Hi Christian; I try to stay out of the darkroom during initial stages. After bulk importing from the camera I usually select all of my images and apply a 'base' style (excludes exposure) which gives me the much the same (or better) result than if I had shot everything in jpg format. This at least gives me a fair idea, excluding cropping, of my material and I can start my tagging and any initial deletions immediately all without recourse to the darkroom.
The darkroom is, for me, the more 'serious stuff' and I don't want to be going back and fourth to the lighttable during that process. David On 13-04-09 12:30 PM, Christian Drechsler wrote: > 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 > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced > analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building > apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use > our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! > http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter > > > _______________________________________________ > Darktable-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
