- Details
- Category: Photography & Videography
There are several ways to convert a picture to black and white with Darktable.
- Using the monochrome module,
- using the RGB colour balance module, and
- using the colour calibration module.
Read more: Converting a Colourful Photo to Black & White with Darktable
- Details
- Category: Photography & Videography
Darktable is an incredible RAW photo editor. As any RAW photo editor, it requires RAW files. I won't discuss here all the advantages of developing your photos from RAW files.
One of the side effects of using RAW files is that sooner than later, you will run out of space. A RAW file is a big file that has all the information the sensor captures, and because of that it is a big file. My Canon R6 delivers 20 Megapixels photos and each RAW file is around 19 MB.
You will be in a situation where you must move all your old photos to a larger storage: local or cloud-based. As you do this, you will find that Darktable breaks. Here is what I did to fix that.
- Details
- Category: Photography & Videography
It is well-known that storage is getting cheaper by the day, and buying a 16 TB hard disk could be as cheap as 500 CAD. But the truth is that we, the photographers who shoot in RAW format, produce around 32 GB (or more) of data per photoshoot session. For those who do a lot of work (or even do videography), filling 1 TB is a matter of weeks.
Because I am standing in this situation, I considered compressing my RAW files. I will share with you my findings.
- Details
- Category: Photography & Videography
So, this could be a very good week or very bad. My old desktop started to behave very annoyingly, freezing every ten minutes is not the ideal scenario. Happily, I had a spare CPU I was using for Windows applications only, so I decided to take it. Because I have some spare AMD Radeon R9 290 GPUs, I decided to install one of them.
Again, I have been getting into photography so again, processing RAW files with the CPU is not a good idea. Not even if your desktop has twelve cores. So I had to figure out a way to make it work.
As I had described in the article where I made my discrete NVIDIA work with Darktable, this software needs IMAGE support. So, the situation is the following:
- only the proprietary AMDGPU PRO module offers IMAGE support, so no Radeon module.
- the AMDGPU PRO requires X.Org 1.1xx, and Mageia 7 comes with X.Org 1.20.x
Here is what I did to make it work.
Read more: Making Darktable to Use the AMD Radeon GPU (with Mageia Linux)
- Details
- Category: Photography & Videography
As I have written before, after more than five years it was time to retire from hard work my trust old laptop. I decided to get an HP Omen. I must say the hardware is quite amazing and to get the best of it I installed Mageia 7 (the current version when writing the articles).
Recently I have been getting into photography (I will write about that later) and of course, getting the software to develop RAW files is a must. I think Darktable is the best for it; however, this kind of software is really heavy, and even this super powerful laptop with 12 cores at 3+ GHz got dizzy. Fortunately for us, Darktable supports GPU processing which offloads the CPU and displays the images almost right away.
Configuration to make this possible is kind of tricky. I will put here my notes hoping it will help other fellow Linux photographers. My notes are on Mageia but I am confident that anyone could apply them to their own Linux distribution.
It took me weeks to figure it out.
Read more: Making Darktable to Use the Discrete NVIDIA GPU (with Mageia Linux)
