For a while now, I have been trying various ways of implementing Film Simulations in darktable. In my latest iteration, I made custom presets for color lookup table and tone curve, matched against a color checker. This seems to work well.
However, choosing from such a plethora of presets in multiple modules is a bit cumbersome. I considered using devices such as a LoupeDeck, StreamDeck, or a MIDI controller, but these are expensive, Linux support seems sketchy, and they are really more than I need.
So, how about using a smartphone instead? I found an app called Deckboard (Win/Lin/Mac), which can trigger keyboard shortcuts on the computer from an app on the phone:
This actually works really well! I simply set up keyboard shortcuts within darktable to trigger the film simulation styles, and put these shortcuts into Deckboard.
Download the darktable styles and icons here:
film sims.zip (1.2 MB) 
And it was a lot of fun (re-)creating these film icons! The Fuji ones are re-drawn from the X-Pro3’s sub monitor, the Ricoh ones are made up. I don’t love the “ISO AUTO” at the bottom of them, but I haven’t found anything useful to put there yet.
It would be even better to not rely on the (payed) deckboard app, but code up a little web server in darktable’s Lua scripting that triggers the styles directly. This could additionally toggle styles instead of just activating them, which would be useful for the dynamic range modes and shadow tones. But we’ll see if I actually find the time to do that.
At any rate, I found this useful and fun, so maybe you will, too.
