Darktable

In my previous post I was extolling some of the benefits of darktable such as cross-platform (Linux/Mac preferred), fast operation, comprehensive processing, etc. I also indicated there is plenty of online support to fasttrack understanding the software.

Here are just a few resources I’ve started with:

• Robert Hutton’s youtube tutorials are an excellent start!
• Cambridge in Colour has a straightforward summary of digital image workflow.
• Jim McCormick has a nice summarised darktable workflow.

There are plenty more tutorials and videos out there, but these are good places to start.

For the last four and a half years since I’ve owned a digital camera that can store images as raw files, I’ve needed a method of post-processing these images to produce jpgs suitable for general viewing/sharing/wallpaper.

My camera, a Pentax K-30 came with a program called silkypix. I tried it and discarded it early on in the piece. I then looked to other free solutions and came across rawtherapee. It came with a bit of a learning curve but it served me well for a number of years. It was cross-platform and did the job but it was fairly slow to process a single image let alone a folder full.