Darktable: Photo Editing - Essential Tools

Welcome to the first lecture! Get familiar with the Darktable interface and some of the basic photo management features such as rating, deleting, and duplicating. Although we won't do much editing yet, these are crucial functions for managing photos. And make sure to download the example Raw image we'll be using for the course!

Use the comparison feature and some words of encouragement!

Learn the first steps of image editing: how to crop, adjust exposure, and use one of darktable's three tone-mappers.

Learn how to do one other basic function: rotate!

The most essential tone manipulation tool is the tone equalizer. It's an essential tool to master to lift shadows, adjust global tonal contrast, and control highlights. And here is a tip: when examining your photo locally, you can zoom in either by middle-clicking OR by scrolling! (Middle-clicking cycles the zoom levels.)

Learn a little about the waveform monitor and how to use it to detect halos. Actually, I recommend using the waveform instead of the histogram most of the time! And this is just one of many applications of the waveform.

Local editing is crucial to editing most photos, and you'll learn how to do so with drawn masks.

To get some practice with drawn masks, you'll learn how to tone down hotspots with the drawn masks and the tone equalizer.

Sometimes drawn masks aren't enough. That's where parametric masks come in. They're a tool that allows you to select parts of your image based on specific levels of brightness, saturation, and hue.

A few more tips for your parametric mask learning!

You'll learn how to use the contrast equalizer and the diffuse and sharpen module to adjust the coarse and fine sharpening of an image. As a bonus, you'll also learn the capture sharpening tool available in Darktable 5.4 and above. But note: if you're using an earlier version of darktable, the contrast equalizer and diffuse and sharpen module are good enough for most images, so you won't be missing out too much.

Check out one additional quick tip on local sharpening (when you want to sharpen a specific part of your photo that is critical).

Learn the basics of noise removal.

A few tips to keep your noise under control!

Chromatic aberrations, retouching, selective blurring.

Let's review the corrections module by correcting some dust specks! And, I'll show you how to better visualize those dust specs!

Learn the fundamental color tool of darktable.

When does chroma vs. saturation matter? Check out this example!

You'll see the basic fine-tuning and channel-mixing corrective tools in darktable.

One of the uses of the color equalizer is fine-tuning. Let's see an example of how I used it in practice!

Learn two ways to convert an image to black and white in darktable – the first is the display-referred and the second is the scene-referred.

A complete editing example of a black and white photo.