Fundamentals of Photo Editing in Darktable | Free Software

The first lecture in the "Darktable Layout" section covers the very first panel in the upper left corner of the Darkroom tab. This panel is known as the "Navigation Panel" and performs various zoom functions while also showing you where you are located on your image.

The "Snapshot Panel" is the first of many unique panels in Darktable. It provides great features for capturing your photo in is current editing state and comparing that "snapshot" to future renditions of your image while you edit. I explain the panel in detail in this lecture.

Next up, I cover the "History Panel" in Darktable. This panel displays the "history stack," an important feature in Darktable that shows you the edits you've made on your photo in chronological order. This allows you to review changes made to your image, and can even be saved as "styles" for future use in other photos.

There are actually two History Panels in Darktable - one in the Darkroom tab (which I went over in the last lecture) and one in the Lighttable tab. The Lighttable Tab version of this panel has more features and functionality, which I'll go over in this lecture.

Darktable released versions 3.4 and 3.6 in late-2020 and mid-2021 with some major updates to the modules layout. In this article, I address these changes and how you can make adjustments to your modules layout to follow along with the lectures in this course.

Modules are basically the most important feature in Darktable. They are where you will perform almost all of your image editing and adjustments. In this lecture, I provide an introduction to what modules are, the order modules are applied to your image (known as the "pixelpipe"), and how the module workflow applies to your image editing.

Below the image window in Darktable is the "Bottom Bar." This area not only displays the camera settings at the time you took your photo, but also has a series of features like image previewing, color and out of gamut warnings, and the ability to quickly add styles to your photo based on modules added to your "favorites." 

The duplicate manager panel allows you to create a duplicate of your image, then edit that duplicate as a separate image. This provides a great way to "fork" your project in a different direction, allowing you to make separate edits to the same image.

The Color Picker Panel allows you to select a single pixel or pixel area and analyze the color values of that pixel. I provide an in-depth look at this panel for this lecture.

Tagging is a great way to add keywords to your photos, group photos based on similar qualities, and be able to easily find any photo in your collections in Darktable. In this lecture, I go into all the ways to tag a photo and use those tags in your workflow.

Alright - you have finally mastered the Darktable layout. Time for the good stuff! In this section, I'll be diving into image editing in Darktable. I'll show you the most commonly used modules for editing and adjusting your photos.

The first module I'll cover is the "Exposure" module. This module is a great way to increase or decrease the exposure levels of your image for over- or under-exposed lighting.

The Shadows and Highlights module allows you to recover details hiding in the shadows - or highlights - of your image. This is a great way to rebalance lighting in your photographs while also adding more detail to the image.

In this lecture I cover the Tone Curve for adjusting your image's brightness/contrast and colors using a gradient curve.

Darktable has many modules for color correction, including the Color Balance and Color Correction modules. I show you which module I prefer to get the best colors out of your image. You'll get an in-depth look at correcting the color channels of your image, as well as the hue and saturation.

Your camera's EXIF data will automatically be imported into Darktable, setting the White Balance for your image based on the setting you used in-camera at the time of your photo. However, in this tutorial I show you how to tweak the white balance in Darktable to make your photos warmer or cooler, and also go over the various other slider settings in the White Balance module.

There are two main types of noise found in photographs - luminance and chrominance (color) noise - both of which I go over in this lecture. I show you the best module to use for removing noise in your photos, which also happens to be one of the easier methods for noise removal thanks to a vert smart feature.

Once a majority of your edits have been applied to your image, you'll want to sharpen your final photo using a sharpening module in Darktable. In this lecture, I cover the best module for the job, which utilizes an "unsharp mask" sharpening technique. Don't worry - I explain what that means in the lecture.

Vignettes are a great way to add framing around your image while drawing the viewers eye towards the main subject of the photo. I cover the vignette module in Darktable for this lecture and the various settings and sliders found in that module.

Learn more about Color Temperature, using the free photo editor GIMP to demonstrate.

In this Darktable tutorial, which uses Darktabl 3.4, I show you how to steal color grading from one photo and transfer it to another using the Color Mapping module.

Once you've processed and edited your RAW image, it's time to export it out of Darktable so you can view it on other programs, upload it to the web, print it, or whatever you'd like to do with your editing image! I show you how to use the exporting features in Darktable - and talk about the best and most commonly used filetypes for exporting.