For my own part I’m often satisfied (enough) with the jpg-output of my Olympus cameras – but anyhow take pictures stored both in jpg- and RAW-format. (Yes, I know this may be a little stupid or at least unnecessary space consuming since there are jpgs embedded in the RAW-files, but it has something to do with saving time …)
Up to now any image processing on my part has then mainly been limited to simple tasks like cropping, horizon correction, general exposure correction etc – which I can quickly achieve with the jpgs. Only more occasionally have I wanted to do more serious processing of an image (-- which admittedly also has something to do with the time believed necessary to reach a decent competency level in image processing).
This is probably about to change somewhat, since a) I now aim at getting more serious about photography and image development in general, b) I’m very excited about darktable 3.0 including its culling function which is something I have missed a lot for doing efficient image management (in particular for selecting “the keeper” among several fairly similar images).
I perceive darktable to be at its core a RAW-developer. However, now that darktable also has gotten such interesting management tools, I wonder if there are any drawbacks to using darktable as pure jpg-manager and -processor? - or for mixed jpg and RAW purposes?
Not. At. All. I have a Fuji camera, and I just love the JPEGs that come out of it. The colors are gorgeous, the light is amazing, and the black and white is also excellent. I rarely feel the need to battle the RAW files to get anything else out of there. So that’s not stupid at all. If anything, I feel more and more that keeping the RAW shots is what takes too much space, not the JPEGs, which are comparatively quite small.
It’s true that Darktable is designed as a RAW processor, but I find it can also process JPEGs fine as well. I often do the same as you and just do a little cropping, alignment and exposure and call it a day. There’s only so much time I want to spend on those damn computers – after all, the point of all this is to shoot nice pictures, for me.
That said, I do see a few drawbacks with using Darktable with both JPEGs and RAWs, in my workflow. Darktable does “group” pictures together, so that the JPG and RAW files are linked somehow. But the UI around this isn’t great. There’s a G button on the top right of the lighttable view that allows you to show a single picture (the RAW, by default) instead of two which is nice. And Darktable can use the embedded JPG thumbnail instead of the undevelopped raw which is also nice.
But it’s hard to get it to show the JPG instead of the RAW when you’re in that mode. You need to click on the (other) G button, the one on the image, two “unfold” the group, then click on the G of the JPG, twice, and then it will show up instead of the RAW file, but just for that image. It would be great to have that as a setting to show JPGs as default everywhere… Or maybe just a way to make that switch easier in general?
It’s also confusing whether a setting will apply to the group or just one of the images. For example, in “grouped” mode, picking a rating (buttons 1-5) will apply to all images in the group. But tagging (control-t) applies only to the selected image, not the group. Same for color labels. I find that confusing.
I also often have trouble finding the matching image. Say I tagged or colored the JPEG but then decide I want to push development further. I’m in a collection that matches all photos with that tag. I can’t directly find that RAW image, because it’s not tagged the same way. So I need to find a unique identifier for the image (say the file name), then remove that tag search filter, and search for that file name. It’s rather clunky and slow.
Things have improved significantly in the past, however. It used to be that ratings were not applied to the group, so I had to use a plugin to rate all images in a group. It’s just too bad that wasn’t done for the other shortcuts, in my opnion…
The short version, that said, is that Darktable is fine for a JPG manager/processor. It’s a bit overkill, and might not be the best if you do only JPEG. But if you’re going the mixed way, it’d say it’s totally worth it because it’s the state of the art in that domain, at least as free software is concerned. (I understand that RawTherapee is also excellent, but I found it harder to use and it doesn’t have as good image management as DT…)
Of course you can use darktable also for JPG files. But you might restrict yourself regarding the possibilities you might have using raw files. I would advice to shoot raw and JPG and keep at least the more interesting raw files for improving your image development skills. The size of the files should not matter so much because you can store more than 1000 raw file per dollar (HDD space is really cheap nowadays).
I beg to differ. Space does matter, and speed as well. I found that dealing with large number of shots (i shoot over 5000 a year) does take its toll, especially if you want to use faster SSD or NVMe drives, which are not cheap. Then you need to think about backups and offsites, it does add up…
I also love my Olympus jpgs! But I never download or import them to save space. I leave them on the card in the camera unless I need them. After some amount of time I reformat the card since I never went looking for those jpgs. But you reminded me about the new culling function and I may start using them to see how good I am at reproducing Olympus’s processing.
You are right, space matters, if you want to work with tausends of files, as many photographers do. But instead of throwing away all raw files automatically by the camera, I advised to keep at least some of them for practise. Even keeping 5000 costs only 5 bucks on a HDD and you don’t have to think about backups and offsites, when the alternative is too completely throw away the raw files.
