http://www.darktable.org
If you’re a photographer dealing with many images at a time, darktable may well strike the perfect compromise between image browsing and picture enhancement.
According to the Web site:
darktable is an open-source photography work-flow application and RAW
developer—a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
...darktable tries to fill the gap between the excellent existing free raw converters and image management tools (such as UFRaw, Rawstudio, F-Spot, digiKam and Shotwell). It focuses on the work flow to make it easier for the photographer to handle quickly the thousands of images a day of shooting can produce. It’s also one of the very few FOSS projects able to do tethered shooting.
Installation Binary packages are provided for Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE
and Arch Linux, as well as a Portage package for Gentoo/Funtoo. There also is an experimental version for Mac OS X, and Windows also is a possibility, but amusingly, the Web site notes that the community for this commercial distribution hasn’t made a native version yet, so it recommends installing Ubuntu instead.
In terms of library requirements, the Web site gives the following list of darktable: a mass-photo browser with a strikingly good interface.
darktable with all the tools visible and ready for editing.
packages: libsqlite3, libjpeg, libpng, libraw (supplied), rawspeed (supplied), gtk+-2, cairo, libglade2, lcms2, exiv2, gconf, tiff, curl, gphoto2, dbus-glib, gnome-keyring, fop and openexr.
If you want to build from source, the Web site is incredibly helpful, with all the instructions you’ll need, in great detail. Nevertheless, I include a simplified version here.
Download the latest tarball, extract it, and open a terminal in the new folder.
Enter the command:
$ ./build.sh
Once the building has finished, change into the build folder with:
$ cd build
Now, to install darktable, if your distro uses sudo (such as Ubuntu), enter:
If your distro uses root, enter:
$ su
# make install
Note that on my machine, it installed darktable to /opt by default, in which case, at the command line, it may be required that you enter:
$ /opt/darktable/bin/darktable
For other users (especially with
binaries), you can run the program with this command:
$ darktable
Usage As soon as you’re inside the main window, you’ll notice an arrow at each edge: this is for expanding and collapsing panes within the window. You may
wonder why I’m starting with something so mundane, but this function actually is incredibly useful (more on that later).
Working within darktable, the interface is split into three view modes: lighttable (browsing), darkroom (editing) and camera tethering (a clever means of interacting with a camera). I don’t really have the word space or equipment to explore the tethering mode, so I primarily cover the lighttable view and the darkroom view here.
lighttable When the program starts, you should find yourself in lighttable darktable with the tools cleared away to enjoy the
picture in peace. Yes, those are my drums.
well as do things like add tags and color labels. Keep in mind that its shortcut key is L, as darktable’s design has been based around switching between the lighttable and darkroom views, easily and rapidly.
The first order of business is to import some images with the import field on the left.
Do you see a field? If not, remember the arrows that I mentioned at the start of this section. Click on the left arrow, and the import section will expand and collapse.
Collapsing one section can be very useful, as it lets the actual picture section grow much larger. With the import section expanded, import some pictures (you have the choice of a singular image, a folder or to scan for devices), and they will appear in the main section in the middle.
While you’re still here, try expanding and collapsing all four arrows, and see how it affects the rest of the window. With all the fields collapsed, the image section gets center stage and takes up the whole window, and with all the fields expanded, you have a great many tools available, but your images are reduced to small, insignificant squashy things. With just a small number of clicks, this clever GUI design allows you to switch between beautiful Zen-like minimalism on one end and ugly but useful functionalism on the other.
darkroom With that covered, select some of your pictures, and let’s move on to the darkroom. Remember that its
between lighttable and darkroom with L and D now. Nice, huh? This darkroom is where you do the editing, and you can do all sorts of things, like toy with the color profile, sharpen the image, apply cropping, rotate and so on.
While you’re in the darkroom, you still can change between images with the filmstrip, toggled with Ctrl-F. Chances are that you’ll have quite a number of images along the strip, so if you want to scroll along it, hover your mouse pointer over the strip and use your scroll wheel.
Double-clicking will open an image.
That’s about all the space I have for darktable, but it’s been an absolute pleasure to use. The GUI design is one of the best I’ve ever come across, and I hope to see its design copied in the future. Plus, the aesthetics are great as well, with a really cool light-black color scheme that is such a nice change from the endless beige and grays that make computing so depressing at times.
For mid-level photo management, this probably is the coolest tool I’ve come across, and whether you like your interface minimal or maximal, it doesn’t matter. You can change it around in about two seconds.■
John Knight is a 27-year-old, drumming- and bass-obsessed maniac, studying Psychology at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. He usually can be found playing a kick-drum far too much.
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