This is a simple note about my experience about darktable - my journey if you wish. Disclaimer first, I would be at best a beginner photographer who does some research, fiddles dials either of camera or darktable, often get things wrong. Many terms confuse me and I won’t be able to tell you difference between hue and gamut or difference between eigf and gf. All I know is that it has nothing do with girlfriend.
My journey started when I discovered my photos do not look good even though I had a camera recommended by one of the consumers reports for individuals - not professionals. I then discovered somethings like exposure, shutter speed and aperture. I was using camera on automatic mode. Research pointed me towards raw files. I actually read the camera manual and figured out my camera does support raw files. Next task was how to deal with raw files. Enter darktable in the picture. I believe it was version 3.2
My first results were of course disasterous, even worst than camera’s auto mode. Enter some more research. I watched almost every video made by Bruce Wiliams and somtimes pretended I understood what he patiently explained. But it worked on his photos but not mine. Do some more reading, watch some more videos and play with images again. Some improvements, but low pass and high pass modules were straining my understanding.
Then I discovered videos by “A dabble in photography”. It opened another new world, sometimes math made sense even if I had to revisit matrix multiplication again. A real discovery was made when playing with color calibration, you need to increase red in blue channel to make the sky bluer. In my simple mind, I was increasing blue everywhere and was painting sky anything but blue.
Then of course videos by Boris Hajdukovic and his many patient explanations here or in videos. Initially I just saw dark(table) magic. How in the world did that photo changed so dramatically? Back to research, fiddling with dials and playing with many images.
I slowly started realizing it’s not magic, but patience and understanding the fundamentals. Key part was there’s no magic bullet. You have to work patiently and don’t expect your photo to look like camera output. I still have a long way to go, but these days I’m reasonably happy with images I develop. Looking at play raw category and kind of life all the artists pore into that dull image is always inspirational as well as educational.
These days, I’m actually looking towards my weekend excursions to use the camera for something without auto mode. While I still screw up, frequency of screw ups is going down (IMHO) and in many cases I was able to recover from disaster. Rather than point and shoot, I’m actually thinking what I want to capture and fiddling with knobs and dials. With newer releases of darktable, I’ve discovered I need around 4 extra modules and masks to make it more presentable. Other modules, well, I’ve to see videos and then read manual to make my mind.
Reason for the long note I realize that developers do spend enormous amount of time developing darktable. Others spend lot of energy and time explaining the details and making magic happen for us.
A big thank you from mostly silent reader to all of you for a chance to learn and more importantly enjoy.
. Most of a good photo is determined by subject choice and composition. With darktable, you might then be able to turn a good photo into an excellent image.