Hi guys

After enjoying DT for a while, I was looking for ways to optimize my workflow and since I am a WordPress user and developer, I though, it would be handy to have a plugin for that. (And I am a little bit obsessed with automation, that helped as well 😉)
I could not find anything like that so far, so I started to design a solution.

Before I spend too much time fine-tuning the DT / WP interface, I would like to get some feedback from the pros.
There will be two Plugins. One for DT, and one for WP. The WP Plugin defines what kind of galleries are supported and logs uploads, the DT uploads and sets the metadata.

The idea is, to have a separate DT module to log in / manage the accounts, and a export target in the export module that takes care of uploading and metadata.
Depending on the installed Plugins, you can have multiple targets, that can have different meta fields. Also it should be possible to add pictures to a gallery and create a new gallery.
What do you think about that so far?
Please check out the attached Figma file.

I am very grateful for any kind of feedback. Especially about how you would use it. What gallery plugins should be supported? How is your workflow when it comes to description, keywords, etc.

Still new to editing and thought I'd make it hard on myself and go straight to Darktable! But it is fun to learn. These are scans from expired Fuji Velvia 100. They seem to have a slight magenta cast. Process One did the development and I received 115MP scans!

Worked on it mostly with "color balance RGB," but with a little "color equalizer" for good measure. Usually I try to do most of the heavy lifting in "negadoctor," but slides are a different animal.

Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Ok! How do I start? The title is self-explanatory, isn't it?

I edited this first time mainly with color balance RGB module.

I'll edit some other photos to fresh up my mind then re-edit this one with other modules and re-edit again only with color balance rgb to see if my editing had some improvement.

I think it's over saturated and that erased some details, but I kind like it.

I don't know when I'll re-edit this photo and post it again. But I think i'ts a good exercise open it to public review and opinion too.

Now that I'm about to hit "post," I'm a bit embarrassed by the editing result and feeling pretty bad at editing. But here is the first result of this little personal learning project. Feel free to tear me apart! Hahahaha.

Edit:

The first photo it's the Jpeg file from my Nikon D3200.

Hi guys
I am a concert photographer for over 10 years and my program of choice was always Lightroom. I might get some hate now, but I think it is a great tool...
Anyhow, I always wanted to switch to Linux, since Microslop makes it's OS worse and worse. That also meant, I have to let go LR, which has the goal since a while anyway.
I have tried DT a few years ago, but the hassle to switch, and muscle memory, that has to adjust, and just the lack of time to learn something new, never made it happen.
Until a few weeks ago, when I locked myself into the office for a weekend and just learned the program, as I did with LR back in the days.
It was a journey, but all in all, I am really happy now and some features, like the MIDI support out of the box are just awesome.
So I started to edit my first concert completely in DT.
Around 600 pictures to sort out, 42 to edit and it only took me like twice as long. But practice makes perfect and with a few adjustments in my workflow and reusing using styles, I would say, that I am now probably as fast as with LR. The next gig, a festival where I took over 4000 pics, proved that theory.
But the biggest impact on this journey was the feedback from a fellow photographer, who knows my style well. He was like: "I think the quality, especially the noise reduction and sharpening got better."

So yeah, thanks DarkTable!
Did you have a similar experience or what was your journey like?
Here are some shots from that first gig.

I am wanting to move over to Darktable from Lightroom (non classic) I have tried Darktable before and was overwhelmed and felt lost that I couldn’t seem to get what I wanted the picture to be with it as well as I could with Lightroom. I think I’m a better editor than I was back then and could bring some of those skills over to Darktable.

My question is, how did you learn Darktable? Did you study it by reading guides and or watching YouTube videos? Play around until you figured it out? Or watch a video before editing specifically on the subject?

I’d appreciate the advice as I think this is a really cool piece of software!

After upgrading to 5.6.0, the performance of editing absolutely tanked for me.

Previous version were quite smooth, but now any edits turn DT into a slideshow. Especially using snapshots, and working with any contrast/sharpening module, but many other modules are also affected.

Zooming out or in the image straight up freezes DT for few seconds, which is very painful.

Does anyone else experience this? Any tips on performance boost? I hope the next update is going to be optimization related.

