Category: photo

I’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.

It’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.