Coming back from a wedding, I’ve used DigiKam and PF, to develop my images ending up with 150 of them.
This is a journey …
First the performance and stability are the main issues, but that’s not the topic. I didn’t include “local contrast” and “noise reduction” to speed up a little bit.
I did not succeed in getting good result with some high iso, but that’s not the topic neither.
Beside that, the repetitive questions are a bit boring
- A pfi has been detected. Do you want to open it ?
- After having exported a jpg file, exiting PF:
2.1. Modified buffers existing, do you really want to exit?
2.2. Image “xxx.jpg.pfi” contains unsaved data. Do you want to save it before closing?
The last 2 questions should occur only if I haven’t not saved anything, am I correct ?
I do not get the right tuning the first time, so I did that 3, 4 or 5 times for each single image …
If some questions must remain, I think a way to avoid them will be more than welcome.
Here is a confusing case. When we have a pfi plus jpg.pfi like:
When I open the jpg file PF asks the question about name.pfi. It should ask about name.jpg.pfi (at least use it). I want to open the treatment which created the jpg :
If I answer yes, I don’t get the actual treatment which has built the jpg. The worst part of it is that I may not notice I use the wrong pfi file…
If I answer no, PF opens the jpg image without any treatment. The only way to reedit properly name.jpg is to delete name.pfi.
A general topic. From DAM, when opening an image with PF, a new instance of PF is started. Would it be possible, or even desirable, to just open the new image in the current PF instance ? If that would not save any click, that would be more convenient to switch from an opened image to another.
When I’ve finished to tweak all images, I would have loved to be able to batch generate again all the images adding a bit of “local contrast” and, for high iso, some “noise reduction” before publishing the images.
Still on batch side, I think it would help to batch generate at the beginning a jpg file for each raw. This time, that would speed up the DAM and help to sort out the images.
Among the things which could speed up also the development process is a color picker for curves, white balancing, …
What did help a lot is the default.pfp, and even more, the ability to copy layers from one image to the other. The copy itself is quite fast ! , then just be patient, if the previous image is good the next image is (nearly) good too .
I’ve probably made a lot of mistakes, not used the best method. I would love to learn how to go faster (4 times would be a good start) because all the tools are there to get the best from our images.
Thank you Carmelo !!