darktable ep 001 (remaster) – Migrating from LR, and basic preferences
hi and welcome to the first in what will hopefully be a long and instructive line on how to use dark table my name’s Bruce Williams you can find me at Bruce Williams photography comm and on instagram at bruce underscore williams underscore photography as I’m recording this it’s July 2018 and I’ve been using darktable now for really short of two years so I don’t claim to know everything about it but I’ve had some time to get familiar with it and I loved it like a lot of beings I spent many years with adobe lightroom and there was a lot to like about lightroom but what I didn’t like was Adobe’s pricing pattern and the course it was incessantly going to go in cost and I so I was looking for something else and I long thought about linux as operating systems and one of the key hastened lumps if you like to me converting from Windows to Linux was whether or not I got to find a concoction comparable to Lightroom and when I discovered darktable I was utterly blown away so one of the key things of course was once you’ve obtained a product that was comparable to Lightroom was can I generate all the work that I’ve done in Lightroom across to whatever this new piece of software happened to be in this case darktable and it turns out that yes you can so in this firstly video I’m just going to run through some of the preferences for darktable I’m currently running on Linux Mint which is a version of Ubuntu but darktable is also available on Mac and has recently been ported to Windows as well so all of my instructional things will be centered on Linux but hopefully a lot of it will move to the other two scaffolds okay so let’s take a dive into the Preferences of darktable we’re currently on version two top four top four now when you first start darktable you’ll are still in the dawn table consider now if you’ve come from Lightroom this is a very similar layout you’ve got bodies on the left and right side and a slog domain in the middle pipes will will default to what Lightroom useds would call gridview where all of your personas appear as thumbnails if you want to see a single image by itself left click once on the image press the Z key and you’ll get a full screen sidebars removed examine of that idol now it’ll only stay there as long as you harboured the Zed key if you want it to stay sticky use the shift modifier and that they are able to then keep it coming in single persona judgment and you can then use your left and right arrows to toggle through the filmstrip of however numerous portraits you’re currently looking at if you want to get out of this single portrait belief back into a grid sentiment simply affected the Zed key and you’re back into grid notion but I said that we were going to focus on some advantages for this video so let’s do that up in the top right hand corner of the center section of the UI you’ll envision the little cog icon for show world preferences when you delivering this up you’ll see that there are five invoices GUI options core alternatives seminar options shortcuts and presets looking at the GUI options don’t need to run through all of these because a good deal of it you’ll work out for yourself the thicknes of the two sides committees in pixels I’m working on a full HD monitor 1920 by 1080 I actually have two of them but I’m only captivating one screen for these videos I’ve found that 350 pixels for the two sides committees is a good size for me but feel free to experimentation with that if if that’s either too much or too little for you don’t utilize embedded preview JPEG but half sizing raw so what that necessitates is if you click that box instead of using the camera’s JPEG render of your raw register darktable will actually use a scaled halfsize version of the raw file so if for example you determined your camera to shoot raw and JPEG and you gave your JPEGs to come out as black and white and high differ because maybe you were doing a film noir shoot I don’t know your RAW enters are going to have all of their color information but the JPEG would be black why so clicking this option will enable darktable to use the roar as the preview with all of its color information rather than precisely the JPEG that the camera developed towards the bottom there are two alternatives now expand a single illumination counter module at a time and expand a single darkroom module at a time now if you’ve come across from Lightroom you’re probably previously familiar with light rooms solo mode which in Lightroom you could access by freedom clicking on the header for each module and selecting solo state and what that does in Lightroom and what this option does in night table is mean that whenever you click on one of these modules either on the left or the right-hand side of the UI whether you’re in light counter or any of the other areas of dark table simply that module will be expanded whatever other module you were working in prior will become crumbled so if I select geotagging this exportation adopted module will get crumbled like so so that’s a handy one to have activated border around image in darkroom state I’ve change this quite low down to about 5 pixels what it does in the darkroom module is create this little 5 pixel mete across the top and foot of the image if this was a much more panoramic cultivate of an idol that 5 pixel borderline would be relevant to the left and right sides just as an example but go to the crop module and I run give me 2 1 and expand this out double click you can see now that that 5 pixel perimeter is relevant down the left and the right sides of the image so that border around image in darkroom procedure will precisely allow you to choose how much of a border you have between your portrait and the other parts of the UI the second last option here rating an likenes 1 stellar twice will not zero out the so by default keys one two three four and five above your QWERTY keys on your keyboard will name a sun rating of one to five stellars for an image or a string of images and if you’ve rated an epitome one ace and you press the 1 key again darktable assumes that you want no wizard rating on that portrait so that’s the default behavior let’s say you have an image rated 5 virtuosoes and you suddenly decide no I don’t want two wizard rating on it at all you can punched the 1 key once and that will become a 1 ace rating thumped it a second time and the ace rating is removed if you don’t want that demeanor you can tick that box so that it will just assume okay you require a one adept rating even though you’ve pulped the one key multiple times moving on to core options halfway down you’ll see right side car file for each likenes now this is the bit that I recall Lightroom