Hi all,
I'm new to darktable. I'm currently trying to get away from Apple and its
products, and darktable seems to be a good way to get rid of Aperture.
I've worked with Aperture for many years now, and of course I'm quick with it
and know all the keyboard shortcuts that are relevant to me. I'm only slowly
getting to know darktable and finding my ways in it.
There's some stuff that currently seems to be impossible to do quickly and
without a lot of clicking around, changing views etc. I'm not sure if I just
didn't see how I could do certain stuff, which is why I post here.
My typical workflow looks like this:
1. Copy a few hundred images over from the camera.
2. Organize them into projects (i.e. film rolls in darktable)
3. In every project/film roll, look at every image, delete the bad ones, do
some basic editing (crop, exposure, sometimes white balance)
4. Tag the faces with the names
5. Put certain images into albums
6. Export to internet gallery
Point 3 is where most of the time goes, and a lot of stuff there seems to be
much more clumsy to achieve in darktable than in Aperture.
First thing, I'm in darkroom view now, which means that I can't delete images.
I'm not really sure what that separation between light table and dark room is
for, anyway? Sure, it makes sense to separate import/export and organizing
images into film rolls from the dark room part.
But why am I not allowed to delete or tag images in dark room mode? That's
where I see them full screen, so that's where I see if they are badly focused
or blurred, which is impossible at thumbnail view. So I have to put in an extra
step, reject them or tag them with red color, e.g., so that I can delete them
later in light table view.
Same with tagging: I don't need the face recognition stuff from Aperture which
doesn't work well, anyway. But I'd like to tag in dark room view where I see
the image full screen and know who's on it (using tags for people's names,
mainly). Plus, even if I do it in light table view later, it's a terrible hell
of clicking and shoving the mouse around, as there doesn't seem to be a
possibility to change the currently selected image without using the mouse. (If
there is, please tell me!)
What I'd like to do: Switch from image to image in fullscreen mode using the
keyboard (not! the mouse!) and simply add tags (from a list of several hundred)
using the keyboard only, too.
What I actually have to do: Click on an image using the mouse. Press z to see
it full screen. Press Ctrl-T to tag it and start typing to select a tag. That
last one is exactly the way I'd like it, BUT: After I've added a tag, I'd like
to add another one. Simply pressing Ctrl-T again doesn't work as expected,
though, nothing happens. I have to click on the image with the mouse again to
be able to press Ctrl-T again for another tag.
Or cropping in dark room mode:
What I'd like to do (what I'm accustomed to from Aperture): Press c to select
the cropping tool. Click and drag to create a crop box on the image (that is
restricted to whatever aspect ratio is currently selected). Press return to see
the image cropped.
What I actually have to do: I assigned c as the keyboard shortcut to activate
the cropping module. That works, but the module doesn't get focus or something;
no helper lines appear on the image, and I can't crop anything (same if I
active the crop module with the mouse). I have to collapse and uncollapse the
crop module with the mouse for it to get focus and the helper lines to appear.
Even then I can't just click and drag to create a new box of the size I want on
the screen, I can only resize the existing one, which means a lot more clicks
and drags. Then, to see the image cropped, I have to somehow unfocus the crop
module again. The quickest way I found is switch to the next image with space
and then back to my current image with backspace (which is a lot quicker than
finding and focusing another module with the mouse), but that's still very
cumbersome, of course.
Please don't get me wrong: Darktable is great all in all, especially in its
dark room features it has much more possibilities than Aperture. I especially
like the "right click on a slider" feature. That's really a very good idea to
make coarse as well as fine adjustments a simple task.
But for me, much more important than all the feature masses I'll never use is
the possibility to work quickly and move from image to image in seconds,
quickly adjusting each one, using the mouse only where the mouse actually is
better (faster) than the keyboard.
I don't fear learning different stuff; so if I oversaw possibilities in
darktable, please tell me. Especially tagging looks more or less unusable to me
at the moment, actually a show stopper—I sincerely hope that I'm just doing it
wrong right now. :-)
My next computer won't be a Mac anymore, I'll switch back to Linux. The thing I
fear losing most is Aperture, but darktable is very near being a good
replacement. It already is more than that technically, but not so
workflow-wise.
Currently, I don't need a new computer, so I won't buy one. But I'd like to do
the transition to darktable now already in order to make the step an easy one
when the time has come. What's holding me back right now is tagging.
I hope you can show me how to do that efficiently in darktable. :-)
Thanks and best regards, Christian
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