I’ve been thinking of getting something like this: Amazon.com
It seems like with multiple layers, you could assign a lot of sliders… And then add on some custom keycaps or just write on the keycaps to know what is what.
The extream culling is prolly your best bet. However I suggest applying at the time of taking the photograph. Todays digital cameras and high capacity memory cads make it easy to amass a large collections of photos.
Thinking back to film photography, i bet more thought was put into taking a photo, before committing to the shot.
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For my two cents worth. I don’t use lighttable to sort and cull my images from a shoot. I use the darkroom view. I work my way along the film strip. I have styles created that apply basic edits including denoising, sharpening and white balance as set in camera. Some images take extra time to get just right, but then I usually can do a selective copy and paste of settings onto the following series of images that require similar edits. These images can be so quick to edit in this way. I actually am really impressed with the speed of editing in DT once you get your head around the program and develop a workflow. Presets and styles are so important to speed up the processing. I also find the sigmoid module much quicker than filmic to work with.
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Sorry, I’m British. You don’t get to call your product “Megalodon Triple Knob” without me spraying my Earl Grey tea across the keyboard.
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The device actually looks quite neat though.
Thinking about it, as I touchtype without needing to look at the keys, that might make it slower for me, I guess?
[Edit: Looked at some YouTube videos using it for lightroom and it looks pretty good]
I have been experimenting with the key press + mouse move shortcuts, trying to make them easier to remember by using one key with different mouse motions for the same module. For example, f+horizontal for filmic white, f+vertical for filmic black, and f+scroll for filmic shadows. Or in color balance, s+horiz for shadows saturation, s+skew for midtones saturation, and s+vert for highlights saturation.
There is an annoying behavior with these though, I’m not sure if it’s a bug or intentional. If you press a key, click and start dragging in a certain direction, it starts adjusting the intended slider. But if you then change direction while still holding the key and mouse button, it switches to a different shortcut - if you intended to move horizontally but accidentally move the cursor too far upward at the same time it changes to skew. At some point I will try to come up with a patch to fix this, so that it only adjusts the slider corresponding to the initial mouse motion, until the button and key are released.
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It does. And I’m pretty sure they had their tongues in their cheek when they came up with that name
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I don’t use darktable, but my experience with batch processing might provide some insights…
My workflow involves taking a day’s (or session’s) collection of captures and batch-processing them to 800x600 "proof JPEGs that contain the toolchain used to make them. Indeed, batch processing in most any software is not sensitive to shot-to-shot differences, and for me that is exacerbated by exposing for highlights, which means that the mid-tones are all over the place. What I find does line up are the exposures in a given light setting; what I do when I see a set of these is to edit the first one, then delete the others’ proofs and re-run the batch sequence, this time with the edits of the first image. One thing my batch program does by default is to cull out the raws that already have proofs, so this operation just regenerates the missing proofs.
Now, a lot of the above depends on the behavior of my hack raw processor, but the batch facilities in darktable might be wrangled to help…
The term darkroom in darktable takes on a whole new meaning 
:
And I myself still…
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Aside from taking less, culling more, applying styles and using gear/shortcuts, I think the biggest time saver is being less perfectionist with your edits.
For round 1 editing, adjust exposure, wb, sigmoid contrast, some basic saturation, auto denoise, preset sharpening, and move on. You can do all that in one minute. That’s about 5 hours for 300 pictures.
For round 2 editing, only throw all the bells and whistles at the few images which are best of the best - portfolio shots. If that represents 5% of your shoot (15 shots) and you take 30 mins on each, that’s 7.5 hours. 12.5 hours total for 300 images would be about 1/3 your current allotment.
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I have a core set of presets that I use for effect in the main modules I use. These I mix and match as needed. Then when I edit… I take a sort of key frame approach and put a bit of time into a photo and then copy the settings onto the next several shots that are similar. Move to the next keyframe…and so on. Then before exporting I can take a run at any that could be improved or that need things like masking and so on… So not too much automation for me but I’m also not crazy picky. I just try to get nice color and reasonable exposure… I can always revisit to do more if necessary
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I know this probably won’t sound helpful, and I should probably know more about how many or how long a session these 250-300 photos are coming from, but I would be asking yourself why on Earth as a hobbyist do I need to edit i.e. keep so many photos? (NB I’m still going to offer tips at the end so please keep reading).
