Darktable Newb :: Part 1 :: Getting Started :: Concepts and Basics

hello YouTube this is perhaps the very first time we've met because this is the darktable video that you should probably watch first of mine I've done a lot of darktable videos and I realized recently that they're all geared towards the person who kind of knows what they're doing in dark tales in darktable they're edit videos showing some fairly medium level edits but what if you've just installed darktable for the first time on Windows Mac or Linux this is what you see so the purpose of this video is to really talk about some of the concepts going on under this under the under the surface here and to get you to a point where you can import some images understand the very least you need to understand to edit an image and export that image to use as something else now darktable is really a tool that I think is mostly used for raw edits although it can be used on JPEGs but the real power of it is being able to manipulate the massive amounts of data in a raw image so I'm thinking of it as a raw image and I'm talking about raw imaging editing here and then exporting to JPEG and what we're going to cover here is we're going to talk about some of the concepts but say you are coming to darktable from adobe product so let's put this in context or say you currently use something like Photoshop for your raw edits where does darktable fit in this spectrum say say Camera Raw or Lightroom and Photoshop where does it fit in that spectrum well really I think of darktable as being doing everything that Lightroom and Camera Raw can do and or if you look at some of my more detailed videos you'll see that when I export something out of dark table I am I'll bring it into something like I'm a Linux user so I don't use Photoshop I don't have Photoshop and i will be doing tiny modifications I might be removing blemishes or photoshopping photoshopping light stands out of out of the background but most of what I think in in many scenarios most of what is the dark table does more than most raw editors it is really super super powerful I'm not gonna go into everything it can do in this video this is really about being able to switch on dark table for the first time and work out what the hell you're doing so here we are let's get some images into dark table and let's talk about what it's really doing now if you if you think of importing what you're not doing here is taking a bunch of images and putting them somewhere else this is not like importing something into your camera roll and on a Mac this is not like this is not like this you know let me show you so let me split the screen here here here are a bunch of files Neph files which is the raw for nikon and they're in a folder called lesson 1 well I hit import I am not moving them anywhere I am NOT I'm doing nothing but reading those files darktable will never change these files so I'm going to open this import tab I'm going to go to that folder and when I open that I didn't go far enough yeah I did so what you see is for every single file we have an Associated XMP file which we call a sidecar file now this file for every single image is effectively a list of what we have done with it in dark table so in dark table if you edit a file make modifications change the exposure crop it a definian do color changes all of those things are just statements of hey do this then do this then do this then do this then do this so when we work on a file this will just get bigger and bigger and bigger and this is associated with that raw file so we're never actually overwriting that raw file and this is a super important concept understand we're building a stack of changes to that image using dark table so going back to our dark table we really have two main conceptual main areas of dark table we have the light table which is what we're looking at here and we have the dark room and here's why it's here's why it's named like that think of old-school photographer who has taken a bunch of photos and they've developed the negatives or they've developed slides think of this as them looking at all of those slides on a light table and evaluating what they want to do they want to keep this one do they want to work on that one which are the good ones which are the bad ones and now I can zoom in and out and see these at a different resolution all the way up to full size the concept then continues that for any single image that we like on the light table we pick it up when we take it into the darkroom which is where we actually process and expose that image and we're gonna do that with an image in a second but let's look at all of the powerful things we can do in light table so we can zoom in I'm using control and mouse wheel or here it is by slider I can sort these by file name or by various things which won't change it right now because we haven't done anything I can do it in reverse order or I can do it in I can do a normal order or reverse order but there's much more to it than that see right now we are viewing all also notice that there are this is a one-star image which is the default for everything being imported let's say I want to take one of these images pick one I like let's say I like them all let's say this one make that a 2 star I did that by clicking on it I could also press number 2 in the keyboard see if I press 1 3 4 2 then if I go up here and say I only want to see 2 stars we get only that one or if I only want to see and this is actually 2 or more so you can change that also so that's equal to 2 stars that's equal anything equal to 1 star so we're seeing every single image except the one I made it - if I say greater than or equal to 1 star it's brought in back that to start image so why is this important this is really important because here we have 470 files this is Janelle taejun she's a Denver Colorado Springs model look her up kudos to her this is an early shoot of mine that I really enjoy and I'm gonna use it over and over again in these tutorials so how why is this useful well I can go through all of these and I've got other if you look at my darktable workflow videos you'll see this in more detail but you can say this is a 1 this is a 2 this is a 3 you can basically go through all of these and make all of the ones that you think you might have work on a 2 and then step to just show your twos and all of a sudden you're going from 470 images that's overwhelming down to maybe 100 of 50 or 20 that you're actually going to work on then you