darktable 101: 9 Beginner Tools for Photo Editing for FREE!

[@sillysailorartemis]

I started learning darktable this week and this has been hands down _the_ most helpful introductory video I've seen. Thanks !

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

That's great! I'm glad it's been helpful for you. Comment any questions you have and maybe I can make a video to help with them!

[@ElyRiverBlues]

Totally agree

[@DJVasC]

Thanks, Dylan! This was a well-spent 27 minutes. Great introduction to Darktable!

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

awesome! I'm glad it was helpful for you 👍👍👍👍

[@donsylvester5275]

Hey Dylan, this IS a good video for beginners. The main point is to help new users overcome the initial frustration and experience early success ... your video tries to do that. Critics might consider the idea that "perfection is the enemy of achievement". Just getting a rewarding result more immediately from software this complicated is the priority for beginners. We can grow into the finesse points later.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Thanks for the support! And thanks for finding the video here.

[@sillysailorartemis]

Video in fact does that -new user

[@samuelashaju]

The best darktable tutorial on KZbin ever.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Thank you so much!

[@WilTushaus]

This is the best video I've found so far for learning editing. I really like seeing the evolution from quick and simple to more complex fine tuning. Thanks, and I'll definitely check out some more of your videos!

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Thank you! I'm glad that it was helpful!

[@RomanSkateboarding]

Thank you for this clear introduction to darktable. I watched a couple other videos before this one and must say that yours helped me the most. I'll check out the rest on your channel!

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

That's so cool to hear! I'm glad that I could help you. I've really gotten into darktable and I want more people to learn about it

[@andrejgrgic5978]

Very good and educational video - especially for a newbie like myself.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Glad it was helpful!

[@ElusiveFrame]

As someone coming from the Canon photo editor and only used lightroom mobile lightly, Darktable seemed scary. Thank you. 😄 After seeing this video I am covered for 99% of what I need for photo edits! The rest I'll learn with time. 😎

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

That's so encouraging to hear! I'm glad that my video could help you out.

[@robertleeimages]

I'm about to start with darktable after 4 yrs of only using canon dpp4 for editing, I mainly only take milky way images and after having them nailed in dpp4 it's going to be a huge challenge to learn how to edit them with a program that is more powerful

[@tee2sugars]

Awesome tutorial. Can’t wait to see more. Great video quality

[@mak-j2o]

Great video, i am new to editing and have just downloaded darktable 4.8. This video helps explain what the different modules actually do. You have any more similar ones? What is sigmoid and is it something worth learning to use

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

I have some other videos about specific tools in darktable, but not another 101-style video going over various levels of editing sophistication

[@mak-j2o]

@DylanLiveLifeCreative il check it out. Just need to learn key tools of editing and what they actually do so I know whether or not my pics need them. This video answered most of that

[@emrg777]

Likely what you should tell viewers is that this is an example of a legacy edit and reflective of a display referred edit in DT...the new basic and modern tools are the scene-referred tools....esp for eg the old colorbalance module that you used. The new one is far more powerful and designed to preserve gamut and hue...... THat said its nice that DT offers all options

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Thanks for the feedback. I felt like those details were too far into the weeds for what is meant to be a beginner's editing tutorial. I've used darktable for about six years and I barely understand scene versus display referred; I'm just hopeless when it comes to the new color balance rgb module as well. There are better authorities than me on those subjects

[@richardg6038]

Huh? Plain english please

[@emrg777]

@@richardg6038 If you ask a specific question I will try to answer. DT has evolved to do scene referred editing. Most others are still display referred... google it ... Basically you edit now in DT before applying the display transform on linear data and not after it is already put in display referred space. DT is heavily designed around color science which is a complex topic and worth getting to know

[@kimsuphan]

@@DylanLiveLifeCreative Hi Dylan. I've enjoyed your videos and always learn something watching them but I do think if you are going to teach DT to others you need to wrestle with the scene referred editing approach which is what the programs developers strongly recommend. Its fundamental to what darktable is.

[@arniespace]

Great stuff. Your presentation is spot on, learned a lot, thanks.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Glad you enjoyed it and I'm glad that the video was helpful!

[@ArunA-oh8vh]

Thank you! Great introduction to the tools.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

You're very welcome!

[@jagajitdas]

@Dylan, this is a very good learning video. It helps !

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Thank you! Was there anything you found unclear or needed more explanation?

[@talende]

Thank you making this video. Out of curiosity, what Linux distribution are you using?

[@sklipkani]

you could have mentioned a possibility of using the right mouse button in "rotate and perspective" to clock and draw a line, which will be automatically rotated to be perfectly horizontal/vertical, which is much more usefull than throwing around numbers and hoping, that it'll fit :)

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

That's another really good way to use the rotate tool. I find drawing the line usually get better results for me if I draw along a vertical line instead of a horizontal line. I do often enough find that trying to get a perfect horizon (by drawing a line) produces a degree of rotation that, while technically correct, makes the image feel skewed or off-balance. The next step there could possibly be adjusting the perspective controls to reduce the "skew feeling", or what I do, which is just make small changes to the degree of rotation until it feels balanced.

