lundi 5 janvier 2015

Darktable tests

Tried the version that comes with my current Ubuntu distro: 1.4.2

So far I've used


I liked

  • the database (keep these RAW files organized!)
  • the long list of powerful modules (though I only used the most basic ones so far)
  • the interface in general (lighttable/darkroom)
  • the metadata editor (IPTC tab) to set description title and keywords, save templates and apply them later, the tag list and its compatibility with Shotwell hierarchical tags (tag1|tag2|tag3), the starring.  I was able to produce JPEGs from within Darktable and import them into Shotwell without additional manual metadata tweaking.  Pretty nice on that front.

What I initially disliked but found a solution/workaround for

  • DT doesn't (yet) support my Olympus XZ-10 RAW format (ORF) and my whishlisted OMD E-M10.  Fortunately this converts easily to DNG thanks to the kiwi DNG converter.  The resulting DNG file works fine with DT 1.4.2 so this is a minor concern for me now.
  • the metadata editor can only be used from the lighttable, not from the darkroom view
  • I found no key shortcut to "reject" (move to thrash) a photo from the darkroom view.  Clicking on the film strip works though. Then I found I could stay in lighttable view, make the thumbnails bigger (even display them one by one) where the shortcuts work (r, 12345, left/right, etc...) and this is much faster for preselecting images (compared to the darkroom view).
  • I initially had a serious problem while testing with my DNG raw files from the Pentax K-r and also the DNG-converted ORFs from the XZ-10 (see above):  during editing everything looks fine but after exporting the JPG these photos are way too dark (like 1-3 stops darker after export).  I thought it might be due to Pentax's shadow/highlight in-camera settings.  I'll have to check that out.  The XZ-10 problems might be due to the DNG converter, or just the fact that this camera is not supported yet.It turns out that I somehow had an exotic color profile selected as the export profile (in the export box).  Turned this back to sRGB and it was fine.  The impending profile is reported by ExifTool as "Profile Description : Darktable linear Rec709 RGB".

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