what's so hard about darktable

Software darktable
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it’s a really common issue a lot of people share me included so it’s probably an issue with darktable itself.

if you look at how a basic edit currently works:

  1. tone mapping: you have multiple tonemappers sitting there (filmic, sigmoid, base curve) when you most of the time should only use one. users have to build custom module groups just to hide the ones they aren’t using so they don’t accidentally stack them.

  2. white balance: the actual white balance module warns you not to touch it, so you have to use color calibration. but in the CAT tab there isn’t a normal green/magenta tint slider. if you have a slight tint from leds or glass you have to go into custom and dial in LCh hue/chroma or sample patches just to fix a basic cast.

  3. tone equalizer: you can’t just move it to fix highlights or shadows. you have to open the mask tab first, hit the calibration button, check that the exposure mask spans the right EV range, and only then touch it.

  4. selective edits: you go to exposure, draw a mask. to add some thing else to that same subject you have to find another module, create a new instance or link the previous mask. to tweak color on it, jump to color balance rgb, find the mask again, and link it again. you end up with masks scattered across different modules and it’s hard to track what is attached to what.

what an ideal setup could look like from my perspective without breaking the pipeline or xmp compatibility:

  1. tone mapping: using one (like default) automatically hides the others so you only ever see the active one. (ofc the old behaviour can be turned on but imo just confusing for most users) and you can find them in search.

  2. white balance: a clean interface with normal temperature and tint sliders that handles everything in the right place without 2 modules where the obvious to use one shouldn’t be used

  3. tone equalizer: automatically calibrates the mask range on image load so the sliders are ready to use immediately.

  4. selective edits: you make a mask and apply edits directly to it instead of hunting across separate modules. under the hood it keeps the exact same pipeline order as now, but the module list could filter down to only show the tools active for that current mask (with an option to view all modules if you want). in the list each module could be marked as “global” or show the mask name/type, with maybe a color code showing what part of the pipeline it belongs to (scene-referred, display, etc.), and selecting a mask highlights all the modules tied to it. for basic edits you don’t even have to think about pipeline order, but reordering is still there for advanced usage.

darktable is great but it’s not easy to use

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Just a quick response on how easy darktable is to use! Because, as a non-technical user who can hardly use the words colour and science in the same sentence, I chose it over rawtherapee because, just that; I found it easier.

  • Use a favourites tab and/or the quick basics tab. You never see anything youdon’t use, and can search for the rarely-used. (Yes: one will already be familiar with dt o be able to do this, but it is an evolving thing.
  • Tone mapper problems? ok, filmic confused me some; agx is amazing but too much so. The Three Bears approach: Sigmoid is just right: the perfect answer to those who just want a default.
  • Tone Equaliser… this one I agree on. It has been improved, and I do use it when Colour Balance RGB is not quite enough
  • Masking, local alterations, is what really won me over from rawtherapee. So much simpler. You do not have to scatter your masks around: it is option to reuse them, and usually one wants to.

There is an active redevelopment of masking which will make it very much more powerful.

I think that darktable can be many things to different people. Want a quick edit? Exposure and Colour Balance RGB will probably do it. Want to go deep? Well, I am still trying to understand Channel Mixing, and have watched several videos several times. lol. But I can’t claim dt is hard just because it has one or modules I can’t (yet) understand.

Anyway, enjoy your project. If creating the software and making it just the way you want it (even withLLM help) is your thing, that’s very valid creativity too.

One PS on the which-software thing: I didn’t process raw before. I only tweaked jpegs in GIMP. I had no preconceptions of how things “should be” from anything like Lightroom. That means that my “should-be” is now darktable! :rofl:

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Note that this topic was created from posts on another topic.

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I actually agree with all of the OP, with a partial exception in one area: tone mapping.
I only ever use the “currently enabled” module filter, so I never see other tone mappers or any other modules. When I need to enable one that isn’t already. I just search it in the search bar, enable it, and then click the enabled modules filter again to go back to my standard view.

I will say, however, that this way of doing things was not intuitive at first, and I had to learn to do it this way to make it easier for myself. Now that I am used to it, it makes sense, but as a new user, the module panel feels not great, because there is so little structure to it (or maybe because it is so easy to turn the structuring off).

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I’m slightly surprised that that’s even possible but definitely a good thing

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Yes, I agree with white balance and tone equalizer.

In my view the current white balance is extremely confusing and complex, every other RAW editor that I now has a temperature slider. It is that I should 99% of my photos under natural light. But yes it took me ages to wrap my head around.

The same applies to the tone equalizer, I am rather happy with the results I get now, but it a took long time to get it to my liking, and I still don’t like that I have to fiddle with a mask to edit.

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I have tried for a full year to build something like that. For various complicated reasons, this is not possible with the existing Tone Equalizer. You will either break backwards compatibility, kill the performance of the module or be forced to introduce new controls in parallel to the old ones, which makes understanding the module even harder.

A better solution is only possible as a new module. I understand that contrast & texture has new shadows and highlights controls.

By the way, adding to your list here: There are still display-refered modules like Shadows and Highlights that are not part of a modern workflow (even though they have their uses for users who know what they are doing). I think such outdated modules should be renamed, so users don’t get confused when they just type what they want into the search box.

