Darktable and new negadoctor plugin

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.

Rather than continue to scatter vague references here and there, it was suggested I create a thread for it.

So first, https://www.darktable.org/ is an open source package that started as an alternative to Lightroom. It's really designed for RAW development, batch processing, organization, culling, proofing, etc.. It's more Lightroom than Photoshop. It's also "non-destructive"-- all of your edits, adjustments, crops, rotates, etc., are stored in metadata files, rather than changing your source image. This also makes it easy to apply those edits to other photos.

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.

negadoctor seeks to fill the same role as Negative Lab Pro-- invert and correct for color cast. Automatic works pretty well, but you can also tweak in semi-automatic or full manual mode.

This video (and following videos) does a nice job introducing Darktable:


And this one covers negadoctor:

Rant deleted about how annoying it is to have to have the latest version of Ubuntu to use stuff like this -- apparently they or someone in the Ubuntu community have packaged 3.2.1 as a Snap, letting me use the latest version on Ubuntu 16.04 even though Darktable group doesn't build for Ubuntu older than 18.04 due to missing required packages. The beauty of Snap is that it lets the required packages be bundled with the app installer; the down side is that it uses virtualization sandboxes (similar to Wine "bottles") that make it difficult to find a program's config files for fine detail tweaking that might not be supported in the menus.

Now I need to start learning an entirely new interface and workflow (never used Lightroom). I can already see how helpful it'll be for indexing and searching my image files, though...

Rant understood. 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).

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. That's a bit too... unstructured... for me. You're expected to be a competent linux admin (which I am), but things can occasionally break unexpectedly.

Manjaro takes the excellent distro, and wraps it in a user-friendly installer, and pushed out "curated" updates on a regular basis-- to everything. 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.. If you're linux savvy, it's not a bad choice. It's not exactly designed for linux novices, though.

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. So I am somewhat familiar with its user interface.

Upgraded to the latest version and played with negadoctor for a couple of hours. I have two comments to make:

• Negadoctor is much faster than manual inversion if you want quick & dirty results. 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.
  
• But it takes about the same time (per frame) as the manual inversion to produce a result that makes me happy.

The latter criticism is not really about negadoctor, it is about the sad state of UX in Darktable. They do not follow established UI conventions of image editing software, do not offer sensible defaults and the UI is not scalable. 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. 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.

Everything 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. (WTF, who uses that?) But for the knowledgeable there's a separate orientation tool!

The curves tool (one of the two!) has 5+ settings but the one everyone needs, i.e. the R/G/B switch for per-channel adjustments, cannot be found (I wouldn't be surprised that there's a 3rd curves tool hidden somewhere)

My list of WTF Darktable moments is long. IMO they should throw away 80% of their features and focus on making the remaining 20% actually usable.

In many ways, it suffers from the same issues as GIMP-- the functionality is there, but it's built from the perspective of a programmer, rather than a user. The benefits are that you can easily create modules to extend the functionality, it's very easy to copy your recipes from one image to another (or a group of images), and you can create your own group of useful modules.

All of that is very cool. But difficult to navigate, especially if you aren't familiar with how the programmers expect the application to be used. *sigh*

The lack of context-aware mouse controls is, as you've noted, a right royal pain in the keister.

The "selection" pane over on the left, which allows you to select by roll, by path, by metadata attribute-- is all well and good, but has become increasingly complicated since early Darktable days, and frequently makes me want to pull my hair out.

So I agree, the UX is not the greatest.

Also, look for the "RGB Cuves" module-- by default, it's "RGB linked", but you can set it to "RGB Independent".

Thank you, I will. BTW I do not have any major issues with GIMP. It's opinionated and different enough, but it's consistent in how different it always is. It's not my favorite, but if someone invests time in learning "GIMP ways", he should expect to be efficient just like with any other image editing program.

Hi, new user here. I'm a huge Darktable fan. Although it doesn't have many editing features, it is an extremely powerful processing program. I downloaded Luminar 3 when they gave it away last year and have used it enough to know it's fun and has decent editing features, and so reserved two 'seats' for the new AI version. After learning their DAM and filing system leaves much to be desired I got a refund, then started poking around with a few others. I downloaded Photopad, nope, Aftershot Pro 3, nope, and others, I think On 1 and DxO, just looking for something for basic edits beyond DT's design features.

Along the way I learned that GIMP works hand in hand with DT. I suppose this isn't new information for most of you, but I had no idea. I've had GIMP on my computer for years but never used it, I dislike all the Paint Shop type features that just seem to clog up the menu bars. Still, I am going to dig in and see if taken together the two programs scratch my itch.

Darktable can be daunting when you first get started at it. Now that I'm used to it it feels like home, the way Photoshop did 'back in the day'. The newer modules like Tone Equalizer and the updated Filmic allow you to turn off the base curve for your camera and get a better result, plus no need to wait for them to develop new profiles in their typical glacier-like speed. Unless there's been one in a new release there never was a profile for my Panasonic G9.

Masking is pretty powerful, the combination of parametric and drawn is my go-to. Although, if I had a wish list it would be for a typical straight forward dodge/burn module. My wish list for GIMP would be to make it more photo-centric.