could or you could go down to a hundred then go through them again and take some disree star and then when you actually work on them and modify them make them a four-star when you actually export them make them a five-star so it's all about organization the other way you can organize files is function keys add a color that's f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 at 5 4 3 2 1 so you can toggle on and off these colors which is useful for example I will go through and I will find say it's a studio shoot like this and some are shot f8 and some are shot at one point one point eight I'll go through and tag all the f1 point eights is a different color so that's my way of organizing things so I could take multiple here I did a shift click and then shift-click selected all of those I can make all of those red if I make let's say I made these some of these red and then I went up and ordered by color label than the ones with any color level will be at the top likewise order by star by rating we'll put the ones that have any kind of rating at the top so there's our two star so let's take those color labels off again so it's very very powerful this this light table is very powerful way to help you organize photos and more which I'm going to show you the other main role of it is so I've said that all the edits don't actually make changes to the Neff files it's all about it's all about working on that files and then exporting the result as some file format so let's just do use the default settings and I'm going to export that file and by default it is putting it in a folder called darktable exported right there and the same folder as we were and the super powerful thing is so it's actually visible here so you can understand why it's putting it there and you can use all of these tags to customize this for your own desires you can save it as like you can see there minute second bexif year all kinds of stuff or you can put it in a specific folder or you can make it a specific following I mean all kinds of really cool stuff personally I put it I put my key for honey for photography as part of the file name and then the original file name but you can do all kinds of stuff you can apply styles which could include watermarks you can make different qualities you can auto resize you can store lots of things as different styles so a whole bunch of stuff super-powerful module but we're not going to go into that module right now we're gonna do is we're gonna edit this photo so so far we've let's recap we've used over here we've used import block to import a folder and that sucked in all the nests we made one of them to star we've played around a little bit there and now we're gonna actually take something into the darkroom so let's choose an image if I double click this image it'll go straight to the darkroom let's choose that one one of these so I could double click or I can go up here and click darkroom and now we're in a completely different module you see the light table is still across the bottom you can still do the same kind of stuff up here to modify that light table but really what we're gonna talk about now is this darkroom we've got two things going on here over here are all of the modules that can affect that image and over here are our more overview things like like the information about the shop so there are a lot of modules in darkroom in dark in dark table and the darkroom by default which is what this is is we have some groups similar groups like lighting what the basic group color related correction group effects group this shows everything that is on right now and there are some on by default so it takes the white balance from the camera for example and by default it will apply a curve based on what it finds so which you can keep orally or but that is beyond the scope of this video if you want to see all of the modules available you click more modules and you'll see there are some dark here and there are some gray and these cycle through on a click it's pretty much hidden added to its group up here and another click adds it to the favorites group which is here now personally I've added a whole bunch to my favorite group and those are the ones that I use all the time so if you see me scrambling around here because it's I forget where they actually are in these normal groups but let's do a super fast edit on this photo so histogram this is clearly underexposed so I am going to use the exposure module to make it brighter now how much brighter do I want it I'm going to switch on this over under exposure indicator which shows blue coming in for underexposed and red coming in for overexposed and my personal style is I bring things up until I just get some overexposed all my primary focus of the image which is the face bringing those darks up a little bit there too now there's a whole bunch of things about these modules which I'm not gonna go into I'm just doing the absolute basics here but I'm gonna make this photo kind of a little bit the way I want it I'm gonna crop it I like of thirds guides and I'm gonna make this kind of a 10 by 8 shape then I can just kind of do that as I wish but I'm gonna crop that about there I'm going to have been yet and just to show you some of the power of dark table I'm gonna use this split toning color correction module do a treatment like that so that's the bare bare minimum of getting that photo kind of where I wanted to go I'm gonna increase its contrast a bit a little bit more saturation that I'm gonna bring the exposure down because that's now looking a little bit hopped about there and that's my edit so remember this is doing absolutely nothing to my raw file what it's doing is creating a stack of things I've done all the way from where it was originally to the things that were automatically done to it by the software my exposure fix my crop my vignette my color correction my contrast the saturation my overexposure so this is our history stack also super important absolutely nothing has been done to the death file all of these steps that I've done have been written to that sidecar file whichever one it is in fact no I'm not complicated we could find that sidecar file and I could show you but that's what's going on here so I could go to another image down here currently working on that one I could go to that one and double click there's lots of things I can do but here I'm going to go back to light table and we now see that the thumbnail of this shows it's different now here's where things