Updated to 4.6.1, but lighttable image quality still broken FIXED!!!!

Software darktable
1

I’m baffled as to when and what has happened.

The image quality of my files in the lighttable full preview when zoomed in has disintegrated. For the last 5 years it looked identical to 100% view in darkroom mode, but recently it’s become like a tiny thumbnail upscaled to 3000px wide. Fuzzy and pixilated. Weird. I had hoped 4.6.1 would fix it, but no change.

In desperation I have been messing with various settings and lost track of what I did. So I reset all the settings options back to default then rebuilt all my thumbnails using the darktable-generate-cache command line. No difference. I’ve even removed all the files from 2024 and re-imported. No change.

Very confusing.

Anyone have any step by step diagnosis suggestions?

Thanks

Dave

EDIT: Found it by sheer chance. The relevant settings is nothing to do with the thumbnail settings at all, but the CPU/memory settings in the processing tab.

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The crucial setting is “prefer performance over quality”. If that gets ticked, your lighttable image quality is screwed. Untick it and all is well.

2

Well at least now I know what will happen if I tick performance over quality. Is this the only problem that it causes?

3

One could say it’s not a problem but a documented feature.

Enable this option to render thumbnails and previews at a lower quality.

How much lower, probably depends on the available embedded JPG previews.

1 Like
4

If the option was also enabled previously, there may have been a change in how the embedded preview is read. Maybe if a raw has several embedded previews, darktable used to choose the one with the highest resolution, and may now pick another note. That would be a regression.