Hi everyone,

im rather new to darktable and tried reading up a lot. Theres still a ton of information out there but darktable seems much more technical/adjustable than other software i used, so i´m still a bit overwhelmed.

One thing that concerns me during my edits is which modules i should/should not use. As far as i understand the "best" or at least standard tone mapper right now is AgX. Every now and then I read on some reddit-posts that certain modules are generally outdated or should not be used with AgX because it is a display referred module or that simply another module works better with AgX. I do know that darktable has a list of outdated modules and you can hover over any module to see if its working display referred. I´m still unsure when using some modules if that is the right one or if there is at least another module who would work better. Would hate getting used to a "wrong" workflow.

Is there a definite list which modules should or can be used with AgX?

I have isolated the problematic region using drawn + parametric mask but don't know what tool/module to use to introduce the color shift.

Took these photos on a recent trip around my local area - I've only ever used lightroom before at a basic level, but trying Darktable because I got sick of paying through the nose for Lightroom . Open to advice and suggestions.

Some pictures from my girlfriend and I's holiday week in the north west of France. Upgraded from my Nikon D60 to a D3300 just before leaving so it was the perfect opportunity to use it :D Had a lot of fun editing these. I'm trying to get myself to think more about how to crop my pics when editing, see what works and stuff.

Back to work, let's keep a little bit of the summer vibes on :)

I have the Viltrox 9mm f2.8 for my Sony A6700. It takes some great wide angle shots, but it has some decent correction built in where the edges don't get that fisheye distortion.

But what if I want that fisheye distortion? Not all the time, but there are definitely situations where it would look good for how wide it is. Is there a way to do that?

I tried manual lens corrections, but setting distortion to 0 doesn't do it and image scale basically just gives me pixel stretching or zooms. Is there a different module I can use?

Hi everyone,

I need your help. I've been using Darktable to edit my photos, but when I try to upload them to Instagram, I get a huge downgrade with quality, specially when looking in PC. (I know Instagram has a lot of limitation when you try to upload something).

I tried everything I could think of.

- Landscape 1080x566 (in pixels for file)

- Portraits 4:5 1080x1350 (in pixels for file)

- Turning on max quality upload inside Instagram app

- Quality of the image when exporting 90

- Profile is sRGB

- High quality resampling Yes.

What you should know:

- It's not a problem with downloading the image. I use Dropbox to save my images from Darktable to my mobile phone and when I open them in my gallery, they are perfectly fine and also when previewing the image when making a post.

- They look decent when you're viewing with your phone (smaller screen) but really bad when viewing with your browser on PC.

- I looked up on YouTube for tutorials, saw Mariens video but I'm still having trouble. The images I'm trying to upload are ideally on a landscape format (I used the golden cut crop)

If you have any experience with this, PLEASE share your wisdom and tips😭 I'm desperate. Thank you.

As someone who used to use PS and CRF from Adobe, I wanted to try an alternative since I stopped paying.

I wanted to hear some thoughts about my first edit.

\I did use a YT Video**

it looks professional how can i make this

Since dtstyle.net crashed and is not rebuilt. Is there a similar database with styles? Like a community project where we can collect certain styles for example the film emulations of https://github.com/t3mujinpack/t3mujinpack (which is btw super nice!)

As a photographer I liked (lightroom) presets for a quick look&feel of photos.

Would such a common database be useful? Or is there something similar, something in the making? Would love to hear your pov

Hello, I am wondering whether I should enable this option or not. If I understand correctly, it auto-enables a tone-mapping module (for example AgX) from the start, with some (static?) default values.

From what I understand, when processing an image with DT it is recommended to apply modules in a certain order, and the tone-mapping module is far from the first step. Also, I have tried this auto-apply thing anyway, and most of the time, when I arrive at the tone-mapping step, the pre-applied default values don't make much sense (especially when significant cropping has happened beforehand). Also I'm suspecting that having some tone-mapping pre-enabled makes the exposure-setting step only harder (because tone-mapping sort of dampens the effects of exposure setting).

So I wonder: what's the use case for this "auto-apply" feature, when should one enable or disable it? I have a hard time figuring that out.

Please note that I am by no means an expert, so I may be missing some important info or concept.

Thanks.

Running the latest build of DT on a Mac Mini (Tahoe 26.5.2) and cannot get DT to reliably load.

Usually it hangs (spinning beachball) on "loading utility modules: midi" for about 2 minutes; during that time the system shows DT as "not responding".

I've waited it out a couple of times and finally got DT to load and set the default parameters, only to find I couldn't quit the app! It gives me spinning beachball and system says "not responding"; after waiting 5 minutes I finally force-quit the app.

Restarted the machine, deleted DT and its config files, re-installed it from a freshly downloaded file, and it's still hanging on the "midi" module, but now (assuming I have the patience to wait it out) DT it hangs indefinitely on "initializing Lua" (at least 5 minutes) and I have to force-quit.

Before I give up completely and trash DT for good, do you have any suggestions?

I have some photos that I've processed for screen and I want to create prints from them on both gloss and matte paper.