get really awesome and this is something that you do in other rel tools like Lightroom 2 but if we look at our history stack tab over here I select that image and I copy the history stack these are all of the modules that were used in the making of this edit so if I copy that and I paste all of those boom we have the same edit on another photo or another four photos if we wanted to say that imagine obviously the crop will be wrong so I would paste without the crop then I get the same impact I can do that paste all is basically gonna paste everything that was last selected so it's the same as paste right now when I do paste all it will paste except that crop the rotate from the orientation so I'll paste all wow now look we have 86 images that have been somewhat modified and have that same edit so imagine doing that in Photoshop so we've made the same changes to all of those files now it doesn't mean they're all perfect because they all have slight variations but typically what I'll do is I'll I'll do that on each chunk of file and then I'll go through and star the ones that I really want to work on and go up to two and then go into each of them and make sure that there's not something else I should do crop it differently or I might want to fix that's that looks a little bit underexposed in the face on that one I probably want to bring it up a little bit more and do a problem but you see what I mean I might then go back and say okay that one is now a better starting point for copy all of that stuff and paste it all that one because we're gonna close to or we want to go so as you see now we're working on RAW files in darkroom but we're also working on RAW files in bulk but then what happens we actually want to use these images we actually want to share them with the world so we have to export them so maybe I want to work with these ten click export and here they are going into exported and these are ninety percent or whatever that setting was they're 95% quality they're an 8-bit JPEG they haven't been resized or anything these are super useful things you can do I'm really trying really hard not to deep dive into anything specific my real purpose is here for anybody who's opening darktable for the first time that it makes total sense so let's recap that we're wow 22 minutes in didn't feel like 22 minutes so let's recap I've used the import block over here I don't know it's called module maybe import module I select a folder and I can do it again it's less than one open and and now what i what i just did behind the scenes is it's rechecking this so if more files were added to that they would now show up but it's now it's it's done two things it's looked at all the raw files and it's also looked at all the sidecar files and if something has a sidecar file then it's basing the thumbnail on the modifications that i've already happened then what we talked about is actually organizing photos so for example i just exported those ten so i might hit the 5 star but the 5 key to say these are all 5 stars and it is now organized those 5 stars because this is really powerful for organization we can sort by various things we can show only specific sets then we can take any file we can take it into the darkroom we can modify it we can use any number of modules to get the effect we want and this is where darktable is likes to be powerful these modules are just insane so we can take we can do a quick edit we can go back out to Lightroom we can take those settings and we can clone we can paste that stack onto similar images and we have similar things we could then export them either individually or on mass and we have JPEGs so the concepts darktable is a raw editor but in my experience you can do more with it than most raw editors because some of the modules are crazy look at my videos look at reader goons videos look at look at some advanced editing videos I mean if you look at hairy hairy Durgin they blow my mind they absolutely melt my face the level of details that he knows this product and the things he does with this product at a raw file level that people would normally do in Photoshop and why is that good well it's good in that everything here is just a history of things and if we don't like them we can go change them for example even though this is sequential let's see the base curve changed let's do the vignette the vignette change happened six out of way back there but we can still go back and remove that vignette and it doesn't impact the fact that we did things since the vignette that still are the same so super-powerful another suggestion I have for you is if you're a Facebook user get on the use the user group darktable unofficial search for dark table unofficial and that is a growing group of people like me who are passionate about this product people of various levels and in fact I'm making this video today because somebody said I don't know where to start so join that group get a part of become a part of the discussion if your specific questions either ask them there or ask them in the comments here please like and subscribe I do a I do an edit video weekly which shows some of the more advanced stuff and it is that stuff like some of the stuff you can do with this is just nuts and I don't know where the modules are because I have everything in my favorites but I hope that this has given you the confidence to just get going with darktable and I'm gonna keep doing some really kind of beginner basic conceptual videos well I will if you tell me that tell me this is useful so tell me that this really understanding conceptual and really kind of first couple of days working with dark table are useful videos and I'll make more how about that for you if you like my stuff kefir honey Ford photography on Instagram or kefir honey for photography calm is the same on Facebook is kei fer photography this is my youtube channel that so everything in here that you see this dark table cuz that's all I use because I'm an open-source guy I do use portrait Pro which is not open source and I use and so please if you want if you like my work follow me there and I think that's all I got so have a good one right

Channel: Keifer Hunniford Photography

Views: 65,112

Rating: 4.9000554 out of 5

Keywords: darktable getting started, darktable tutorial, darktable, lightroom replacement, photoshop replacement, free photography software, open source photography

Id: 899uLpO2W9w

Length: 28min 17sec (1697 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018