Hey guys! I spent the past couple of weeks getting used to the new workflow in Darktable after changing over from Lightroom and I’m beginning to get/love it. However. One major feature I think is missing, is a general toggle that lets me preview the original image and compare it to the edit state. I understand that Darktable does a bunch of things before I even start to edit. Couldn’t it be possible to “mute” my personal edits and have Darktable display the point in time when I opened an image to edit it? I am aware that I can take a snapshot, go back in the history panel, look at what I’ve done and then restore the snapshot but this I kind of convoluted and disrupts the workflow when I just need to momentarily turn off all changes I’ve made to determine if what I’m doing is ok. Not sure if I’m explaining myself but in Lightroom you can compare the original to the edited image with one click.
i dont have to DT installed to check if you can do it adhoc by just clicking in the lower point in the history stack. someone with DT installed would need to check that.
If you click on a lower point in the history stack, it will show the image at that point in time. You then can go back to the top and/or create a snapshot.
In time snapshots become a powerful friend in your workflow. I use snapshots a lot when trying to work out the best way to sharpen and denoise images or to compare if I prefer the rendition by filmic or sigmoid. The beauty with snapshots in DT is the downward facing arrow will return the image to this point of your editing in the history stack if it is the one you prefer. I have highlighted in yellow this icon.
When I do this step I often clear my snapshots, compress the history stack and move on with my edits. This process rather than be a clunky hinderance is a powerful time saver in my DT editing.
I see. Now that I know how snapshots work, I think I can adapt to it. During the past weeks while.learning DT, I was kind of struggling. Not with the editing so much - more the speed. Synchronizing edits in Lightroom is quick. Previewing is quick. Batch editing is quick and I wasn’t seeing it in DT. I guess it will take some time to adjust
It will take time to adjust and it can become quicker and more powerful as an editing tool compared to LR which is the program I used to use and teach. Now I dedicated to DT and it can be very fast. At times I can edit one image before the previous image has completed the export cycle so they get queued. It will just take time to learn and master.
Oh great to hear! You mentioned exporting - I was wondering why it takes so long to export tiff files? 76 files took almost 40 minutes and that was only the last successful attempt. The first ones didn’t succeed. It did only export 8 or 11 and then stop without apparent reason
Do you know if you have opencl enabled and working…can you check in preferences… This will greatly speed things up esp exports but still it does take a fair bit of time…
I really am not sure other than millions of dollars and an army of developers…but I think the math is more simplistic as well…DT does a lot of processing in each module. If there were resources and money I am sure the pipeline could be streamlined further.
You can sort of leverage the duplicates feature… It only creates an extra xmp so no real disc commitment.
See here I have an image the top one is edited the original is below…
If you left click and hold on any duplicate that you have it will toggle the preview of your currently edited image to that. So you can effectively do the on/off that you want…
These are saved and can be used to compare staged edits or versions… I think snapshots are not kept on a per image basis and are lost when you end your editing session…
I don’t know if that’s even possible but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to toggle the users modules on and off like you can with individual ones? I’m thinking of the active module palette and a little temporary toggle on the tab that lets you temporarily disable all user enabled modules…
All the afore mentioned solutions sound great but it’s still a lot of extra steps for a very simple operation. Take NIK color efex for example. You can stack a bunch of “filters” or adjustments but you still get the one Preview button that lets you see the original. Same in Luminary AI or On1 photo raw…or Lightroom as mentioned. Maybe this would be something a bunch of users would like to see…not sure if I’m the only one
Why don’t you take a snapshot immediately when you enter the darkroom? Then you can compare the current state to that one without creating new ones and messing with the history stack. Or, if you don’t need the fancy sliding comparison, you can simply click an old entry to see how the image looked at a previous state, and then click the top of the history again.
There are modules you always have to have, like demosaic for raw images, input color profile for all images. Lightroom has those, too, they are just not shown.
Then, there are modules that darktable enables by default, depending on your workflow setting (you can adjust that in your preferences). Examples are filmic, sigmoid and base curve.
Finally, you can enable modules as you edit. You may apply some via auto-applied presets, styles or manually, as you edit.
Fundamentally, only the mandatory vs other modules can be differentiated, but the mandatory ones are always at the bottom of the stack (you can change their settings, and then another entry appears in the stack, but the one with the original state also remains), so it’s easy to do a one-click comparison. I hardly ever do that, but it’s possible.
With raw files, there really isn’t an “original”. The camera jpeg is a raw passed through the camera’s editing pipeline. Also, there is no real difference between automatically applied and user-applied modules (apart from a few that are always needed, and cannot be turned off).
The closest you could get to an original raw image would be to select the lowest item in the history stack, which will have still have some (default) processing applied.
In general, selecting any line in the history stack let’s you see the result of processing all the modules below and including the selected line, so it’s quite general.
But be careful: any edit, or compressing the history stack, discards any module above the one selected in the history stack! So it also allows “undo” operations with complete modules. This is normally not an issue, as the top is automatically selected after any editing operation.