[@mannishboy17]

great video. thanks!

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Glad you liked it!

[@accentontheoff]

Does it make sense for a beginner-to-beginner-plus who is an iPhone user (as of now) who (for what it’s worth) does use RAW apps such as Moment - to use an app like Darktable to edit. Please note that I am not talking about ability and knowledge for using these apps (though that is an issue for sure) but rather I am talking about the quality of the images that come out of an iPhone using a third party RAW app or even out of iPhone ProRAW. Thanks for the super useful video.

[@jeffcanar7294]

As somewhat new to photography and editing, from what I've seen (a) your iPhone takes really great pictures, and therefore (b) it is definitely worth learning how to edit and enhance those photos further in something like Darktable.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

I'm not much of an iPhoneographer, so I'm not really sure. I know that when you shoot JPG or HEIC on iPhone, Apple is applying their image processing magic sauce and giving you pretty great pictures by default that way. Shooting RAW on iPhone? I just don't have any experience with that, so I don't know what level of processing Apple is applying to those. I think the most that I'm willing to say within my experience is that if you just want a nice image, stick with JPG/HEIC on iPhone. If you want to start gaining experience with manual image editing, then I think shooting RAW on iPhone and editing them on darktable on desktop is a good place to start. I know when I was first starting editing photos, I made them look awful, but it was valuable experience to know what not to do. Mainly I was cranking the saturation super high.

[@accentontheoff]

@@DylanLiveLifeCreative Yes, makes sense. If I keep on this journey I will have to buy a proper camera at some point but I want to get going for now. I’m also going to try taking the same photo raw and processed and see if there is a difference, pre and post edit. Thanks.

[@accentontheoff]

@@jeffcanar7294 Yes, agreed, thanks.

[@fishing_for_photons]

I'm pretty sure it would make sense at least to try darktable instead of the RAW apps on your phone. Darktable is a higly devoloped software and it's abilitys are not far (in some instances maybe even better) from 'professional' photo editing software. The processing technics are probably much more sophisticated then in the raw apps on your phone so one can expect that the results are more precise an by that the "quality" is better. Just give it a try, you dont have anything to loose. :)

[@SovaKlr]

My darktable never looks like anyone else's. None of those sliders are in color. There's no color brightness saturation tool in mine. I'm on the newest version but it's been the same every time I've ever tried to learn about it.

[@zanevali8423]

Hello Dylan. Good video. I am new to darktable but not getting very far! I wonder if you can help. I set exposure then tried the white balance. A message appeared telling me the white balance has been set twice! With a bit of research, I found darktable applies a white balance by default. I used this setting to change it to my preference. Now the histogram data is not appearing in the histogram at all. Is there a setting to restore the histogram data, or is it a bug? I tried posting the problem on a darktable forum but they refused to accept it for some unknown reason. I have tried different things to get it back, including reinstalling but have had no luck. Any help will be greatly appreciated. I installed darktable 3.8 on windows 10.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Hey Zane, I'm really sorry to hear that you're having all these issues. Unfortunately I don't know anything about the technical programming side of darktable to be able to diagnose this issue

[@zanevali8423]

@@DylanLiveLifeCreative Thanks Dylan. If I find a fix I will let you know

[@TGPhotoblog]

This is because you have scene-referred in preferences active (default since 3.6). Dylan are not using a scene-referred workflow hence he's not getting that feedback-error message. There are many many reasons to use scene-referred and it is highly recommended (by the developers) but if you decide to use scene-referred then 99% of the steps in this video is not relative for you. Some of the modules used in this video may become deprecated at the next big release of Darktable. Differences for a scene-referred workflow vs Dylan's edit - Curves/levels are mostly replaced by filmic rgb and/or Tone Equalizer - Color balance are replaced by Color balance rgb - White balanced are not to be touched (in most cases) and is replaced by Color calibration (hence why you are seeing that feedback error). - Contrast - Brightness - Saturation is mostly replaced (not needed) by Color Balance RGB, filmic rgb and/or Tone Equalizer - Shadows - Highlight module is mostly replaced by Color Balance RGB, filmic rgb and/or Tone Equalizer - Base Curve is not even used by scene-referred. Anyone following this video with a scene-referred workflow active in preferences will get unexpected result. I'm not criticizing this video (hopefully everyone understands that) but just pointing out why you have a different experience. It is obvious to me that Dylan knows what he's doing and knows well how to get a good end results. Thanks Dylan for sharing your video.

[@artsmodelstation9396]

Q: does darktable have “blinkies” warning when highlights are blown ?

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Yep, you're looking for the "toggle clipping indication" option. On an English installation of darktable, the shortcut is the "o" key. Not sure if that shortcut changes for other languages.

