I am with darktable since about 5 years. I work with two computers a iMac and a MacBook Air. Both of them I run with Linux Mint. The iMac of course is the desktop and the book for travel.
Since about half a year I experience, that the pictures after importing into the iMac are far to dark, I would guess about -3 exposures. They far darker as on the camera display, and far darker then imported into the MacBook. Of Course I can then develop them to my satisfaction, it is however boring always to lighten them, before all the other work.
I enclose here two Testsshots:
iMac:
I also thought of that, however all the other programs look perfectly in the correct brightness and furthermore, when I import this same picture for instance into digiKam it looks perfectly correct in brightness.
In the darkroom, on the bottom right, there is a toolbar with several buttons. Gamut check and soft proof allow you to set/check the display profile. Use right click to reveal the popup menu.
If the images are in the same, pristine state, the input and output profiles will be set to safe defaults. I don’t know of any option that would suddenly break those settings for all images.
Thank you for your help. The right klick on soft proof revealed at the iMac that it was set to system display profile. Setting it to sRGB (websafe) gives a completely different display of the pictures. I only wonder what had made this change of the setting, I cannot remember having done it on purpose.
Normally, it should be set to system display profile. However, you may have set the wrong profile in your system settings (no idea how you adjust this on a Mac).
As @kofa notes…normally this would, ie the softproofing be set to system and not enabled. You would set it to enabled and apply a printer icc profile normally… There is a similar setting for “display” profile…this defaults and should be okay at system if your OS settings are okay… DT has a config folder…there you can have a subfolder named ./color/out. This is where you can copy any output profiles that you would want to use…for example if you calibrated your display or had a specific icc profile you would copy it there and then use that profile by selecting it in DT specifically and not relying on DT using the OS… I don’t really know the in’s and outs for Mac’s but in Windows whenever the software itself offers the option to specify the display profile I choose to do so and not trust that just leaving it on system will give me the correct profile even though for the most part it should if the OS is correctly set up…
I am coming back again. I know now that the profile of my monitor is not as it should be. I do have a Spyder 4 and I have calibrated the monitor some time ago, when exactly I do not know. If however I did something wrong that time, that would explain the whole story. I am sure you are more experienced in this field than I am. Therefore my question, would a new calibration put the monitor to a state, that it would perform satisfactorily. Is the setup Spyder 4 in connection with Argyll displaycal a recommendable way to do this?
can’t help since running Linux on a macbook leaves the whole configuration stuff to the user. In general it’s possible to calibrate a mac display with spyder4 and displaycal (for quite recent macOS versons GitHub - eoyilmaz/displaycal-py3: DisplayCAL Modernization Project is recommended)
If it can be assumed that a previous calibration may have led to problems, the first step is to return to the default settings …
The Spyder 4 (any version older than the X, actually) is not recommended, since the color filters degrade over time, leading to bad and inconsistent readings. If you have the budget, I would recommend getting a CaliBrite Display SL or HL.
