.
But I am generally an advocate for not dumbing down the software too much and encouraging people to learn it and learn from it. I have learned so much about photography over the years because of Darktable, and my deeper understanding of the software has directly impacted the art form side of the hobby.
I wonder how hard it would be for D&S to have a “simple” tab where you pick one type of action (sharpening, lens deblur, bloom, dehaze, clarity, etc) and then just have an “amount” slider that changes the values behind the scenes. I assume it would be difficult to allow the user to do multiple things in one instance though.
It’s based on wavelets, so you also need to set what frequency you want to act on. For me, it’s this aspect that I feel could be most improved: adding the ability to visualize where the effect will be applied. You have the nodes in Contrast Equalizer to guide you (left most = coarse details, right most = fine details), and the circle size around the node controls the effect radius. But there is no such guide in Diffuse or Sharpen, just two sliders with values from 0 to 512, which doesn’t provide any useful reference points. And then I really haven’t figured out how all the Edge Management section sliders interact predictably…
If I’m not mistaken, the module was meant to be a Diffuse module, but the developer realized that by reversing the model, it could also be used to Sharpen. I wouldn’t hate the idea of splitting the module in two to separate the two processes, and then cutting down the number of sliders to the bare minimum, but I’m not sure that would be a popular choice.
The end result in the module can be a dance between the contraction and expansion of the diffusion so I think its hard to do a split down the middle like that…for me the threshold sliders for the edges and the details slider in the mask are powerful controls…you can set the other slider quite widely but the really impact comes in those sliders and to an extent setting the wavelets used…I will either use the presets or I have about 5 or 6 that I use and I have them configured to be roughly what i want at about 50% opacity so that then I can just apply the preset and tweak the strength up or down without much fiddling. I do find that the nature of the adjustments are such that its rare the same preset is the best for each image. I find that with this module more than say sharpen or a contrast eq preset that there is some customization that will always help
Lots of good discussion here already. As someone who is fairly new to darktable, and so far very satisfied, I can share what is working for me:
Watch as much YouTube as you can stomach (the channels mentioned in @Donatzsky 's post - they are all very good). Really watch them, like you’re studying for an exam. Play them at 1080P so you can see what sliders / modules are being adjusted. Have a tab open and flip back and forth to Darktable to practice things. I could play any one of Boris’s videos and as he edits a photo, a workflow becomes clear.
What I mean is, if he does a video on sigmoid or color grading or monochrome conversion, you learn about that, but you also learn what gets done for any photo start to finish. And a process and workflow becomes clear.
Beyond that, you’ll pick up 80 different techniques for masking/ sharpening / local contrast etc. and you’ll forget 79 of them, but next time you’ll only forget 70.
Hope that helps! I don’t think the intention of this software is to compete with commercial products or to be easy. But if you put the time in it’s incredibly capable.
Welcome Matt…great comments and I would say in addition participating in a few playraw posts and reviewing some of them. Also searching here on the forum…There are a few long but great threads on key module and there are lots of tips and tricks to be found…
As said by @paperdigits , users don’t want modules removed. Even modules that don’t work all that well (like “levels” or “tonecurve”, which have issues outside the 0…1 range for which they were designed)
In addition, darktable can still read edits from old versions (3.x, perhaps even older), so the code for those modules still has to be carried along. And people use them, so why hide them?
(Users can do that themselves)
As much as I love Darktable it could use a Module and UI overhaul. Just overhauling the UI which I’ll admit is a big task would go a long way in making the software easier to use for new users and power users a like. Some Modules could be merged, and that opinion has been made by a few DT Yters. I’m not attacking the developers , I think they have made an incredible piece of software but I do feel like some changes are needed.
You cannot just merge modules, and expect old edits referencing the previous separate modules continue to work. Then, if someone creates a new module with the merged functionality of two or more old modules, we get even more modules…
Also merging modules is not necessarily practical if they are designed to work at different parts of the pipeline. This is why “crop” and “rotate and perspective” are separate. Because, for example, we want retouch to be aware of image rotations/distortions but we might also want to be able to retouch using source pixels from outside the cropped area.
We used to have crop & rotate together and, because it was trying to do lots of things at once, it also became a nightmare to manage the code.
