I am new to the whole digital still photography thing. I have a Nikon D300 that I’ve taken my first few shots to try to work on. I shot them in JPEG+RAW. I connected the camara to my computer running Windows 11 and the camera shows in the tree, and the images, when I open the folder that pops up showing me the camera is installed, but not in the tree with My PC.
When I launch Darktable I should be getting this according to videos I’ve seen.
But I get this:
None of these links allow me to get to the camera and notice that my install is lighter. I don’t know if the camera is not installing right, or I need to do something else with Darktable.
Also, when the files on the camera open, I only see the JPEG images. No RAW.
It’s a little hard to know what’s happening with your camera. Do I understand that when you go to My PC your camera is not showing up at all?
My D7100 looks like this:
If yours is not there, I would think it’s a non-darktable issue somewhere.
FWIW, I normally always use a card reader as it’s faster, and simply use copy and paste in windows explorer to copy the images to a folder on my PC.
Then in darktable I use add to library instead of import, to load the images without any further copying. I mention this as it means I’m not that familiar with doing it the other way.
That’s a preferences setting - click the little cog at top right to get to preferences, then you can change the theme to whichever option you prefer. I think the one called just ‘darktable’ is the classic darker one. I prefer that too, although the reason for the lighter one being standard is that it helps accuracy by giving your eyes a more ‘neutral’ midtone background for your image.
Open in windows explorer or windows photos? Photos would be likely to mess things up…
Sure the camera is set to save RAWs? If it is, I’m puzzled, but I’ve heard something similar elsewhere.
Incidentally, if you’re new to editing, I might tentatively suggest that while you’re in preferences, go to the processing tab, and changes ‘auto-apply pixel workflow defaults’ to ‘scene-referred sigmoid’, as many/some people find it quicker and easier to get nice results from that option. It just changes what modules are applied by default, so it’s nothing permanent anyway.
Silly question - are you using two cards? I think you can set most Nikons to put the RAWs in one card and the Jpegs in the other. Maybe that forms a different folder when the camera is connected to the PC. Again, I’m not sure as I haven’t done that - and don’t have a D300 (sadly!).
That video was based on version 3.4, while the current version is 4.6, so things have changed since then. On that note, tutorials based on versions older than 3.0 are very likely to not be useful, due to how massively the workflow has changed since then.
Save yourself some headache - simply copy the images from the card to your hard disk using Windows explorer. Then import into darktable with the add to library function. You may return to direct imports later, but I’d go with the simplest method first.
