darktable Blog

This is certainly a Matryoshka doll of wrappings:

- At root there is dcraw [1], which is Dave Coffin's sometimes inscrutable but massive and high-functioning CLI utility to read virtually any raw file from virtually any camera.

- On top of this, we have LibRaw [2] which "librarizes" dcraw so it can play nice with other C programs. LibRaw is big and complicated (like dcraw) but incredibly helpful.

- On top of that, there is rawkit [3] (with which I wasn't formerly familiar, and looks interesting), which provides a Python cffi interface to LibRaw.

- And now we have a REPL built on top of rawkit!

Somewhat perversely, I hope someone makes a CLI interface to rawkit, and then we could call it, er, dcraw?

One caveat here is that dcraw and its prodigies, though amazing, do just the initial steps in tuning up a RAW file -- the demosaicing and just a few other niceties such as white balance. If you want to process the image in a sophisticated way (e.g. curves, local contrast adjustment, shadows/highlights, sharpening, masks, etc.) you'll need to switch to a different tool, such as darktable [4] or RawTherapee [5]. Or use ImageMagick, as mentioned by another commenter.

Note that darktable now can be scripted via lua, which could be another source of flexibility. And also that darktable ditched LibRaw for RawSpeed [6], which is more elegant than LibRaw, as it was written from scratch as library to load RAW files (and do nothing else), rather than, like dcraw, accreted over the…

I have been focusing on film-based photography for 15+ years - mostly printing in the darkroom, but also often scanning - and can wholeheartedly recommend Vuescan on Linux.

About 6 years ago, however, I switched exclusively to the open-source XSane [1] and it operates my old scanner(s) beautifully, with all features including the transparency unit.

Try it out if you don't have a highly unusual scanner with driver issues. My workflow involves:

1. XSane for scanning (to 16bit TIFF)

2. exiftool [2] to tag my images with full metadata from my notes: camera, lens, aperture, film, datetime etc just like your digital camera would

3. Darktable [3] to manage my library, cropping, sharpening, adjustments, and tagging

It's a little bit of work - but nowhere near as much as taking and processing 4x5in photographs, and the "digital end results" are very satisfactory.

If I may, an example image:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dawidloubser/35944112383

[1] http://www.sane-project.org/
[2] https://exiftool.org/
[3] https://www.darktable.org/

I use and love DigiKam[0] for organizing my ≈230k RAW & JPG media library, and both RawTherapee[1] and Darktable[2] are great for more specific editing (though I haven't settled on an ideal workflow yet). One cool thing about DigiKam is that you can have it use a remote MySQL server for its db, theoretically allowing you to work with your library from the road (I think... it's been several months since I've spent a weekend working on my photo libraries).

Adobe's Lightroom truly is a great and powerful tool like so many of their other apps, but I just can't stomach having years' worth of work locked up in a proprietary subscription-model app. And I just consider Apple Photos untrustworthy, though I do like to use it + iCloud shared photo albums to publish my edited "selects" instead of my full library.

Now if only there was a real F/LOSS contender to replace FCPX...

[0] https://www.digikam.org/

[1] https://rawtherapee.com/

[2] https://www.darktable.org/

The devs are actively anti-folder structure handling within Darktable[1], which is why I still have to use Digikam or a file manager and then leave my computer for a few hours to re-import my entire collection every so often.

Re. UI, open source programs almost always end up on the side of technically correct rather than user friendly. So we're served a bunch of jargon with no easy way to find out more other than searching the web and hoping that whichever term they use has a single meaning, is only used in this context, and is used universally rather than some other term. These things are rarely all true at the same time.

All that said, Darktable is great for my simple use, and it's my main photo developing application.

[1] https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files

There are actually a number of more-or-less node/graph-based image editors:

# chaiNNer

Fully node-based image processing.

https://github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer

# vkdt

Node-based raw and video editor. Sort of the evolution of darktable, by the original developer.

https://jo.dreggn.org/vkdt/readme.html

# darktable

The graph is strictly linear (single input, single output), but you can change the order of the processing and insert new nodes as you want.

https://www.darktable.org

Pretty sure there are some others, but those are the three I can remember right now.

Using Safari 8 on Yosemite.

Clicking on the curve points doesn't do anything. I just retried it thinking maybe I had done something wrong, but still no love.

Re: correction profiles, I'm not sure. Darktable has some, though not as many as Lightroom, so there must be some public source for some of them. This is actually a pretty big deal (for me at least). I'm not a photographer, but I publish a digital/ipad magazine and do most of the retouching work.

http://www.darktable.org

(Not a fan of darktable, but they do some things pretty well).