Darktable plugin7/6/2023 Everything is crammed into that annoying sidebar accordeon and most adjustments are always done via a microscopic dropdown, or a skinny slider with insane ranges from zero to "nuclear infinity", resulting in a useful adjustment range (white balance, for example) using just a few pixels.Įverything is missing something major, or it's hidden in some dark corner: the white balance tool doesn't have a picker, crop & rotate uses a slider to rotate which is impossible to set to 90 degrees, due to its hyper-sensitivity you always end up with 89.4 or 90.5 as if fraction of a degree matters. The basic digital-only edits (crop, rotate, levels, color balance, exposure compensation and white balance) are a PITA as there's no main menu, no toolbar, no toolbox, and the right mouse button never does anything useful. They do not follow established UI conventions of image editing software, do not offer sensible defaults and the UI is not scalable. The latter criticism is not really about negadoctor, it is about the sad state of UX in Darktable. But it takes about the same time (per frame) as the manual inversion to produce a result that makes me happy.It's super impressive for quickly reviewing a 36exp roll: convert one frame, make a few tweaks, copy-paste to the rest of the roll. Negadoctor is much faster than manual inversion if you want quick & dirty results.Upgraded to the latest version and played with negadoctor for a couple of hours. So I am somewhat familiar with its user interface. I've been using Darktable on and off, usually to play with RAW files downloaded from the Internet, as my copy of Capture One works only with Fuji cameras. It's not exactly designed for linux novices, though. If you're linux savvy, it's not a bad choice. It's what's called a "rolling release"- I haven't done an official upgrade since I installed this system 3 years ago, but that was version 17, and I'm now running version 20 with newer kernel, drivers, packages, etc. Manjaro takes the excellent distro, and wraps it in a user-friendly installer, and pushed out "curated" updates on a regular basis- to everything. You're expected to be a competent linux admin (which I am), but things can occasionally break unexpectedly. I switched over to a distro called Manjaro some time ago- it's based on Arch, which is a great linux distro, but since they emphasize "choice", they don't want to crimp your style by providing things like an "installer"- for Arch, you boot from a disk, and manually partition your system, and install your choice of packages. Red Hat established a pattern that Debian followed, and since Ubuntu is based on Debian, they've followed as well- "stable" means "slow to update", and dependencies have never been handled well by Unix, Linux or Windows (or OS/2, if you want to go there). This video (and following videos) does a nice job introducing Darktable: Automatic works pretty well, but you can also tweak in semi-automatic or full manual mode. Negadoctor seeks to fill the same role as Negative Lab Pro- invert and correct for color cast. It's available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux- while it's part of most linux distributions, be aware you need at least version 3.1 (3.2 is better) for the negadoctor plugin, and many distributions lag behind the latest and greatest by a few months. This also makes it easy to apply those edits to other photos. It's also "non-destructive"- all of your edits, adjustments, crops, rotates, etc., are stored in metadata files, rather than changing your source image. It's really designed for RAW development, batch processing, organization, culling, proofing, etc. So first, is an open source package that started as an alternative to Lightroom. Rather than continue to scatter vague references here and there, it was suggested I create a thread for it. I've mentioned Darktable a few times as a promising piece of open source software, especially with the recent addition of a module called 'negadoctor', which does a pretty fair job of inverting color film negatives.
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