Darktable is excellent at finding out what’s worth processing and what’s not worth processing. Darktable gives you the tools.

One of these tool is the Focus Peaking Mode. It works in both the Lighttable and the Darkroom.

Pressing “Ctrl-Shift-F” will enable the focus peaking mode.

The Focus Peaking mode uses a “heat map”

The yellow, green and blue …

Continue reading

Select all the images in the lighttable, then X to enter the culling and X (again) to exit the culling mode and go back to the Lighttable.

To check for sharpness, I usually set the image count to just one

It’s possible to zoom and pan to compare in the images in the culling mode.

• The maximum number of images in the culling mode is 25 when in fixed …

Continue reading

Normally, Chihuahuas bark. They bark a lot. It’s a small dog then it’s small barks but they are annoying barks.

This Chihuahua didn’t bark, she howled and howled and howled. She kept on because her owner wasn’t acknowledging that there was a big danger coming (aka: me taking her photo). This is proof that the standard recommendation to deal with dogs howling …

Continue reading

Darktable does local edits, but not like Adobe’s Lightroom. It does them just like Adobe’s Photoshop, by layers.

1. The same module can be used multiple times. How many times? That’s a good question. On one image, I have used 12 times the same exposure module. And then there were all the other modules…
2. Click on the “new instance” (the arrow) and it will create a duplicate of …

Continue reading

If you look closely, you will notice that the $149 wedding photo is a singular. Yes, the $149 is for a single wedding photo. The photographer will come to the wedding and each photo chosen by the family will be $149. It does add up very quickly. This $149 photo is an 8x10 inch print plus the digital image.

It doesn’t include any album or any …

Continue reading

Q: Is Darktable a free alternative to Lightroom?

Yes and no. How’s that’s for a waffle?

• Free: Yes, you can download it from https://darktable.org. It’s free.
• Is it an alternative to Lightroom? Yes and no. Darktable will process your images and even do a better job at it than Adobe’s Lightroom. Then why the no? Because it’s very different than Lightroom. Lightroom concentrates …

Continue reading

Most often when people walk with their dogs, they walk in sync. This means that if the person’s left foot is forward, the dog’s left front leg will be forward.

This only works when the dog is walking with the owner, like in this photo. This almost never works when the dogs are on ‘those fishing lines’, that’s these leashes that …

Continue reading

Darktable 3.x is a radical departure Darktable 2.x. New modules, old modules that are not recommended anymore. A whole bunch of modules from Darktable 2.x should even be avoided in Darktable 3.x.

The workflow in Darktable 3.x has been significantly simplified. Here’s the new workflow.

1. Exposure
2. White balance
3. Color balance
4. Filmic RGB

These 4 modules will do between 80% and 90% of all the …

Continue reading