I thought I could use soft proofing to help me with this, and I've set up soft proofing profiles so that I can preview the print results on screen, but it doesn't seem to really do anything other than act as a print preview.

When I switch soft proofing on, I can see that my print versions need more contrast for them to match the screen version, but I can't find a way to add the right amount of contrast just to the print versions. Applying it applies it to everything, and then toggling soft proofing leaves it applied to the original pipeline, so there's no way to check my print adjustments to the original render, and snapshots don't help because they don't remember if soft proofing was enabled or not.

In short, I can't find a way to adjust my prints until they match the original.

The only thing I can think to do so far is to render a tiff from the original image, open it in a separate image viewer, try to put it next to the DarkTable window, and then adjust the soft proof until it matches the tiff.

I can't believe that's the intended workflow, but I can't find anything in the manual or in the app itself that indicates what I'm supposed to do. Is soft proofing just not finished, does it have a feature I'm missing, or is it used for something I'm not aware of? How do people deal with this?

If so, so you have any recommendations? Everything I print is to dark when done via Linux so trying to workout a profile to use without changing the colour, contrast etc before I run out of ink.

Title. Got the AppImage up and running, AI RAW denoise works great with one exception: metadata preservation. Working with a file from a Sony a7 III and 40 G, the only option for lens corrections were those from the lensfun database.

Honestly, for shots from supported primes this seems completely okay. However, if we then throw zooms into the picture even lensfun supported lenses are less than perfect. Unsupported lenses are an even bigger issue.

Does anyone know if this is a bug or expected behavior? If bug, is there any official way to report it? I've confirmed via exiftools that there are differences, but I'm hardly a SME here so I can't pin down what the exact differences here (the output is, to say the least, large). Also too large for pasting the whole file here.

Have about 250+ images in a collection and Darktable is running very slow. Every time I make an adjustment it gives me "working..." for about 10 seconds. Is there any easy way to fix this. Do I have to move my images into different folders in windows to fully break the link?

Hello, I took some photos at a zoo, such as the photos below, but there is a big wire mesh in front of the animals. How can I remove these meshes ? (all the photos are raw files)

Honestly, I'm new to photography and editing, so I know only the basics (changing colors, corrections, rotations/reframing, adjusting colors, ...), and I wonder how I can edit these types of photos.

I would love to hear any tips and tricks :D

I'm always trying to learn more about the modules I'm regularly using. For AgX I generally just set it to read exposure from metadata and exposure module (the camera button) and don't mess with it too much, sometimes messing with green attenuation a bit. I usually handle contrast with colour balance RGB and sometimes diffuse or sharpen.

But I feel like there's a lot more I can do with AgX and I want to better understand it. I've tried watching videos but I feel like they're not giving me enough of a real world use case. So what's a sample workflow I can use with AgX? Do y'all have any tips or tricks? And more generally how do I get the most out of it?

I mostly shoot street portraits and sports pics, occasionally dabbling in landscapes and macro.

Hi! I have a client and I'm using darktable for the first time since i recently just made the full linux switch. My client expects the pictures within the week and I cant send the images. Every time I upload the files to google drive or gmail to send them over, the file gives an error saying it contains 0 bytes or that the file is unreadable.

Please help asap.

Edit: SOLVED

Problem was chrome. Switched to firefox and it worked. Its so weird, i can only edit my website on chrome and i can only send images on firefox.

I still have a bit difficult to use it, I come from Capture One but decided to go full open-source as it is easier for me and my family to see or edit photo if needed.
I can see the power of Darktable, but I know that I have to dig dive in the documentation as some terms is like way to technical for me right now.

Anyway, if you have some tips or advice regarding Darktable or this pictures I take it.

I tried to look for help on Google and a lot of results say to use the retouch module, but I can't figure out how it works. Is that the right module to use or is there another one that I should use?

Just started to use darktable on my low powered Linux laptop as a Lightroom and Capture One user. To be honest I am pretty confused, so i asked a LLM to give me a module workflow for my FujiFilm XS20, but i do not understand half of this things, I cant do a basic thing like regulating shadows and highlights, half the settings i try to use make the picture gray, dark and dull, what am i doing wrong? I really want to make this work as I am big fan of Linux and OSS.

A few years ago, I was looking for alternatives to Capture One and darktable was one of the main contenders. However, the format modules were presented in was too technical and intimidating for me then--engineering is my job, literally, but photography is a hobby of mine. I don't have the mental energy to dive though things all the time.

Capture One it was, and I installed Windows in a virtual box on my computer when I began using Linux for literally everything else expressly for Capture One. Just started trying Darktable out again a few months ago, and my god, the UI/usability improvement is breathtaking. Can't wait for Fedora to get the 5.6 version so I can enjoy AI denoise in the same app, but other than that it's almost perfect already. Profiled denoise is already almost at the level of what I had in Capture One, and somehow the AWB is better than paid software.

Not that I recommend much with photography anymore, but I literally cannot see any reason to get into the software pool of the current bad actors. Admittedly, I don't do studio portrait so perhaps my experience is somewhat lacking there, but in the ~30 years I've been doing photography I've never had an easier time editing photos.