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Darktable Guide
Darktable is my personal favorite photo editing engine. It is free for everyone to use and open source as well! The source code is open to the public for modification and improvements. For the purposes of this tutorial I will be using unmodified Darktable which can be downloaded from here.
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Darktable has far too many features to cover in one guide so this is only the bare basics that I use the most often. I hope you find this helpful!
Lighttable (homepage)
This is the view you should get when you first open Darktable (there will be no images since you just downloaded it). This is known as "Lighttable". It is essentially a gallery of all your imported photos.
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Highlighted in orange is the Lighttable/Darkroom toggle. As stated earlier Lighttable is your gallery where you can view your photos. Adversely; Darkroom is where all the editing action happens.
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Highlighted in Lime is a timeline of your photos. While in Darktable it will act as a "mini Lighttable" and allows you quick access to your other images.
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Lastly the yellow is your actions panel. Here you can manage your selection, duplicate, trash, group, copy, etc your selected pictures. If you scroll down you will find the exporting menu, where you can pick all the appropriate settings for your final image.
Darkroom
Darkroom is where all the magic happens. You will spend the majority of your time in this window so try and familiarize yourself with it. Darkroom has 2 panels (left and right). On the left side you can view your editing history (highlighted in red). as well as a small preview in the top left and other actions, but mainly edit history.
On the right side is your module panel (highlighted in orange) as well as a histogram at the top right.
Using Modules
Modules are very simple to use. However very powerful. Some modules may look different than this one. However the general controls are the same. Circled in red, is the module activation, click it to turn on your effect. Keep in mind that modules will activate automatically if you move a slider from it's default position. Once activated this module will be placed on top of your selected module in history and overwrite everything above it, be careful of this when looking over previous edits.
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If you have a preferred setting for any particular module you can make a preset and access it in the top right corner (orange). Lastly if you only want your module to effect a certain area you can mask it using the plethora of masking tools circled in yellow.
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Snapshots
As shown above, If you want to see a comparison of the original image (or at any other point in the edit) you can use the snapshot tool. I made the picture black and white to demonstrate this. The slider can be moved freely and also horizontally oriented if needed. The side that the snapshot is on can be flipped by rotating the slider 180 degrees.
A snapshot can be created on the right-side panel.
by clicking "take snapshot".
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The snapshot will be made of your current selected module in history. I wanted to make a snapshot of my original image, so I selected the very bottom of my history list. Same goes for whatever point in your edits you want to compare to your current point.
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This feature is still new to Darktable so it may experience some bugs and glitches.
Exporting
Once you're done editing and happy with your final image its time to export to show your friends! To do this we need to bring ourselves back to Lighttable menu (top left corner) and then onto the actions panel. Scroll down a little bit and you will find the export menu. Although this menu can seem daunting, there's really only 3 things you will really need to pay attention to; Destination, Format, and Compression / Quality (for .jpeg).
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In yellow is your file destination on your computer, I suggest making a folder specifically for your exported photos. It will make your life a lot easier. Then select your file format (I usually use PNG) and compression which can reduce your file size if you need to do so.
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Lastly when you're finished, click "export" and enjoy your picture!
Conclusion
Darktable is a very useful and versatile software that can bring out the best from your image. If you want to know more about how I use certain modules, consider looking at my Color Grading in Darktable guide.
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Once you are attuned to Darktable and feel the need for even more photo editing power. You can find many publicly made modifications made for the application (one of the many benefits of being open source software).
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I hope you found this tutorial helpful :)