fun with darktable

LiquidI’m really impressed with darktable, a raw photo workflow for Linux.  Unlike Gimp, it uses floating point for all image processes, so it doesn’t get caught up in quantization error. It’s a non-destructive editor, too: it assumes your source images are like negatives, and any changes you make are only applied to the exported images. Darktable also has a very intuitive black and white filtering mode (where you apply a virtual colour filter to the front of the lens, and see the results in real time) and some very powerful geotagging features. I’m sold.

darktable-uiIt’s not immediately obvious how some of the features work, and it took me a few hours (and some reading of the manual — eek!) to get files to export as I wanted them. It’s not quite perfect yet — the map feature can become unresponsive if you click too much on image icons — but it’s definitely solid enough for my purposes.

More of my initial darktable attempts on flickr: A Day by the Lake.

raw, raw!

I’ve just ‘hacked’ my Nikon Coolpix 2500 to run in raw mode, using cpixraw (on a Windows machine, alas). I can read the files with Dave Coffin’s dcraw. So far, it seems I’m getting a bit more extra detail than from the original JPEG files.

The only real disadvantage I can see is that for every picture I take, a regular JPEG and a raw file is created. The raw file is confusingly called *.jpg. I think I can live with this.