[@artsmodelstation9396]

Q: in capture one if the highlights are clip all I have to do is move the highlight slider and I recover. Can you do same in darktable? How ?

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Yes, you can do that with the "shadows and highlights" module. There's a "highlights" slider in that module that you can drag to the left to bring down the highlights. However, if the highlights are completely clipped in the raw photo, you won't be able to recover that detail.

[@ASHISH_KR_DUTTA]

Is there any way to keep the metadata details in the properties of the exported image?? Thanks in advance

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

I suppose it depends on which metadata you're wanting to keep. There's a metadata module in the lighttable mode, on the right side just above the tagging module (as of dt 4.2.0). That allows you to set new metadata. There's quite a bit of MD that darktable auto-attaches to exported images, like camera brand, camera model, etc.

[@ASHISH_KR_DUTTA]

@@DylanLiveLifeCreative Thank you

[@cindypayton-jk8fh]

How can you delete pictures that you imported and changed your mind about keeping?

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

in the lighttable tab, you can mark images as "rejected". This doesn't immediately delete them, but sets them aside as ones you don't want to keep. Then once you're sure you want to delete all your rejects, you can show only rejected images in the lighttable, select them all, then use the delete button in the selected images module on the right. That may be worth a whole video by itself, or maybe a YT short

[@nebula_M42]

bro the real clipping here was your mic lol thanks for the video tho, cheers

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

My bad! yeah I got a better mic now

[@petevonschondorf4609]

watch your video several times and I'm getting the hang of it EXCEPT when I export to a jpeg or Tiff file, the colors get washed out and bluish. Any ideas or lead me to another video - many thanks

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Hmmmm...not sure what's causing that. The only thing I can think of is perhaps darktable is applying a style during export. If you look in the export module, almost right about the export button there's a "style" option with a dropdown menu by it. That menu should read "none" by default; if it says something else, it may be making changes to your images as they're being exported. Another possibility that just occurred to me is that your editing computer screen may not be color calibrated, so if you edit an image on your computer, export it, and then look at the image on another device, the image may look different because the screens on the two different devices don't match in how they display color.

[@petevonschondorf4609]

@@DylanLiveLifeCreative Yes, the style option was putting that blue shade on my photos. Wish the darktable manual was better, but then again watching videos you get to see the results or at least what they should be like - Thanks for the help

[@sergiollag1]

does dark table has a tool like "content aware fill"?

[@a7xcss]

...superb..!

[@FernandoPerez-tc5ry]

How did you grouped the Color Balance sliders? I have a version where each factor, hue and saturation are not shown side by side.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Go to Settings (gear icon in the top right of the middle portion in lighttable or darkroom tabs), then the 'darkroom' section from the left side menu. Then in the main section of options, look at the option fourth going up from the bottom called "colorbalance slider block layout". You'll have a dropdown box of three options to choose from. This is in darktable 3.8.1, so it may be different in a different version

[@FernandoPerez-tc5ry]

@@DylanLiveLifeCreative Thanks for the steps! I genuinely would've missed that completely.

[@ViktorCosta-n2p]

i cant find the contras brightness saturation in my dark table

[@HOKshortz]

Is the dark table link is packed with malware? Because I am hesistant to download! Please help me.

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

If you download from darktable.org, it's fine. I've never had an issue

[@dima1353]

I started using darktable and noticed that the base colors and contrast look weird compared to any standart color profile in lightroom. Both from the old 5d2 and from the my new R6 - strange and very flat. Am I missing some color space or profile settings ? Is it possible to make things more "adobe"? To make colors look more preview/camera monitor ?

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Lightroom is probably applying some basic tone adjustments to go from the flat raw file to something that looks a little more edited. Darktable does some of the same thing; specifically, look to see if the "filmic rgb" module and/or the "base curve" module is enabled in the darkroom view. Those apply some basic adjustments for raw files; it's possible that default basic adjustments for the R6 haven't been created yet, though I think that's unlikely

[@stephenradford3384]

at 2.38 how did you manage to turn yourself upside down?

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

DaVinci Resolve, the video editing software I use, has controls to flip your video recording in different ways, like rotating it upside down

[@m.rafidrizqullah7454]

Wait, my white balance slider didn't have a color in it, any clue or solution?

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Your white balance slider with still function the same as in the video. Getting a visual of the color on the white balance slider itself is a setting you can change in darktable

[@m.rafidrizqullah7454]

​@@DylanLiveLifeCreative and where I can find it? What options did I have to check on it?

[@Knackebrot]

There's a really high frequency noise in your audio

[@rolandvanalphen4355]

Why use a totally unsharp picture!?

[@demian3281]

I’m here cause I’m broke

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Welcome to the club, that's why I started using darktable too

[@leelemon007]

Wierd presentation

[@DylanLiveLifeCreative]

Thanks! 😁😁