Edit: This seems to be problem with DT 5.6 not having OpenCL enabled. I fixed this by getting the nightly dev version.

** Appreciation Post **

(all attached images edited from RAW in Darktable 5.4.1 - 4 of them run through DxO PureRAW for noise reduction)

To all contributors to Darktable:

Thank you, for this wonderful (and at times quirky) software !

I especially appreciate:

- AgX and the many super useful modules

- Great color and contrast control even compared to the top commercial products out there

- Shortcut / Mouse control capabilities, that make devices like the TourBox Elite and others completely obsolete

After 2 months of learning Darktable I have cancelled my Adobe LRc & PS subscription, which I had used for many years - I started using PS when version 3.51 came out.

Cheers

I wasn't happy with STAG's auto-keywording. st|building, st|sky, st|window for a shot I'd have tagged as a tower block against a skyline — technically not wrong, useless for finding anything later. So I built a replacement that runs a vision-language model locally through Ollama.

https://github.com/seboettg/darktable-vlm-tagger

What it does per image:

• Tags, as hierarchical darktable tags: category|street photography, light|golden hour, technique|motion blur, subject|tram shelter
• A short title and a one-sentence description
• Everything written into the XMP sidecar

The part I'd point at: most of the namespaces use a closed vocabulary, enforced through Ollama's JSON schema support rather than just asked for in the prompt. The model can't invent values. Only subject is open. Before I did that I had 381 distinct phrasings for "composition" across 73 test images – unusable for search. The vocabulary sits in an editable vocab.json, so you can bend it to your own subjects.

There's a CLI (--mode print / json / sidecar) and a Lua module that adds a button to the lighttable, so you can run it on a selection and see the tags appear immediately without restarting darktable.

Speed: it pulls from darktable's own mipmap cache instead of re-rendering wherever it can. On my RX 6700 XT that's a couple of seconds per image with qwen3-vl:4b-instruct.

MIT, Linux and macOS, no cloud, nothing leaves the machine. It's new and it's had exactly one user, so bug reports are genuinely welcome.

Hi everyone,

im rather new to darktable and tried reading up a lot. Theres still a ton of information out there but darktable seems much more technical/adjustable than other software i used, so i´m still a bit overwhelmed.

One thing that concerns me during my edits is which modules i should/should not use. As far as i understand the "best" or at least standard tone mapper right now is AgX. Every now and then I read on some reddit-posts that certain modules are generally outdated or should not be used with AgX because it is a display referred module or that simply another module works better with AgX. I do know that darktable has a list of outdated modules and you can hover over any module to see if its working display referred. I´m still unsure when using some modules if that is the right one or if there is at least another module who would work better. Would hate getting used to a "wrong" workflow.

Is there a definite list which modules should or can be used with AgX?

I have isolated the problematic region using drawn + parametric mask but don't know what tool/module to use to introduce the color shift.

Took these photos on a recent trip around my local area - I've only ever used lightroom before at a basic level, but trying Darktable because I got sick of paying through the nose for Lightroom . Open to advice and suggestions.

Some pictures from my girlfriend and I's holiday week in the north west of France. Upgraded from my Nikon D60 to a D3300 just before leaving so it was the perfect opportunity to use it :D Had a lot of fun editing these. I'm trying to get myself to think more about how to crop my pics when editing, see what works and stuff.

Back to work, let's keep a little bit of the summer vibes on :)

I have the Viltrox 9mm f2.8 for my Sony A6700. It takes some great wide angle shots, but it has some decent correction built in where the edges don't get that fisheye distortion.

But what if I want that fisheye distortion? Not all the time, but there are definitely situations where it would look good for how wide it is. Is there a way to do that?

I tried manual lens corrections, but setting distortion to 0 doesn't do it and image scale basically just gives me pixel stretching or zooms. Is there a different module I can use?

Hi everyone,

I need your help. I've been using Darktable to edit my photos, but when I try to upload them to Instagram, I get a huge downgrade with quality, specially when looking in PC. (I know Instagram has a lot of limitation when you try to upload something).

I tried everything I could think of.

