Hey!

Darktable 3.0 was recently released, and I finally (thanks to my computer crashing) got to trying it out.

This morning after taking the boys to school, I quickly went to the Mukkula Mansion pier with my gear, and walked up on to the ice to shoot... Well... this:

It was just to test the new and improved Darktable. And boy was I surprised! The whole workflow I've been doing earlier was actually wrong.

I've been watching this video by one of the Darktable developers, that explained to me, that the first things one does in a photo editor is fixing the mistakes the lens and the sensor tend to crap the image with. (I should've known or realized this by myself, but I was too hung up in with the editing itself.)

So the first thing you should do, is to fix any lens errors (e.g. distortions, chromatic aberrations, vignetting) and/or sensor noise that might be in the picture. Only then should you edit the photo itself, otherwise you may exacerbate them in the editing process.

Okay, once that was cleared, I noticed there's now a new tool tone equalizer, that's sort of replaced and combined the shadows and highlights and contrast, lightness and saturation tools.

I have no idea how it works though.

Gladly the earlier tools weren't removed, only displaced. I ended up using the shadows and highlights -tool, because that's what I'm still used to.

What I was pleasantly surprised with was the denoise (profiled) tool, that worked really well. It seems to reduce noise much more efficiently and cleanly than previously. But since this was my first try I will still need to test it on other images before I can say anything definitive. But the result was encouraging to say the least.

The exposure of the image was kicked up 2 full stops in post processing, and I can't say there's any lost detail. Everything seems to be as sharp as ever.

However, I think I still need a little more practice with the new Darktable. The UI looks very pretty and polished, but I need to learn the tone equalizer as I found it pretty interesting after seeing it in action.

Here's the video I mentioned:

(I still haven't watched completely yet but I had to bookmark it for later watching as it was pretty interesting stuff.)

Have a nice day!