Since switching from Windows to Linux and from Lightroom to darktable, my setup is no longer properly color-managed. It used to be - back on Windows everything was reasonably calibrated. But in the end, maybe it doesn’t really matter. Or more precisely: maybe it never did. Or rather: it’s hopeless.

Lighting conditions vary. Most of your screens likely aren’t color-managed or adapted to your current environment. And then there’s everything else - biology, psychology, mood. Truth is, we’ll never all see exactly the same image.

But perhaps that’s not a flaw - it’s the point. A space for different ways of seeing. Just as a sculptor starts with raw stone, I start with a RAW file: a block of digital potential. The image I shape from it isn’t the final word - just the beginning of someone else’s interpretation.

#Photography #Squared

@Vulpy Wise words, Kay. And a beautiful picture, too.

@Vulpy

We can get lost in the focus to be correct, to be accurate. And to what end?

Does it matter to be "right", or is what really matters to simply be present?

@Vulpy Very nice image! Color management is important if you are printing. I also find it useful for social media, however, I set my camera white balance to 5500k & never touch it. Only on overly bluish twilight photos do I find myself warming the white balance a bit in Darktable. Under Linux you can use displaycal-py3 which is an actively developed fork of the long deprecated DisplayCAL. Or, if the command line suits you better, the backend of the GUI, argyllCMS, is the way to go.

@elaterite @Vulpy Do you know if the new fork of DisplayCal works under Wayland? I'm on Fedora 42 Gnome.

@adventure_tense Don't know. Here's the rpoject website: https://github.com/eoyilmaz/displaycal-py3

@Vulpy

@elaterite @ewen @Vulpy uuugh you all are making me feel bad for dual booting just to use Capture One.

I guess I just need to find a faster workflow for darktable. I can get good results, but it is slow for doing large numbers of images from events

@adventure_tense Oh, I guess so. I'm running Linux Mint 21.3 which is based on Ubuntu Jammy 22.04 which I see has Wayland as the default.

@nigel Maybe you just need to setup some presets? I occasionally do event photography and I can blow through a few hundred photos pretty quickly. That's even with manually masking faces to lighten them a bit.

@Vulpy @ewen

@nigel

Capture One is the most frustrating part of my life right now.

I don't wanna use it, because they're mean to customers and subscription is evil. But the fact is there is nothing more efficient for getting through professional jobs than this.

When you have several thousand images from a shoot, and need to find the good ones and give them that little tweak to bring out an extra few % in quality (because that's what your client is paying for), no other tool can match the workflow of Capture One for speed and performance.

I wish it wasn't so.

As a professional, your software makes more of an impact on your business than your choice of camera.

@ewen exactly right, sadly. Luckily I have an older version that uhhhh doesn’t phone home, and works with my older camera still.

But I’d still rather not dual boot, or even run a VM with it in (which I couldn’t get to work efficiently but that’s a me/skill issue). I did use darktable in 2019/20, but they changed from base-curve workflow to filmic module and it slowed me down immensely. And it wasn’t that fast before that anyway.

I basically need to have my style set, then skip through the images setting exposure to account for shooting manual and clouds going over or whatever. Which is pretty quick in C1, but drktable i need to adjust shadows and highlights in flimic module as well for some reason. Bot Lightroom and C1 seem to compress each end of the exposure and sort of drag thr middle arpund as you adjust it, which is pleasing. Darktable seems to just linearly push it out of bounds.

@elaterite maybe. I did used to do that on 2019/20, then used C1 due to the free version being usable with Fujifilm and worked out it is way faster to get the same result.

Maybe I’ll have a play this weekend again, I probably should.

@elaterite I don't end up using presets per se but I use the selective copy and paste of operations in the light table to apply the same edits to all photos of similar conditions. It gives a nice base to start with.
@nigel @Vulpy @ewen

I still have my little M1 MacBook Air which is five years old and still feels as good as the day I bought it. Managed to get it dual-booting into Asahi Linux, and enjoy that space. But when time comes to edit photos, there's just nothing equal to Capture One, so I go back... and stay there.

Most companies will never ever never make the move to Linux. Not enough volume of paying users. I wish it weren't so. So I'm gonna be on MacOS for a while longer, at least on the desktop.

@ewen @shom @elaterite @Vulpy yeah that’s exactly what I do on every platform I’ve used, I used darktable for a couple of years then tried Capture One and it was still faster sadly.

The fastest images and the best darktable results I’ve ever had were using someone’s 1DX raws… it was easy compared to fighting with Fujifilm in darktable, so I wonder if it’s an issue of support because of what is commonly used. Dunno. I’m probably just making excuses, I just know that I’d rather not feel like I’m fighting the software.

@elaterite I'll do a little research when I get home. Maybe Fedora has an RPM on one of their repositories.

@elaterite Bob, thanks. I did find an rpm version on Fedora that I could install. No issues found so far.

