Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Version: 2.4.4 Website: https://www.darktable.org/ NOTE: to install, use the Ubuntu software Centre.
In this article, I plan to give you the penny tour of a great RAW photo editor Darktable. Maybe if there is demand, we can make it into a tutorial. Lots of people use this stunning piece of software only as a photo manager. You may want to compare it to Adobe Lightroom, but it actually has more (GASP!) tools than Adobe Lightroom.
How about we look at Darktable now. When we open Darktable, the default view is lighttable (see green arrow in image shown below). This is where you manage your photos and where lots of people stop. Next to lighttable, you have darktable, as well as ‘other’. Clicking on the ‘other’ tab drops down another list we can get to at another stage, but let's take this one step at a time. As you can see, the images have CR2 stamped on them, denoting RAW images. The ones with JPG stamped on the background are jpegs. The nice thing about RAW editing is that, when you take photos in one location, you can edit one and then apply those edits to multiple images. When you are done editing, you can export your images to other formats by clicking on the export command on the right-hand-side (RHS). As you can see in the illustration shown right.
Let us move to the next tab, Darktable. This is where you do all your editing. Double-clicking on any image in lighttable view, will immediately switch you to this view. This is the editing tab. You can change whatever you like and it will not affect your original RAW photo. Just like those washing powder ads, this is where whites get whiter and colors brighter. All of those changes are saved to a file and your original can be made to look different again.
The last tab 'other' drops down with map and slide-show. I imagine everyone knows what those are. The first one brings up a world map. This is for Geotagging. It is not something I use at all, but, it is there if you want it. The second starts a full-screen slide show of your selected photos. Just be aware that this requires memory and processing power as RAW files are large. Sometimes, you may find you cannot exit from slide-show view, that's okay. You can switch between views with the shortcut keys D and L. If you have 4GB of memory or less, please be patient with the program, it will make generous use of your swap space. (There are some settings you can look at, but more on this later). M will bring up the map and S the slide-show. Rule of thumb here is first letter of the word.
When I use Darktable on my laptop, I find the screen real estate to be a little small. This too is not a problem as all the panels can be hidden. When you look at the edges of the screen, you will see small white arrows (triangles). When you click this arrow, it hides that pane. they are located in the middle, North, East, South, West. If you should click the arrow again (now inverted), the panel returns. Here too, there is a shortcut key, TAB. Pressing TAB will hide / unhide all the panels at once.
When you have Darktable open, the universal drop-down menu in Ubuntu contains only quit. The settings for Darktable are actually the little gear, just below the word 'lighttable'. I suggest you take a gander at this as there are a lot of settings. Under the 'views' setting, you will find all the keyboard shortcuts that make working with Darktable a lot easier. Now that we have a fundamental understanding of the interface, how about we dig deeper? If you would like to know more about this powerful program, let us know!