I don’t think that is a meaningful exercise. You can turn turn off everything except the color profiles, raw B&W points, and demosaic, but that just gets you a funny-looking picture (white balance will be off, looking “flat” because of the linear map, and in most cases too dark).
As @rvietor said, there is no “original” image for a raw file — that’s why it is called raw, that’s what you have before an image is formed.
But if you just auto-apply exposure, color balance, and sigmoid (can be made the default), you get a pretty reasonable-looking starting point. You can take a snapshot there and compare.
That said, I would correct at least exposure, WB (with color calibration), and crop (rotate if necessary), and take a snapshot there.
Lots of good points here - thanks everyone for that!
@kofa unfortunately my possibilities to upgrade my GPU are kind of limited as I work on a mini PC but it does have one that is not too bad. Maybe I’ll have to play with the settings in DT to get faster performance.
Also - I know that Lightroom “hides” the basic steps needed in order to be able to give you a base image and DT shows them all but what I meant was exactly the point in the stack where whAt you see in light table becomes the base. Everything from there on I refer to as user edits or modules and for these I would love a on/off switch.
But you’re right. I can take a snapshot and go from there.
The Ctrl - E at the end of the editing is a great suggestion. I’ll try that. What’s even more helpful is knowing that you can copy and paste edits - I totally missed that!!
That would be either the embedded (camera-generated) jpeg image or a minimal darktable stack (depending on settings) for not previously edited images. Otherwise it’s a thumbnail of your latest edit.
The camera-generated jpeg will never be shown in the darkroom, so a switch to turn off user edits doesn’t give what you want.
You get the minimal darktable stack by selecting the first line (marked "original) in the history stack.
And while it might be possible to mark the history stack when you start editing a previously edited image, that’s not too reliable, as soon as you use the option to compress the history (which purges all but the last copy of each “module name”). So there are some pitfalls with this option as well.
The time needed for calculation strongly depends on the module (and it’s math). If you use “local contrast” or “contrast equalizer” for local contrast or sharpening these modules are in most cases much faster than “diffuse or sharpen” (depending also on the number of iterations)
But the quality can be much better for “diffuse or sharpen”. So, quality takes it’s time .
I haven’t managed so far, nor am I likely to. Some of darktable’s features aren’t useful to me (negadoctor, softproofing, that may change without notice), or I prefer other programs, and don’t mind doing some extra manual steps (lua scripts). So such features will remain a mystery for the foreseeable future…
@tamas as mentioned there is an export module in the darkroom but I mainly use the keyboard short cut CTRL+E. However, where a lot of my speed comes form is editing a series of images shot under similar lighting conditions. I use Ctrl+Shift+C to open a dialog where I select the edits I want copied for the future images. I then open the next image and use ctrl+V and most of my editing is done. That is just so fast that the export module can’t keep up with the speed of editing a series of images. I also use styles and presets a lot. There was I time when I remembered the speed of LR , but those days are long behind me and I get excellent processing times out of DT. Some of my very large panorama stitches can be slow at exporting, but they are huge files.
Yes I know. Although there’s some things I don’t understand and probably can’t change or shouldn’t. Also some of the module names are kind of difficult to grasp. The color balance module for example - why isn’t it called HSL like in literally every other photo editor? Sometimes it’s hard to understand why to change something that in the industry has become a certain standard but maybe that’s just me
In short, the coordinate system used is not HSL, but uses a different base. This may have to do with luminance being unlimited in a scene-referred work flow, where the brightness is (in theory) unbounded.
In a display-referred workflow, brightness is restricted to the range 0…1. (Similar to why Lab isn’t used much in darktable: L is not valid outside a rather narrow range).
Many such “industry standards” date from when all photo editing (including in darktable!) was done in display-referred. For that, they work. For scene-referred, they can cause issues.
Terry has mentioned the keystrokes for selective copy or paste. This is also available in the Lighttable view via buttons under “History Stack” on the right-side panel. The keyboard shortcuts also work in lighttable. This means that you can easily copy to multiple selected images.
(Another great productivity aid for you to look into is styles.)
I often say that people new to photography software will by far have an easier time learning Darktable than people coming from Lightroom, capture one, dxo, Luminar etc etc. The reason for this is simple, experienced photographers have a really hard time dropping the “industry standard” mindset.
darktable is NOT in any way a Lightroom replacement, it’s modules and workflow is completely different when it comes to processing photos.
Try to simply drop that mindset and rather see darktable for what darktable is… And what it is compared to the industry standard is that it’s different, understand that and you will start to learn darktable.
This is what I have tried to educate people about in my videos.
Learn to embrace and accept how DT works. Recently I tried a few commercial editing softwares that were not Adobe or Adobe clones. It was really challenging for me to learn and accept these softwares because they are so foreign and do stuff differently. It gave me insight into the challenges of coming to DT for a new user and it also made me realise that DT is no harder to learn than these other software. I started out learning Photoshop when it came on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and stuck with Adobe up to LR6 and CS6, but they then lost me with the subscription model. So I appreciate the challenges of coming from the Adobe mindset, but just embrace how DT or RT work as if you were switching from a Canon to Nikon camera and the controls while the same are in different locations and often have different names. You would not tell Nikon that their cameras have to match Canon or vice a versa. Imagine the response you would get. DT is created by volunteers who are not trying to create a free version of LR or PS or any paid program. Good luck with mastering DT. It is worth the effort.
Yes I do understand that. But let’s be honest - I did not change to Darktable because of being unhappy with the way Lightroom works. I left Lightroom because of Adobes policy and ended up with DT as an alternative to help me continue working on my raw images. Naturally one tries to emulate the workflow that has been refined over more than a decade in my case, which obviously is no easy task. But I’ll get there. I’m sure about that
Sometimes it’s hard to understand why to change something that in the industry has become a certain standard but maybe that’s just me
