By popular demand[1], I present to you, my quirky and fun way of using darktable!
Film Sim Panel
In both the darkroom and the lighttable, this funny widget adorns my sidebar:
Each button in this panel activates a particular style:
- A Fuji or Ricoh film simulation
- A “DR” dynamic range adjustment
- A “S Tone” shadows adjustment
- An exposure adjustment
The names and icons of the latter three mimic the same controls on Fujifilm camera controls. The DR modes adjust the tone equalizer bottom half by zero, one, or two stops. The Shadow Tone adjustments apply a shadow bump or dent in the RGB curve. The Exposure adjustment adjusts exposure.
The film simulations were extracted by the magic of darktable-chart and a photo of a color checker. I can’t say that they replicate the in-camera styles perfectly, but they are close enough to they serve as the starting point of most of my edits.
You can download both the film simulation panel and the film simulations from GitHub - bastibe/Darktable-Film-Simulation-Panel.
As a fun aside, the Film Sim Panel works not just in the darkroom, but in the lighttable as well. I often do my rough exposure adjustments directly in the lighttable during culling, before I even open the darkroom.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Please forgive me, for I have sinned. I have used commercial raw editing software. I’m just kidding, I’m not sorry. My sojourns to other software has been well-documented in these forums:
While I didn’t stick with neither Lightroom nor Capture One[2], they did have a thing or two to teach. One brilliant feature of Capture One are their so-called “Speed-Edit Keys”.
Just you hold down a key a on your keyboard and move the mouse to adjust most sliders!
In Capture One, the most important sliders are in a specific order:
Which they translate to Speed Edit Keys on the left-hand home row of the keyboard. These keys are not mnemonic, they’re just one slider after the next, mapped to the home row QWER, ASDF.
Since these keys became second nature to me after just a few minutes, I replicated the same logic in Darktable (with minor alterations):
- Q: Exposure
- W: Color Balance RGB Contrast
- E: Color Balance RGB Global Saturation
- R: Rotate and Perspective Rotation
- A: Color Balance RGB Brilliance Highlights
- S: Color Balance RGB Brilliance Shadows
- D: Sigmoid Target White
- F: Sigmoid Target Black
Additionally, I have set up Q for showing Retouch, and C for showing Crop, and M for displaying the currently active mask, once again mimicking the Capture One shortcuts, which somehow live rent-free in my brain.
May I take this minute to exclaim just how awesome Darktable’s keyboard shortcut system is? These keyboard shortcuts have completely revolutionized my editing! In other programs (Lightroom), I payed a rather astonishing amount of money for a plugin that didn’t do anything else than just replicating these shortcuts in Lightroom. DxO Photo Lab I just couldn’t get into because there’s no way of setting any keyboard shortcuts. And here Darktable just lets you build your own, no hacking required. Mad kudos! That’s just amazing!
Quick Access Panel and Presets
Another big boost to my editing speed is the Quick Access Panel. Mine looks like this:
Some of these modules (RGB Curve, Color Equalizer) are just a shortcut to the corresponding module. Some are essentially just a shortcut to select a preset (Contrast Equalizer, Local Contrast). I could expand these, but there’s more value in fitting the Quick Access Panel entirely on one screen than having all the things in it. Especially since I mapped ESC to always bring me back to it.
And then there a the few quirky modules in my Quick Access Panel:
- My Color Calibration always shows the Temperature slider, as I pre-set my cameras to always shoot in daylight white balance. After much faffing with white balance, I have reached the conclusion that I’d prefer my mornings blue, my middays harsh, and my sunsets orange, just like in the film days.
- The Tone Equalizer crucially includes the magic wand to set the exposure compensation and the adjustable graph. Therefore, I never need to go into that module and can use it right from the Quick Access Panel.
Add to that a few parametrized auto-presets that automatically apply correct Lens Corrections, and camera-appropriate levels of Denoise (Profiled) in variously pre-set ISO ranges, and the aforementioned Film Simulations and Quick Styles.
And not to forget, I have an auto-applied Output Sharpening style that is applied in the export module. This adds a final level of Diffuse and Sharpen at the very end, without slowing down the rest of my editing.
Overall, this makes for a very quick editing workflow, where most images are just a click here, a tug there, and move on to the next frame.
Tool Tips
Lastly, I have customized the labels on the lighttable thumbnails and darkroom image information line to show all the relevant information in a pleasing manner:
It’s a small thing, but the little touches with the bold-faced numbers and the complete set of exposure parameters, they bring me joy.
And as a small personal accomplishment, my lighttable no longer scrolls line-by-line, but smoothly and fractionally, like it befits a modern application.
And now I’d love to hear how you have customized your darktable!
two people have asked, if you must know. ↩︎
nor DxO Photo Lab, SilkyPix, ON1, Luminar, Zoner Photo, nor AfterShot, all of which I’ve owned a license for at one point or another. Yes, I realize that that’s a crazy collection. In my defense, many of these were bought in a sale for a heavily discounted price, and I have donated a lot to Darktable’s development as well. ↩︎
I do prefer having a full row of thumb always visible, I don’t see the point of having a partial view of thumbs. I do see a benefit for people using a touch-pad as it feels lot more natural to scroll smoothly. Anyway, good news, you have the choice now… And thanks 
), which also seems odd to many people. So maybe it’s me, but I really love the choice I will have with the next darktable release 
.