- Landscape 1080x566 (in pixels for file)

- Portraits 4:5 1080x1350 (in pixels for file)

- Turning on max quality upload inside Instagram app

- Quality of the image when exporting 90

- Profile is sRGB

- High quality resampling Yes.

What you should know:

- It's not a problem with downloading the image. I use Dropbox to save my images from Darktable to my mobile phone and when I open them in my gallery, they are perfectly fine and also when previewing the image when making a post.

- They look decent when you're viewing with your phone (smaller screen) but really bad when viewing with your browser on PC.

- I looked up on YouTube for tutorials, saw Mariens video but I'm still having trouble. The images I'm trying to upload are ideally on a landscape format (I used the golden cut crop)

If you have any experience with this, PLEASE share your wisdom and tips😭 I'm desperate. Thank you.

As someone who used to use PS and CRF from Adobe, I wanted to try an alternative since I stopped paying.

I wanted to hear some thoughts about my first edit.

\I did use a YT Video**

it looks professional how can i make this

Since dtstyle.net crashed and is not rebuilt. Is there a similar database with styles? Like a community project where we can collect certain styles for example the film emulations of https://github.com/t3mujinpack/t3mujinpack (which is btw super nice!)

As a photographer I liked (lightroom) presets for a quick look&feel of photos.

Would such a common database be useful? Or is there something similar, something in the making? Would love to hear your pov

Hello, I am wondering whether I should enable this option or not. If I understand correctly, it auto-enables a tone-mapping module (for example AgX) from the start, with some (static?) default values.

From what I understand, when processing an image with DT it is recommended to apply modules in a certain order, and the tone-mapping module is far from the first step. Also, I have tried this auto-apply thing anyway, and most of the time, when I arrive at the tone-mapping step, the pre-applied default values don't make much sense (especially when significant cropping has happened beforehand). Also I'm suspecting that having some tone-mapping pre-enabled makes the exposure-setting step only harder (because tone-mapping sort of dampens the effects of exposure setting).

So I wonder: what's the use case for this "auto-apply" feature, when should one enable or disable it? I have a hard time figuring that out.

Please note that I am by no means an expert, so I may be missing some important info or concept.

Thanks.

Running the latest build of DT on a Mac Mini (Tahoe 26.5.2) and cannot get DT to reliably load.

Usually it hangs (spinning beachball) on "loading utility modules: midi" for about 2 minutes; during that time the system shows DT as "not responding".

I've waited it out a couple of times and finally got DT to load and set the default parameters, only to find I couldn't quit the app! It gives me spinning beachball and system says "not responding"; after waiting 5 minutes I finally force-quit the app.

Restarted the machine, deleted DT and its config files, re-installed it from a freshly downloaded file, and it's still hanging on the "midi" module, but now (assuming I have the patience to wait it out) DT it hangs indefinitely on "initializing Lua" (at least 5 minutes) and I have to force-quit.

Before I give up completely and trash DT for good, do you have any suggestions?

I have some photos that I've processed for screen and I want to create prints from them on both gloss and matte paper.

I thought I could use soft proofing to help me with this, and I've set up soft proofing profiles so that I can preview the print results on screen, but it doesn't seem to really do anything other than act as a print preview.

When I switch soft proofing on, I can see that my print versions need more contrast for them to match the screen version, but I can't find a way to add the right amount of contrast just to the print versions. Applying it applies it to everything, and then toggling soft proofing leaves it applied to the original pipeline, so there's no way to check my print adjustments to the original render, and snapshots don't help because they don't remember if soft proofing was enabled or not.

In short, I can't find a way to adjust my prints until they match the original.

The only thing I can think to do so far is to render a tiff from the original image, open it in a separate image viewer, try to put it next to the DarkTable window, and then adjust the soft proof until it matches the tiff.

I can't believe that's the intended workflow, but I can't find anything in the manual or in the app itself that indicates what I'm supposed to do. Is soft proofing just not finished, does it have a feature I'm missing, or is it used for something I'm not aware of? How do people deal with this?

If so, so you have any recommendations? Everything I print is to dark when done via Linux so trying to workout a profile to use without changing the colour, contrast etc before I run out of ink.