@adventure_tense Oh, outstanding! Do you know if it's the original version for Python 2 or is it the forked version for Python 3? There's some functionality missing from the forked version, but the necessary bits are there. I haven't upgraded to the latest release. It's been about a year since I calibrated... :/

@elaterite It's the Python 3 version. 3.9.16 (rc2) I believe.

There may be a Debian version out there for LM. If I come across it before you do, I'll send you a link. 🙂

@adventure_tense Welp, I just checked the LM repository and apparently not. Looks like for Debian distros you still have to build from source. :/

@ewen Ya, I've done that for events I've shot. In Darktable its called styles. You create a style from a particular history stack and select images to apply it to. But most of the time, for images shot under various lighting conditions, I use presets and then from there, just make a few tweaks once I'm in the editor. Although, I find myself often masking these days which is a lot of hand work. Still the presets get me half of the way there.

https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.8/en/module-reference/utility-modules/lighttable/styles/

@Vulpy @nigel @shom

@haraldhux@photog.social Thank you, Harald. ☺️

@Vulpy I can't imagine the color looking any more perfect. It is like a painting, like a really magnificent painting

@Star12Mt@masto.nyc Thank you so much! I’m really glad to hear it’s not just me who likes it. ☺️

@Vulpy 👍 Since I didn't have to worry about printing stuff (about 25 years ago), I haven't bothered to check any color calibrations. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder on whatever device they choose to use... 😀

@antoinnesterk@cyberplace.social Yes, very true, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, quite literally. That said, I do occasionally think about printing (or having things printed), and for that, proper color management would definitely be useful. But then again, I hardly ever get around to it anyway.

@Vulpy So why bother now? Worry later ;-)

#TegeltjesWijsheid

@antoinnesterk@cyberplace.social Kommt Zeit, kommt Rat. 🙂

@ewen@social.ewenbell.com Accuracy speaks to the mind. Presence speaks to everything else.

@adventure_tense@mapstodon.space As far as I understand the long thread at https://discuss.pixls.us/t/wayland-color-management/10804 , it’s still not possible to profile your system under Wayland. However, under KDE/Wayland, it is indeed possible to assign an ICC profile. @elaterite@mastoart.social

@Vulpy Well, there are good reasons for calibration, if you’re printing as you noted, or if you work a lot with bright and saturated colours, and of course if you work in fashion etc., but otherwise I don’t think it’s important. In this photo (beautiful, btw!) there are no „correct“ colours anyway, it’s all about what you saw at that moment.

But what’s so hard with calibration on Linux, if I may ask? Does darktable not support profiles or something?

@skittles@berlin.social Absolutely agree - calibration and profiling definitely have their place. My monitor covers almost the entire Adobe RGB gamut, and I still dream of the day we can finally move beyond sRGB globally and settle on a wider standard. The reds and greens on my screen are absolutely stunning - but sadly, there’s no good way to share that.

As for calibration on Linux: it’s... complicated. I’m using Wayland with KDE. KDE/Wayland *can* apply an ICC profile, but actual profiling (i.e. creating the profile) isn’t possible under Wayland yet. darktable supports ICC profiles too, but from what I can tell, KDE and darktable may end up applying the profile twice - which leads to wonky results.

@Vulpy Thanks for the link. I haven't paid attention to the Wayland / Xorg transition. But now that I look I see LM Cinnamon is still running Xorg which allows a system wide ICC profile to be installed. So under LM to date, I have had no problem with color management. For me, if Wayland doesn't recognize a system wide ICC profile, it's not ready for prime time.

@adventure_tense

@elaterite @ewen @Vulpy @shom yeah, have done all that historicaly. Am currently processing a batch from last night in darktable and it is sloooow; mainly loading times between images. It is a few seconds instead of instant. It is workable, but annoying… and I’m wondering if it doesn’t like my AMD card.

@nigel Are you having trouble with the slow loading in the lighttable module? If so, try setting the slider at the bottom to show three images (thumbnails) across. I find if it's two or one, it is very slow to load because it applies presets to the actual RAW files (I think that's what's going on?) rather than showing a low resolution jpg for review. There are settings in the preferences dialog that will change this behavior.

@Vulpy @shom @ewen

@elaterite @Vulpy @shom @ewen light-table loads fine (I have it set to a smaller jpeg preview), it is when skipping to the next image while processing each one in darkroom view. I understand it has to apply all of the edits, but lightroom and C1 both load the next image instantly - which tells me they do something differently.

@nigel Hm, Darktable isn't instant on my desktop, but it's only a second or two even with a couple of parametric masks & other edits. On my laptop, however, it is very slow applying some of the edits. I've used Lightroom a bit at my former job where there was a large format fine art printing dept, but I didn't use it enough to say whether it was slow or fast. I printed from Photoshop, which I felt was kind of clunky on the Apple machine we used, but they were large print jobs. @Vulpy @shom @ewen