customers will be most provoked about Lightroom by default supermarkets all the things that you’ve done to an persona whether it’s adept ratings color ratings tags keywords any other kind of metadata and all of the developing that you’ve done on your personas in what it calls an LR CAT file a Lightroom catalog file and it’s essentially a database register that lives on your method and if anything ever happens to that Lightroom catalog file and it gets debased you’re toast you’ve lost everything unless you’ve got a backup nonetheless there is an option in Lightroom that is not enabled by default why I don’t know but anyway such as it is in Lightroom there is an option very similar to this that says write all the metadata to sidecar XMP files so if you want to leave Lightroom and come to dark table what you can do is enable that alternative in Lightroom then go to your grid examine and adopt the option that says judgment my entire library drive restrict a to select all of your portraits and then exit ctrl s it’s a save right that’s that’s the standard default save keyboard shortcut for just about every app in existence and what that will do is turn away through your entire persona catalog and write everything that you’ve done all your keywords or your starring ratings all your colouring ratings all you’re developing tweaks for every single image to an individual XMP sidecar file right alongside where the likenes datum lived on your plan just as an example I will bring up my enter browser I’ll go to my photos Drive become photos proceed no let’s just go personal jobs let’s go 2018 let’s go whatever was last and there we can see a single persona and beside it a file with the portrait appoint the image extension and speck exmp and that’s the record that darktable has created for that particular raw folder now if I go back to something like now you will see that there are two XMP files beside all of my portraits now the versions of the XMP file which say that they are a text file and just have the portrait honour and dot XMP they’re the versions that were created by Lightroom but when I imported these idols into darktable darktable speaks the Lightroom version of the XMP file and then composes its own version of the XMP file which includes the folder postponement for the type of file that was in my occasion a RW for Sony RAW enters so I could if I wanted to go through my method discovery all of these text files that don’t have the document increase in the file honour and I could delete them all because I’m not going back to Lightroom it’s on my to do roll okay so that’s the beautiful percentage if you want to come from Lightroom across to dark table follow those steps I mentioned earlier and all of these XMP files will appear alongside your existing personas and you will then be able to import all of your idols into dark table and dark counter will read all of the metadata all of the keywords all the calls all the developing that you did in Lightroom and it’ll be accessible through dark counter now it’s not without its little hiccups here and there but it’s generally pretty good I would say 98% of the work that I had done over the years that I employed Lightroom I was able to access through dark counter there was maybe 2% that I had to tweak so it’s pretty good okay moving on to session alternatives this is where you tell darktable the locate index appointing pattern so essentially where’s the master folder that all of your photos are going to live in for me its media lash USR slash butters regional/ photos/ kinfolk photos now one minor provocation with that table is that this particular field doesn’t have a browse button so if you want to import images into a different folder you’ve either got a write it in manually here or you need to go to your record browser catch the folder that wishes to and grasp that itinerary ctrl C to simulate climb back over here and paste it in I choice the same addresses what was already there but you get the idea so it’s a little bit painful in that respect if you was necessary to segregate your epitomes up into different folders now you might be thinking why would I want to break all of my likeness up into separate folders well if like me you’re doing all different types of shoots you might want to keep them all separated like I don’t want their own families photos desegregated in with my commercial slog so that’s one intellect then you’ve got the sub index identifying blueprint personally I prefer time and then inside a year folder a year month and day folder the elegance of this is that even if you’re importing likeness off a remembering card periods weeks or months after they were shot that folder start process will be based on the exif data supplied by the likeness concerned so darktable will go and create folders for each day on which you took likeness and gave the relevant likeness into each of those folders you’ve then got a file appoint structure personally I don’t rename my data but if you want to you certainly could use a chore word in this field for professional photographers and particularly for those on Linux I would highly highly recommend you go and search for a piece of software announced rapid photo downloader it does this in a much nicer route it has a nice GUI and it’s a lot easier and simpler to exactly point to a folder and extend this is where I demand my likeness to be imported to it does mean it becomes a twostep process because you use rapid photo downloader to download the epitomes from your remembrance card to your hard drive and you then import from that folder those personas into darktable but it’s a pretty quick process so I truly don’t mind make it then we’ve got shortcuts as you spend more time with darktable you’ll realize that there are certain things you do a lot that you want to assign a keyboard shortcut for so you can go into any of these four options now the world shortcuts the image its operation and the modules or the views find the option that you want and blame a keyboard shortcut and it’s as simple as scrolling down through the menu finding the option you want double clicking on it and you’ll meet press key combination to remap you then use whatever keyboard shortcut you want to assign to that particular office and then exactly sounds away from it and it will be there so if I wanted to say reset in module constants let’s attain that switch prowes so go to control R and that is now designated just like that alright I’m not going to worry about presets and we will leave it there for this particular video I’m going to aim to get one of these videos out every week love to hear your thoughts or feedback either in the comments or you can email me through my website and we’ll talk to you soon
