I have a Sony a7r3 and would love to migrate into Darktable, but so far, it’s been pretty rough; the colors for my raw photos look, frankly, terrible. From what I can glean of the camera compatibility guide, I’ll need to create a custom color profile for the camera; am I reading that properly? And if so, how do I go about doing that?
I mostly shoot events, street, and sports photos. I tend to shoot 1k-2k photos before processing, so workflow to get through the images quickly is very important to me. I will very rarely deviate from the workflow below; I might consider going black and white, but that’s only for street shots. My typical workflow is:
Select images from the card that are worth looking at (this part is especially painful in Capture One, since an errant click can reset the entire selection process and is one of the reasons I want to switch)
Once images have been offloaded from the card to the machine, then do another sweep through of images, using the star system (5 is a keeper, 4 is a meh, unmarked is not a keeper)
filter for images tagged with 5
For each 5 image, automatic color correct (ctrl-l), crop (c), perspective correct (k) or straighten (r). I might do a whitebalance change (w), but that’s rare. The use of keys to change between modes is really helpful to churn through images quickly.
Once I have my images set up how I like, export to 100% jpgs and then upload to smugmug.
Even if the colors were correct, I’m having a hard time figuring out what the workflow should be in darktable so I can churn through 1k images in an hour. What’s a guide I can read on how to work through images quickly?
There isn’t such thing als automatic color correction in darktable. So if that one click does it all expectation in step 4 is important for you, darktable isn’t the appropriate tool.
You might define a style with some defaults, but that’s a one size fits all approach
This is far too much of a general statement to provide any solid advice. You’ll need to at least post a screenshot and describe what you’ve done to allievate the problem.
Hrm, it’s unfortunate that there isn’t a “best guess” approximation; something that basically stretches the histogram to something that makes sense. What do you mean by “style with some defaults”?
@paperdigits sure, here are some in broad daylight. When inside, the color is much worse. It’s really straightforward for me to hit c to crop to get the highlit section in the Capture One image, I’m sure it’s pretty easy to crop in darktable but I haven’t figured that out yet.
@claes Can you point me to any particularly germane sections? Time is the thing I’m trying to save here. I have watched no videos nor read a manual for Capture One, the UI is just intuitive enough for me to understand. I’m certainly willing to go searching for things, and have spent a few hours trying to figure this out, but feel like I’m no closer to having a fast workflow or even a basic understanding of how to get good colors out of the box.
@paperdigits I’ve read through some docs, and have tried to follow some tutorials for color correction, but gotten nowhere. I did figure out how to do perspective correction, which seems a bit clunky but usable. I’m sure there’s a way to do keybindings for operations, but I haven’t figured out how to do that.
I should also say, for the above shots, that’s with the ctrl-l hit for color correction. Even without having done that, the colors just aren’t as washed out as they are in Darktable, which leads me to think that there’s some default color matrix to set up.
Here are two screenshots from the same action sequence without having color correction, cropping, or rotating to the horizon. Sorry if I’m posting too much, I’m just very excited that you guys are so willing to help me out here, I’m not used to projects being this active
Use the display referred workflow…it uses a basecurve and should be a lot more like C1 if that is what you want… DT is about doing scene referred edits and many of the modules are designed to support this but you will need to do some work to get up to speed on that and likely its not what you need by the sound of things if you want to process a 1000 images an hour…
If you can follow fast, fluent French, I have other recommendations for you.
Only way to learn darktable is to try, test, fail, try anew, start again, &c, &c, &c.
When your developed RAWs are better than your camera’s JPGs, you have succeeded.
@Claes 61 tutorials is… a lot of tutorials. I really hope that switching off of Capture One doesn’t require that level of involvement, because then the cost of CaptureOne becomes much cheaper when I factor in the cost of my time
It its in the preferences…you will need to run through those anyway I would image to configure settings to use DT. In the processing tab you can choose that as a workflow. It will use a basecurve in stead of filmic and this behaves much more like traditional software that apply curves and color profiles to your file out of the gate… DT really doesn’t do that. You need to work with it if you are going to use the scene referred workflow and there are a lot of nuances to it that if you aren’t willing or don’t have the time are not likely going to be the solutions for 1K of images per hour… Using autolevels and a basecurve might be closer to what you are used to…
I have watched 3 times as many and i am still learning…its not a quick learn. Its powerful and can yield great results but it has a lot of nuance. It is also under constant development at the moment so things can change week to week month to month… You can obviously stay on a release version but many times fixes are implemented in the code so people can have a range of versions when they are talking to one another and that needs to be clarified…