Robert Frank shot 28,000 images over two years for The Americans and only 83 were selected for publication.
You’re keeping far too many photos I’m afraid, you have to raise your standards. Depends how you value your time and how much enjoyment you get out of the process I suppose, but considering the fact you can get 10 rolls of Portra 400 for 150USD (360 exposures), even after development and scanning (or printing) costs, you’d surely be much better off shooting that and taking whatever you get back from the lab than spending 35 hours in darktable editing.
The crazy thing about that 35 hours number though is that at 7 minutes a photo you’re not even giving each image enough time IMO. I’d rather give 35 photos an hour each to be perfectly honest.
As for the workflow tips you’re looking for, my preferred way of making selections is to lock the preview view with Alt+w and use the scroll wheel to get through images quickly with my fingers over the number keys. First pass is just grabbing anything that might be good so that I can ignore everything else forever. Second pass on those selects I’m looking for keepers, good focus (or happy out of focus accidents), picking the best composition from any scenes I may have worked, etc. Third pass I’m just looking for one to five hero images from the set and then I’m basically done.
I’ve also struggled to make presets that are generalised enough to be useful, but I do use selective copies on the history stack all the time. I always start with my hero images which set the tone for my editing that day, and then I’ll just copy and paste those results onto the other images and tweak as necessary.
There are plenty of modules in darktable you don’t need too, I’d try to use as few as possible to get the results you want.
My last piece of advice would be to share your work. In a digital world you’re unlikely to become the next Vivian Maier sitting on all your photos I’m afraid, and sharing can improve your photography and your process in more ways than you might imagine.
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I agree with that. When I first started with darktable I was always trying different modules for everything. But as least for me, now, I can usually do everything with a limited ‘standard’ selection. I’m never quite sure if it’s applicable to other styles, though, so I’m a little hesitant to suggest it sometimes…
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I took inspiration from Capture One, which introduced keyboard shortcuts such as these a few years ago as “speed edit keys”. Capture One has slider groups, such as exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation in the first panel, and highlights, shadows, whites, blacks in the second. These don’t map to mnemonic keys, but to a location-based scheme: QWER and ASDF, in this case.
For me, this sort of location-based organization works better than mnemonic keys such “E for exposure”. I find it very convenient to be able to go through a set of related adjustments with a set of neighboring keys.
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Found an open box x-touch mini on eBay for a price that seemed worth giving it a go. Thanks
This.
It’s not all that unusual that I’ll have this many or more in total (from a trip, not a single session) but that’s almost always the result of bracketing or some other near-duplicate shooting behavior. Those cull pretty quickly.
I find that when I’m having to work on an image deeply it’s worth asking myself if I’m polishing a diamond or just poop. The latter is probably true far more than I care to admit and I’ve abandoned more than a few edits / images. I certainly have no problem with extensive processing – and rather enjoy it at times – but it needs to be worth it.
All that to say, IMO examine your workload first, then your workflow second.
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Oh my I have been holding “w” while scrolling “alt w” oh my thank you for the reminder!
In this process similar to yours I make all potential Yellow Dot (Under construction/consideration). I then filter Yellows out and select all Reject label. Filter Yellows back in for editing. While editing if they make the cut and editing is successful I label them with an additional Red Dot (Ready to Go). Pink Dot for not quite ready (almost red).
Green Dot for Groups, Blue Dots for blah but if I am absolutely stuck with no other option… You get the idea. I do not waste time with the dots make it quick.
To not waste time Alt W and either sparingly Yellow or majority reject - period. All other dots come in during/after editing. Filter on the dots and go from there - quick.
+1 on shortcuts keys and mouse movement but those dedicated keyboard/dials look too tempting to resist!
Specifically which model of Loupedeck is the one to use? because I think I read some time ago that the interface had to be Midi, not USB. Maybe I’m wrong.
I have the “plus”. (No Idea about the others.) Lots of knobs and sliders. Accepts modify keys too. After a while I just use the controls mostly as @s7habo showed in the first clip. Still would prefer the music of Glenn. Just having a Bach-hour.
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