In practice, this means Darktable can change tones with any number of tools without losing color information: the tone equalizer, or the rgb curve, or levels rgb, or the contrast equalizer, or sharpening, or color balance all manipulate tones without fear of losing highlight information. In most other tools, the squeezing is done early on, and edits hobbled thereafter. In the new scene-referred Darktable, colors are squeezed into a viewable or printable form only at the very end of the processing, retaining their physical properties for as long as possible. Consider sharpening, or color grading, or contrast adjustments: All of these can push pixels brighter or darker, but really shouldn't suddenly whiten them at some arbitrary brightness. Thus it makes sense to edit photos with a physical understanding of light, where making things brighter does not make them whiter. Which is why pushing things ever brighter in photo editing eventually turns them white, because that is the brightest thing possible on screen or print.īut this is a limitation of the display, not the editor or the recording. Instead, they have a limited maximum brightness, and the brightest color is always white. However, screens and print and analog film can not get arbitrarily bright. A very bright blue light is still blue, and could always be brighter.

When there is very little light, we call that 'black', but there is really no similar label for when there is a lot of it. This article is about my favorite features in Darktable 3.6, contrasting it with Capture One's more traditional toolset.Ī camera sensor records light. But with version 3.6, Darktable seems to have found a new stride. I have been frustrated with it, too, even opting to use Capture One for a while. The scene-referred pipeline has brought changes to pretty much all parts of the editing workflow. This is the norm in video editing and video games, but unique in photo editors at the moment. Which means that most edits are no longer bounded between a fixed black zero, and a white one, but can range between zero and infinity, like light itself. With version 3.0, my favorite photo editing software Darktable started the journey towards a scene-referred editing pipeline.

How to use darktable software