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Renamed and hidden by default is indeed probably the best solution for those depreciated features

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Would not be a bad idea, and then also drop the RGB in the names of the scene referred modules, it confused me so much at the beginning…

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I think you’ve found a small clear headache. One obstacle for solving this automatically is the two different TE usages: highlight/shadow compression and fine tuning of one tonal region. They would have different settings, for a very wide and very narrow tonal range respectively, and adjusting this (contrast compensation) will invalidate the current curve. Maybe the curve should be adjusted as the mask settings change? That way it wouldn’t matter if the initial settings are chosen wrongly.

But that doesn’t seem like an easy fix. Even the design is hard. (I just saw JovianSettler’s comment, and I immediately agree that you can’t do this really well without introducing new controls.)

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I was thinking more like currently there’s a setting for automatically setting the mask and contrast that it would just run that on loading the module if it’s newly added to the active modules

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There aren’t settings that are good for every edit. It would have to be a different module with a different algorithm.

The mask settings needed to tweak the brightness and shadows on the face of a portrait will not work for whole image shadow highlight compression.

It would be interesting to put code into presets so you could create a default preset that automatically matches the whole scene (if that’s what you want), but that would be quite a big change.

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For the tone equalizer head ache would you be up for trying out the new module im working on? It has simplified controls of highlights and shadows based on the same filter as the tone equalizer uses. But there is no mask to fiddle with and it offers control over details as well. Kind of like how i made the sigmoid module as a alternative to filmic a few years ago. [Merged] New module Contrast and Texture - #191 by jandren

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Usually ime is the settings it can already automatically select good enough most of the time (and imo this shouldn’t change previous ones it’ll just be automatically applied mask based on when the module was initialized)

But imo this isn’t that big of a deal compared to most of the other things

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I really believe it would be beneficial for darktable as a whole to stop treating the QAP as a ‘beginners tool’ and make it a first class citizen, with masks, duplicates, whole modules, perhaps even the option of adding modules on the fly to your edit, where they appear in whole, etc. It’s just so convenient having your entire worlflow visible and expanded at the same time.

I guess it turns dt into a bit of a more traditional developer, but it saves a lot of time opening and searching modules, and values are instantly visible after a quick scroll.

Besides that I have no complaints. I don’t get the multiple tonemap argument, just use one and stick with it for all photos. Instead of switching when you encounter an edge case, try to deal with it another way.

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One thing I would like to see is a mask based pipeline.
I mean, I want to select a mask and apply the modules on that mask until i select another mask or the whole picture.
I am imagining that I will choose/lock the mask on the mask manager and by default all the modules (that support mask) should be applied only the masked portion.
Selecting another mask and clicking on the module that was already used by previous mask can create a new instance of the module.

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Exactly, and that’s probably the thing where I think the most improvement is possible for DT

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Perhaps this is not good enough for the more advanced user, or the user who needs that magenta-green slider but my answer to this one is… White Balance module? What white-balance module? I don’t even remember it except when others bring it up.

I think this approach is valid because White Balance is wired to work with Colour Calibration and can be left among the auto-applied modules to just do its thing.

I know that others don’t agree. Maybe because they come from other software, maybe because they are able and want to think deeper into the process.

So am I. But mostly, the Brilliance sliders in CB-RGB do that work for me. I use TE when I have things like under-exposed, dark-skin faces of people wearing white clothes to deal with.

I recall somebody saying, “but I don’t use TE for contrast,” but I very much do. I can set up the shadows across a face quite nicely in TE, if I wish, almost to the point of not needing CB-RGB brilliance.

TE does so much more, adjusting mid tones as just mentioned as well as shadows and hightlights.
I do use S&H for a final highlights tweak.

Yes! in fact Colour Balance RGB does so much more, Drop the RGB and consider a complete rename! Don’t know what to, though. The Almost Everything module? :wink:

None of the modules named are intrinsically difficult. Except, for some of us (all the people that Boris made three (or four?) videos for), the channel mixer in Colour Calibration.

There will always be more. Deeper. But that doesn’t make the package unusable. That’s like calling a toolshop hard because, yes, one can use a screwdiver, but the arts of the engineer’s scraper remain a mystery.

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then use those haha :smiley:

I actually like the way WB+CCT works more than a simple white balance/tint slider. Once I understood how they interact and what the goal is, it became much more powerful - and gives you, for example, a space to do unified color adjustments before the color calibration module and specific adjustments after it. You just need to switch the way you think about white balance the other way around.

I dont understand the need to make everything simplified - I switched to darktable from a 100% photoshop/camera raw workflow and after one afternoon I had everything set up, configured the workflow to a few tabs with modules based on my own categories and needs, and, except for a few bugs (which were expected, and still are), almost never looked back…

Re: the tone equalizer - I agree that an option to have it auto-adjust the sliders on module application would be nice - this could probably be a module-specific setting, theres some other modules that would be nice to auto-adjust (perhaps a way to save the fact that I pressed an auto-button into a preset? right now it only saves exact values, but if it could save the auto-button-pressed state and recalculate the values on a new image…)

Re: the masking - that one is a mess, yes. I do not use masks often, but I think that this is the thing that wins in camera raw and other similiar software - paint a mask and attach effects/modules directly onto it, not the other way around…

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I don’t think that it has to be simplified just more efficient to reach the desired results that in a more intuitive way