I will use the common darktable terminology in this mail, a quick reminder since you are new around
DR: dark room, the the edit mode LT : light table, the selection/multi-image view DT : darktable master : developement version of darktable, i.e the features that will be in the next release > > 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). as pointed earlier, the 'z' is your friend. (or remap it to something else, I have remaped it to numpad_+ so all the keys I commonly use in LT mode are on the keypad) note that this is a fullscreen view of the thumbnail, not the processed image. In particular if you don't have raw thumbnails enable it will be the jpeg as processed by your camera until you open the image in DR mode and start editing it the drawback of that option is that all thumbnails need to be generated at import time, which makes import much smaller > - 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. entering edit mode is a "slow/costy" action because it forces DT to process the RAW image. So we try to provide a UI that pushes our users not to do it for the "quick sort" job of your dataflow. you can change the rating and tags of images in DR mode by clicking on the corresponding icon in the filmstrip at the bottom. If you do that a lot, I would advise remapping the shortcuts to do that (no shortcut for that by default) there is a mapping to move to the next image in DR mode, I think it's left/right arrow or space. I'm not quite sure, but it can be remapped if you don't like it > - 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. not sure about that one. I don't have a similar workflow. it's probably possible but badly documented, or implemented in master... Someone else need to answer that one > - When looking at a single image the metadata (name, file, etc) is > overlayed on the image. Get your text out of my images! :) > try changing the zoom level in LT mode (spin button at the bottom or ctrl+scroll-wheel) to something that fits you need better. I change zoom level all the time when sorting images Again, this makes sense because LT is here for quick sorting, not looking at image details. So it's a point where you want to have some meta-data visible at all time > 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. not sure what you mean. This layout was actually quite hard to come by, finding the coorect compromise. IIUC it can be folded out if you know the shortcuts to change view. > -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. I create a style using DR on one image, go to LT mode, select all the images I want to apply the style to, apply it, then edit each image individually if they need extra processing > The more I think about it the more I think the > lighttable/darkroom distinction doesn't make sense in a digital world. you underestimate the time/power needed to reprocess an image every time you touch the raw image. Doing it on multiple image at a time would be incredibly slow and frustrating. We only do it to generate thumbnails and that's done at a background job. that's the whole point of the separation. > -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. doesn't the "active" module group do what you want ? I'm not sure I understand your problem here > -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. I'm not sure what you mean here. You are probably calling settings something we don't usually call settings. > -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 keyboard is used to enter numerical value. I am not sure you can do precise settings with keyboard. mouswheel on sliders, ctrl-mouswheel on slider should help you, and right click on slider should open our precision setting widget. Play a little with it to learn how it works it's awesome once you mastered it > -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) again, IIUC the active group should do exactly that > > 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 > unlike DR where we only process the visible area, and process it at low-res when it's zoomed out, export requires complete processing with the highest detail. And that's slow. I know it's hard to imagine, but the increase of resolution of sensors, the bit-depth of professional DSLR RAW files easily compensate the increase of power/RAM of modern CPU. so RAW processing is still a heavy computing task. You might want to try opencl to offload most of the work to your video card, but i don't know how it cope with VMs. I am not sure what priority we use for our export task. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. 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