Fundamentals of Photo Editing in Darktable | Free Software

Welcome to the Fundamentals of Photo Editing in Darktable course! Get a sneak peak at what's inside the course and learn a bit about Michael Davies, your instructor for the course.

In this lecture, I provide an introduction to the RAW processing software Darktable! I describe what makes it different from Adobe alternatives, and why you'll love editing your RAW photos with this program!

Learning how to edit RAW photos is all well and good, but how do you take RAW photos with your camera in the first place? In this lecture, I show you how to change your camera settings to capture RAW photos, plus how to create JPEG back-ups for those of you who can't fully get away from editing JPEGs just yet.

Now that you know how to take RAW photos with your camera, you'll need to download RAW processing software to be able to open and edit those photos. In this lecture, I show you where and how to download Darktable for free (it is an entirely free program).

The next step in the process of editing your RAW photos is learning how to import the RAW photos from your camera to your computer. In this lecture, I show you how to do just that - describing two different methods for importing your photos.

The first step to understanding Darktable is learning how to open a photo into the program. In this lecture, I cover opening your first photo (or group of photos) onto the Collections page, and provide an introduction to the default Lighttable screen.

The thing that perplexes new users the most about Darktable is that there is no "save" button. In this lecture, I explain why that is and how your edits are saved while you work in this software.

Test your knowledge learned in this section!

The first lecture in the "Darktable Layout" section covers the very first panel in the upper left corner of the Darkroom tab. This panel is known as the "Navigation Panel" and performs various zoom functions while also showing you where you are located on your image.

The "Snapshot Panel" is the first of many unique panels in Darktable. It provides great features for capturing your photo in is current editing state and comparing that "snapshot" to future renditions of your image while you edit. I explain the panel in detail in this lecture.

Next up, I cover the "History Panel" in Darktable. This panel displays the "history stack," an important feature in Darktable that shows you the edits you've made on your photo in chronological order. This allows you to review changes made to your image, and can even be saved as "styles" for future use in other photos.

There are actually two History Panels in Darktable - one in the Darkroom tab (which I went over in the last lecture) and one in the Lighttable tab. The Lighttable Tab version of this panel has more features and functionality, which I'll go over in this lecture.

Darktable released versions 3.4 and 3.6 in late-2020 and mid-2021 with some major updates to the modules layout. In this article, I address these changes and how you can make adjustments to your modules layout to follow along with the lectures in this course.

Modules are basically the most important feature in Darktable. They are where you will perform almost all of your image editing and adjustments. In this lecture, I provide an introduction to what modules are, the order modules are applied to your image (known as the "pixelpipe"), and how the module workflow applies to your image editing.

Below the image window in Darktable is the "Bottom Bar." This area not only displays the camera settings at the time you took your photo, but also has a series of features like image previewing, color and out of gamut warnings, and the ability to quickly add styles to your photo based on modules added to your "favorites." 

The duplicate manager panel allows you to create a duplicate of your image, then edit that duplicate as a separate image. This provides a great way to "fork" your project in a different direction, allowing you to make separate edits to the same image.

The Color Picker Panel allows you to select a single pixel or pixel area and analyze the color values of that pixel. I provide an in-depth look at this panel for this lecture.

Tagging is a great way to add keywords to your photos, group photos based on similar qualities, and be able to easily find any photo in your collections in Darktable. In this lecture, I go into all the ways to tag a photo and use those tags in your workflow.

Test the knowledge you acquired in this section!

Alright - you have finally mastered the Darktable layout. Time for the good stuff! In this section, I'll be diving into image editing in Darktable. I'll show you the most commonly used modules for editing and adjusting your photos.

The first module I'll cover is the "Exposure" module. This module is a great way to increase or decrease the exposure levels of your image for over- or under-exposed lighting.

The Shadows and Highlights module allows you to recover details hiding in the shadows - or highlights - of your image. This is a great way to rebalance lighting in your photographs while also adding more detail to the image.

In this lecture I cover the Tone Curve for adjusting your image's brightness/contrast and colors using a gradient curve.

Darktable has many modules for color correction, including the Color Balance and Color Correction modules. I show you which module I prefer to get the best colors out of your image. You'll get an in-depth look at correcting the color channels of your image, as well as the hue and saturation.

Your camera's EXIF data will automatically be imported into Darktable, setting the White Balance for your image based on the setting you used in-camera at the time of your photo. However, in this tutorial I show you how to tweak the white balance in Darktable to make your photos warmer or cooler, and also go over the various other slider settings in the White Balance module.

There are two main types of noise found in photographs - luminance and chrominance (color) noise - both of which I go over in this lecture. I show you the best module to use for removing noise in your photos, which also happens to be one of the easier methods for noise removal thanks to a vert smart feature.

Once a majority of your edits have been applied to your image, you'll want to sharpen your final photo using a sharpening module in Darktable. In this lecture, I cover the best module for the job, which utilizes an "unsharp mask" sharpening technique. Don't worry - I explain what that means in the lecture.

Vignettes are a great way to add framing around your image while drawing the viewers eye towards the main subject of the photo. I cover the vignette module in Darktable for this lecture and the various settings and sliders found in that module.

Test the photo editing skills and terminology you learned in this section.

Learn more about Color Temperature, using the free photo editor GIMP to demonstrate.

In this Darktable tutorial, which uses Darktabl 3.4, I show you how to steal color grading from one photo and transfer it to another using the Color Mapping module.