Darktable: Focus Peak Mode

category darktable • hashtags lighttable, darkroom • 1 min read

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”

focus peaking in the lighttable

Focus Peaking in the Lighttable

focus peaking in the darkroom

Focus Peaking in the Darkroom

The yellow, green and blue …


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Darktable: Darkroom Local Edits

category darktable • hashtags darkroom • 1 min read

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 …

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Darktable vs. Lightroom Q&A (part 1)

category darktable • hashtags darkroom • 3 min read

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 …

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Darktable: Recommended Workflow

category darktable • hashtags darkroom • 1 min read

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 …


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Darktable: Modules to Avoid

category darktable • hashtags darkroom • 2 min read

With the Darktable 3.x serie, the developers have introduced a whole bunch of new concepts, including:

  • scene referred processing
  • display referred processing
  • LAB space vs Linear RGB processing

All these things have implications about which module to use or not.

Darktable 3.x is compatible with Darktable 2.x. All the Darktable 2.x modules are still there. This doesn’t mean that you should be using them. The …


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Darktable: Darkroom Overlays

category darktable • hashtags darkroom • 1 min read

Darktable, by default, has a very simple and view when processing the image in the Darkroom of Darktable.

default information in the darkroom

Default Information in the Darkroom

As you can see, it’s very sparse and very simple. My main problem is that the Darkroom does not show the filename/image name. I need to see it at all times. That information is available in the left panel through the image information, but that …


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