Hi Pedro,
About the main interface
> - There's no quick way to change from viewing 1 image to viewing the
> table (double click moves into edit mode which is almost certainly not
> what you want).
Actually, that's not entirely true.
When you are in Light Table mode, just put your mouse pointer over an image
and press Z, it will zoom in and full screen the image. This is FAST,
very fast, unless the image has a lot of effects and there are a lot of
thumbnails being generated.
John P Santos
Digital Media Consultant
*Green Bee Media*
greenbeemedia.com
facebook.com/greenbeemedia.ca
twitter.com/greenbeemedia
On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Pedro Côrte-Real <pe...@pedrocr.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I shoot with an SLR in RAW-only mode. I've traditionally used
> f-spot+ufraw to manage my workflow, it's worked fine but it's not a
> great solution. Now that f-spot has stagnated I've been looking at
> other options and darktable seems very exciting. I took it for a spin
> a few weeks ago (version 1.1.3 on Ubuntu 12.04) to process some
> pictures I had taken at a friend's wedding and took some notes. I
> figured I'd edit them into a coherent use report in case the
> developers were interested. Here it is.
>
> General thoughts
> - The non-destructive, "all edits are really just metadata", way of
> working gets top marks. It's the way to go to edit RAW files
> - The stars/colors/tags facilities to classify photos fit right in to
> the way I want to work. I use the stars to evaluate absolute quality
> of the photos, the color green to mark the ones I've selected and the
> tags to describe what the pictures are about.
> - The program seems to do great things in terms of the RAW pipeline. I
> find the interface a bit hard to use to process a large number of
> images quickly.
>
> About the main interface
> - There's no quick way to change from viewing 1 image to viewing the
> table (double click moves into edit mode which is almost certainly not
> what you want).
> - Here I'd suggest double click still bringing you back and forth into
> edit mode but have it also show the ratings/colors, allow them to be
> changed, and respond to page up/page down to change image. This would
> almost eliminate the need for the bottom slider in edit mode and make
> editing a bunch of images in sequence much easier.
> - I couldn't find a way to search by color, only to sort by it. After
> doing the selection I'd like to be able to restrict the list to only
> green marked images as those are the keepers in my workflow.
> - When looking at a single image the metadata (name, file, etc) is
> overlayed on the image. Get your text out of my images! :)
>
> Edit mode
> -There's way too much space spent with the settings tabs leaving a
> very small image, making editing very hard on a laptop. The top bar
> also wastes a bunch of space with a huge darktable logo and the
> "lightable | darkroom | tethering | map" selector. With my edit mode
> suggestion you could just eliminate that selector and just have a
> tethering button somewhere.
> -There's no way that I could find to apply the same settings to a
> group of images, the only one I found was saving a style and then
> going image by image, selecting "original", collapsing the stack down
> and then applying the style (way too many clicks). When working a
> large set of images this is incredibly frustrating. This is what I had
> to do with ufraw and was hoping that something that joined the
> functions of f-spot and ufraw allowed me to apply a set of RAW
> settings at once to a bunch of images and only then go one by one and
> fine-tune the ones that need it. Here again the distinction between
> lighttable and darkroom seems superfluous. I should be able to have
> the edit pane open just the same for a single image as for a set of
> images, the same way I should be able to set a tag on a single image
> or to a group. The more I think about it the more I think the
> lighttable/darkroom distinction doesn't make sense in a digital world.
> -In the history stack, if you try something and set in on and off
> you've just poluted the stack and there doesn't seem to be a simple
> way to just remove a line from the stack. Instead of saving a sequence
> of events I'd just have a list of what plugins are on, and not show
> anything that's off.
> -Even though a lot of space is spent on settings it's often hard to
> access them, as they'll scroll out of the way, and it's not clear the
> pane is scrolled down. The dark theme needs to give some contrast to
> the scrollbars.
> -The sliders in the plugins (e.g., exposure change) are very hard to
> use precisely with the mouse (very small targets) and don't seem to be
> keyboard accessible
> -I'd suggest a single pane holding all the settings as icons and
> somehow indicate which are currently active (desaturate the disabled
> ones for example)
>
> Export
> -The interface here is a bit cryptic but serviceable
> -The export seemed to bring the rest of the app to a crawl (this might
> be because I was running it in a VM environment). Running the export
> at idle priority might be a good idea
>
> Others
> - It's happened a few times to me using the Ubuntu ppa that after
> first opening and closing darktable once, every time I try to run it
> again it will not open and become an unkillable process (kill -9 has
> no effect). I can run it as many times as I want and spawn an
> unkillable process every time. Ubuntu hangs on restart (probably
> waiting to kill darktable) so I have to hard-reset it.
>
> Let me know if any of this wasn't clear and if you want to discuss this
> more.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Pedro
>
>
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