edit-overview.md

title	id	draft	weight	author
editing an image: workflow overview	workflow-overview	false	20	people

This section will guide you through the basics of developing an image in the darkroom view, where an arsenal of modules is at hand to help you reach your creative goals. Many other raw processing applications try to present an image approximating the jpeg file produced by the camera, however the philosophy behind darktable is to do minimal pre-processing and provide the user with a neutral image onto which they can apply their creative vision.

To begin, open an image in the darkroom by double clicking its thumbnail in the lighttable view.

In the darkroom mode, you see a list of modules to the right hand side of the screen. Each module performs one processing step to bring an image from raw format into an image that can be seen on the screen or printed. The processing steps are performed in the order shown in the module list, starting at the bottom of the list and moving up to the top, like a stack of building blocks where each block builds on the processing done by the modules below. The order in which the modules are applied is important to provide a correctly processed image.

On the left-hand side, there is a history stack, which shows the order in which adjustments were made the the controls of the various modules. This allows you to undo changes by going back to an earlier step in the history stack.

typical editing workflow

When processing an image, the order in which you adjust the module settings is not necessarily the same as the order in which the modules appear in the pixel pipe and do their work. The following diagram shows key modules in the pixel pipe that are typically involved in basic processing of an image, and underneath are numbers showing the order in which you would normally adjust the module settings.

1. The lens correction module can optionally be enabled at the start, to correct problems such as barrel/pincushion distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration. This module will try to automatically detect and correct for your camera and lens combination. Sometimes it may need some help to select the right camera and/or lens.

2. The exposure module is adjusted next, in order to set brightness for the main subject in your image. This then allows to you see the image sufficiently well to proceed with the subsequent steps. Note that shadows and highlights may be too dark or bright, or maybe even clipped. Don't worry about that at this stage; just set the exposure of your subject to an appropriate level, and the shadows and highlights will be dealt with later.

   By default, the exposure module adds +0.5 EV of exposure. Some camera models may need a bit more exposure by default, and an auto-apply preset can be used to override this value. The compensate camera exposure setting is selected by default, to take into consideration cases where the camera's exposure compensation dial was used to "Expose To The Right" (ETTR). See the prerequisites section of the filmic rgb module for more detail about this workflow.

3. The crop and rotate module can now be used to straighten the image and frame it correctly. You may also want to use the perspective correction module to apply some keystone correction so that vertical and horizontal features in the images are properly aligned. This is the digital equivalent of using a tilt-shift lens, which is commonly used when shooting images of architecture.

4. The white balance module does a primary color grading, often referred to as white balancing. By ensuring the neutral colours (whites and greys) in your image are indeed neutral, it provides a reliable baseline on top of which you can apply creative color gradings. The white balance module normally detects the white balance settings proposed by the camera, however this can be overridden by using sliders or presets that simulate white balance settings in your camera. A more sophisticated workflow is to set the white balance module to "camera neutral" and use the color calibration module to fine-tune the primary grading. This will be done automatically if you set preferences > processing > auto-apply chromatic adaptation defaults to modern.

5. The filmic rgb module is now used to do a global tone mapping on the image, where we fix up the shadows and highlights in the image. First we set the white relative exposure (the auto picker next to the slider can be helpful if your image contains pure white regions). The black relative exposure is adjusted if the blacks are too washed out or too crushed. The filmic rgb module will set the overall tone mapping for the image; to make finer adjustments to specific areas of the image, we recommend to use the tone equalizer module.

At this point, you should have neutral-looking image, which is a good base on which to apply further creative adjustments.

6. The color balance rgb module is now used to secondary or creative color grading. Use it to adjust things like color saturation and vibrance. There is a "basic colorfulness" preset that may give you a good starting point. This module allows you to apply tints to the shadows and highlights using controls similar to the slope/power/offset style color grading controls that you find on many video editing applications such as DaVincvi Resolve.

7. The local contrast module can be used to restore some of the local contrast that may have been lost during the global tone mapping. This can help add definition to the image. For a more sophisticated approach to sharpening/blurring the image, take a look at the contrast equalizer or diffuse or sharpen modules.

8. The retouch module can used to touch up and remove any blemishes in the image. This uses powerful wavelets techniques to allow blemishes to be smoothed out while still preserving the original texture over top of the touched up area.

9. The denoise (profiled) module is now used to reduce the amount of noise/graininess in the image. This step is normally left until the end as it is computationally expensive and if enabled too early, it can slow things down while you are trying to sort out the preceding steps.

Other modules

There are a lot of other modules available in darktable, including special effects such as liquify, censorize and watermark modules. We suggest you browse through the Module Reference section of this manual to see what is available.

Some modules are legacy modules that were written before darktable's transition to a linear scene-referred color pipeline. Many of these modules are no longer recommended; for a list of these modules and the recommended alternatives, please refer the the non-recommended modules section.