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Comparing Darktable's HDR files to regular files. I think that Darktable does a really good job at creating a raw HDR file combining multiple exposures, allowing a post-processing that still looks natural. It's actually pretty much the same thing as underexposing a shot and then adjusting the curve and boosting the shadows, but with a lot more latitude and a lot less noise. I took 7 exposures, ranging from 1/6th to 10 seconds, at f/8 and ISO 100 with a Sony A6000 and a Samyang 12mm f/2.
As single frames, I processed the 0.6 seconds shot and the 1.3 seconds one. I also tried to process my 2.5 seconds shot, but some highlights started to be blown out. I tried as much as possible to achieve the same exposure with all three shots, and cropped areas of the at 100% to examine the shadow areas and the highlight areas. The top part contains both highlights and shadow areas, and the bottom part contains an area that was strongly underexposed.
The comparison came out very favourable to Darktable's HDR files. To me, they look natural, and being able to process them like I would for normal raw files adds a lot of flexibility to the process. I think that I'm going to use Darktable a lot more under many situations where I would have used manual exposure blending in GIMP.
For those who don't know, Darktable is an open source raw processor, a little bit like Lightroom is. And GIMP is an open source photo editor. They are both free, and very capable. Some features are missing compared to Adobe's creative suite, but not that much. Features that I'd really like to see for both would be:
-Tools to make all photos or all layers aligned. At the moment, I'm using a script (deshake.sh) found at this address:
panotools-ng.586017.n4.nabble.com/Using-align-image-stack...
-Tools to straighten lines manually. Darktable has a keystone feature, and GIMP has a distortion correction tool. And they both can correct lens distortion so long as lenses are in the lensfun database. But it would be nice to be able to trace a line that's not straight (using a vector or something), and then "deform" it to make it straight. Would be an awesome feature both for Darktable or GIMP. Photoshop has something like that for verticals and horizontal lines. Would be nice to be able to trace over existing lines, then trace ideal lines, and then execute the transformation so that the existing lines match the ideal lines.
-For GIMP, 16 bits processing is also a feature I'm waiting for, and I'm sure they're working hard on it.
But yeah, Darktable and GIMP are amazing, I love using them and they work great. I hope their developers keep working on them and maintain them well, and I hope that more people start using them.
Interesting little project has been brought up to my attention. While obviously leaves a lot to be desired, already does lots of things well.
+ Dark theme
+ Fullscreen operation
+ Tool palette tab toggling
+ Non destructive editing including cropping and arbitrary angle rotation
+ Lots of funky widgets for color correction.
+ RAW support.
+ panning and zooming instead of scrolling for the lighttable mode.
- Really immature in terms of management.
- No actual portrait/landscape rotation for the unfortunate GF1 crowd.
- slow in lightable mode. Would be sweet @ Blender speeds/GL.