Who here uses Darktable?

I know its not a widely used package, but there were a rew people on dpreview.com using it. So, who here uses it as their primary editor?

Me - have done for a long time.

Me. I like it a lot.

I use it for all my post 2019 images. Earlier images edited with legacy LR 6.14 perpetual licence.

Yes, l use it, it's very under-rated and extremely powerful. The masking flexibility in particular is second to none IMHO.

I confess.

Switched to it from Capture One this year. Bit of a leaning curve but once I watched a few tutorial videos and focused in on a few key modules and worked out a basic workflow I find it fairly simple and quick to use...and IMO I'm getting better images from it that I did with Capture One. It also integrates reasonably well with digikam which I use for my DAM.

I do. I check out other raw developers from time to time, but I invariably come back to darktable.

There's just something about the flexibility of the open pipeline, the Lua scripting, and all the deep tool parameters that I enjoy tremendously. And its development is moving at a crazy pace, which is quite the breath of fresh air, compared to most other raw developers.

It's nice to see that there are a few others here that I can reach out to for help. I use it badly and, for lack of time, struggle to learn more.

The key (IMO) to using competently is to decide on a workflow and simplify the UI accordingly. It helps keep you in a routine and avoiding the temptation to go out and experiment with those 30 modules you probably will never need. It's a lot easier to get reliable results from a steady workflow than by hopping around trying to use every feature (many of which are merely alternative means of doing the same thing).

I use these tools on just about every image:

crop, rotate & perspective, lens correction,
one of Filmic/Sigmoid/LUT, color calibration/white balance,
exposure,
color balance RGB, RGB curve, graduated density,
sharpen, denoise (profiled),
retouch, framing

I have a few others in reserve for images that need them.

I've set the UI up to hide everything else.

I'm really trying to, and I'm gradually learning it.
Unfortunately most days it's hard to find time. It's much quicker to breeze OOC JPGs into the DAM.
I am trying, though.

Boris Hajdukovic makes some very useful Darktable tutorials on Youtube. This video here is a must watch imo.

Sort of.

There are many ways of achieving much the same thing in dt. The main problem with Boris' tutorials (which you can see if you watch them) is that he often make real time changes, reverses and does it a different way. I'm never completely convinced he always knows why what he does work. It's more like he did something and it worked so he keeps doing it. And that is the primary issue with dt. Lot of tweaks in different modules will get you to the same place. So you have to figure out what works for you and keep it simple, else you will be tweaking in 50 different modules in a different way in every image.

The module I find particularly useful is the color balance RGB. Despite the name, I use it as an all in one for boosting contrast and saturation and as a highlights/midtones/shadows tool. All in the Master tab. And that usage doesn't seem to be in tutorials!

It's my #1. But I probably use a very small fraction of what it can do. Mainly because I don't know what I'm doing most of the time.

Glad I saw this thread. Just downloaded it. I like it.

How have you come to this conclusion?
Cheers!
Jerry

Because there are new significant features developed, like, monthly. C1 didn't have a feature to impact me in years, DxO has maybe one or two a year. Lightroom has picked up the pace lately with its AI masking, but it's still very slow.

What goes to show? Version 4.4.0 is out now, and the portablised distro for Windows of it made it to the flock at portableapps.com/apps on the 28th of June.

v4.4 change to the brush tool is good. Previously I never used it because the mask was opaque which made it difficult to see what you were doing. Now they have made the mask semi opaque and you can see what you are painting over. Good move.

Darktable uses the algorithms and data of the external lensfun library; the quality of correction for a given lens depends on the user-contributed measurements that go into their database. Given that lens distortion correction algorithms are pretty straightforward (well, to math people, anyway...), it's the input data that determines the quality of correction for a given algorithm.

Lensfun also has the Adobe distortion model available as an option, and tools to convert Adobe LCP profiles to their XML format, so it can be as "good" as that if an Adobe LCP is available for the lens. Note that this capability is dependent on the version of lensfun incorporated; 0.3.2 doesn't have it.

The real beauty of lensfun is that, if you don't like the available corrections for your particular lens, you can do the measurements and make your own correction entry. It's not that hard, capture an image through the lens of some known straight lines for each focal length, mangle it with hugin (stitching/stacking software with the requisite utilities), and ta-da, distortion correction data. I wish camera color profiles were that easy...

Edit: lensfun.github.io/