Somehow Darktable is really slow for me and zooming 100% or so takes forever most of the times. I am not sure if its due to my camera (Canon Rebel T7 which is partially supported by DT). I had been trying an alternate route for editing - I have been converting my raw files into 16-bit TIFF using Canon’s own software (DPP4) after very slight adjustments like lens corrections etc and then going from there in DT 3.2.1. This has significantly improved the speed and I feel the the results are also better.
I just wanted to ask if this is an stupid route to go?
You should try transforming them into dng files, however, the best way is to provide the needed files to get your camera supported at https://raw.pixls.us
It is something else. Perhaps a setting. I tried the T7 file from raw.pixls.us without issues. Do you have any heavy modules activated?
Your camera is missing a noise profile. Create one by following this tutorial PIXLS.US - How to create camera noise profiles for darktable
No one but a T7 owner is able to take the pictures.
I’ve converted some photos from some of my older cameras, including a few different Canons and a Fuji X-Pro1 into DNGs before in the past, and I regret it a bit now, as the original raw files are always a bit better for extracting information from (with dynamic range, and in some cases, with demosaicing). The DNGs are not too bad, but they’re not quite the same. They’re still better than TIFFs, however.
If you can somehow speed up processing of the original raw files, that’s pretty much almost always better.
Even still, DNGs have more information than TIFFs (which have more information than JPEGs).
For photos: RAW > DNG > TIFF / PNG / WebP > WebP (lossy) / JPEG > GIF
(That > is “greater than”; not supposed to be an arrow.)
Meanwhile, I’m using darktable on an Intel-only GPU laptop from a few years back. If you can use OpenCL (NVidia / AMD / Intel with Neo OpenCL), it would help speed up things.
Also, you can tell darktable to pre-render thumbnail previews for your image library with the darktable-generate-cache command (and then step away from your computer for a while, depending on how fast it is and how large your collection is). That alone speeds up my use of darktable tremendously (when browsing and selecting photos in the lighttable view).
Converting raw files with one program to the further process them with another is, in itself, not a problem.
Where you start losing information is when you delete the original files.
I consider the original files like the negatives from film days: you can have made many different prints from them, but you never ever destroy the negatives those prints came from.
@newbie:
When you are new to raw processing, the first results aren’t going to be good, so at least those images you will want to work on again later… Keep in mind that the Canon software can use the same algorithms as the camera uses, and will be able to decode all the metadata from the raw files. So it’s fairly easy to get a result close to the camera jpeg fast. Faster at least than with dt. But I think you’ll find that once you learn how to use dt, you can get more out of your images, especially the difficult scenes (like high contrast scenes).
And as @betazoid inferred, the computer you use (graphics card and drivers) has a big influence on processing speed.
@paperdigits I dont know why the DNGs for T7 are not so great as well. Anytime I try to use them for HDR, it gets really purplish. May just the camera format is strange.
@Peter I mainly use exposure, tone equalizer, color balance, filmic, local contrast and equalizer and use any denoising in the end.
@betazoid Its 4-5 year old Dell Workstation with i7-4910MQ CPU (16GB RAM) and Quadro K2100M GPU (not so great). The main challenge comes in when anytime any changes are made like changing even slight zoom, the ‘working’ screen shows up and stays like for for 10-20 secs. Comparing that with much larger TIFF files with similar steps, its comparable slow (and annoying at times). I tried RT and things are much faster there on similar setup (though I may not be knowing what I am doing in RT - just picked up the manual yesterday and will give it a shot).
Sample Shots -
I dont know if I am not doing things correctly but my processing with raw in DT sometimes end up rather dull as well. I asked here thinking that native software from Canon may have a bit better handle on the T7 format (maybe). I also thought that maybe TIFF has significant data to replace raw but I can see that I was wrong
