What are you switching to?

[Zarastro]

I'm getting acquainted with DT too. The UI is really strange, but once you get a hold on it it's not that difficult to grasp. And DT's IQ is nothing short of amazing:

• Its profiled noise reduction really works
• Exporting images is very fast - actually much more faster then ASP is, today
• Colors are striking, without the need of additional adjustments
• It's under constant development - 1.2 has just been released
• Highlight recover works well, too - much better than ASP (but also a little more trickier)

What I will certainly miss once I move definitely to DT:

• UI (the best one, even among commercial offerings)
• Selective editing
• Catalog (DT's is hard to grasp on it)
• Layers
• Stored processing profiles (but DT will export directly to Flickr)
• Embedded picture upscaling (will have to use Gimp for this)

It's a shame that Corel's mismanagement of ASP led me to such a radical move. But I'm really tired of getting sub-optimal IQ from an old workhorse such as the Sony A700 which should had been well supported by now, and it isn't..

[TheDude]

The UI is really strange, but once you get a hold on it it's not that difficult to grasp.

Well, using the UI didn't feel very challenging for me... Not as simple as ASP, but works.

What I will certainly miss once I move definitely to DT:

• Selective editing
• Layers

In case you don't mind compiling DT on your own, checkout the sources from git and switch to branch mask_manager. (if you try development versions, backup your database first!!!)
The developers are currently implementing an approach for selective editing. You can already define masks, using circular or curve regions. In contrast to ASP, there will (probably) be no layers. Instead any mask can be assigned to a module. If more than one mask is assigned, theses masks can be combined in different ways, e.g. you can subtract one mask from another. Applying multiple instances of modules (as you can do in ASP with layers) is already available in DT 1.2.

[Zarastro]

In case you don't mind compiling DT on your own, checkout the sources from git and switch to branch mask_manager. (if you try development versions, backup your database first!!!)
The developers are currently implementing an approach for selective editing. You can already define masks, using circular or curve regions. In contrast to ASP, there will (probably) be no layers. Instead any mask can be assigned to a module. If more than one mask is assigned, theses masks can be combined in different ways, e.g. you can subtract one mask from another. Applying multiple instances of modules (as you can do in ASP with layers) is already available in DT 1.2.

Seems that you already use DT since a long time. Thanks for the tips, I'm no stranger to compiling programs myself and I'll give it a try, probably.

Do you know how do we emulate the "fill light" slider of ASP in DT? It is really useful sometimes at ASP, and I still can't grasp exactly how to achieve the same effect in DT.

[TheDude]

Seems that you already use DT since a long time.

Actually not very long. I processed some smaller and larger series of pictures and played araound with DT. Btw, I also processed some medium format scans... it's nice. In contrast to ASP, DT can deal with large tiff files.

Thanks for the tips, I'm no stranger to compiling programs myself and I'll give it a try, probably.

Take care of your data base! You must backup it before, and you might also have to use a clean database for testing it.

Do you know how do we emulate the "fill light" slider of ASP in DT? It is really useful sometimes at ASP, and I still can't grasp exactly how to achieve the same effect in DT.

There is a "fill light module" in DT. Alternatively you can use the shadows and highlights module, which does a really nice job.

[swimmer]

Once you get used to DT it isn't that bad at all
It took me two weeks of intensive work with it but by now I found a workflow which I'm content with and is even faster than with ASP ...

With how much pics did you work? I`m realy interested.

Regards

Trucks

I shot around 1000 pics with my new D7100 and they are all processed with DT

My old pictures I import into what they call 'filmrolls' as needed as they recommend to work with small slices and not your whole collection in one big filmroll ...

[swimmer]

Once you get used to DT it isn't that bad at all
It took me two weeks of intensive work with it but by now I found a workflow which I'm content with and is even faster than with ASP ...

With how much pics did you work? I`m realy interested.

Regards

Trucks

I shot around 1000 pics with my new D7100 and they are all processed with DT

My old pictures I import into what they call 'filmrolls' as needed as they recommend to work with small slices and not your whole collection in one big filmroll ...

[madsec]

Thanks guys for the motivtion to look into Darktable again! I compiled the new version 1.2 and testet it, and well it's really getting great! There is nothing missing for my workflow, everthing is there, also very hidden in some cases. But with some practice it should work even better than ASP ever did, at least for my work! Sadly it doesn't support the X-Trans sensor yet, but I am sure it's just a matter of time.

[AsterixEtObelix]

Yep !

I just read the new manual of Darktable 1.2, and there are a lot of changes. it's well explain and I might give a try also. I am positively impress by this documentation.

more I just bump into the french forum of Aftershot and saw that the implementation of mask is on-going. that s a good news for DT: see in french there or in English there

I wish some good news like this could occurs to ASP....


Edit: Darktable documentation for those like me who wanted to have an quick overview

[Trucks]

Hi,

somebody tries the LR5 beta with wine.

http://photorumors.com/2013/04/15/adobe ... available/

Regards

Trucks

[afx]

somebody tries the LR5 beta with wine.

Does not work at the moment.
See relevant entries at the WineHQ bugtracker.

cheers
afx

[madsec]

The last days I tried Darktable and liked it very much. But now I discoverd, that I can't process RAW files of the planed X-E1, and that the support for this isn't planed either. That means that there is now solution for processing X-Trans sensor RAW data on Linux at the moment. Tried to convert a sample file mith dcraw to tiff, but thats not working very good and need some more time to evolve I guess. The only way I see to get good results is to work with Lightroom under Wine, works quite good with the method I postet in the extra thread, but is very slow at the export of files...

[afx]

That means that there is now solution for processing X-Trans sensor RAW data on Linux at the moment.

Lightzone claims to do it.

Tried to convert a sample file with dcraw to tiff, but thats not working very good and need some more time to evolve I guess.

With appropriate backend processing I her it easily beats Adobes efforts.

cheers
afx

[madsec]

Heard as well that dcraw should beat Lightroom, but that was before Adobe reworked the support for the X-Trans sensor. Now Lightroom does quite a good job on those files. My first tries with dcraw produced some artefacts in the images though, but haven't worked with that any more yet.

Thanks for the hint with Lightzone, I will have a look on it. They use dcraw as well, but maybe they do some custom stuff which solve the problems I have...

[madsec]

Okay, dcraw can process X-Trans files without causing artefacts. Found here a command which gives great detailed results (http://www.flickr.com/groups/fuji-x-pro ... 913173508/). The command for Linux bash is:

./dcraw -a -H 0 -o 4 -q 1 -f -m 15 -g 2.4 12.9 -6 -T FILE.RAW

and producess a TIF image. The colours aren't very good in the result, but maybe that can be adjusted by playing with the parameters (which I haven't undestand completely yet). Having good TIFs would be enough for me, since AfterShot or Darktable can process them, while Darktable even can organize the original RAW files grouped with the TIFs.

LightZone seems to be in a pre-release state, they haven't put out a new version besides the oldest commercial version. When they bring their first own version, I will have a try for sure.

[AsterixEtObelix]

Hi

about switching for linux, it seems that the mask are appearing in Darktable:

http://www.darktable.org/2013/04/masks/

That's a good point