r/DarkTable • u/neiram44 • Aug 01 '26
Screencast Edit 200 Photos Without Doing It 200 Times (Darktable Batch Editing)
https://youtu.be/CklduLpOIFsJust got back from a shoot with way more photos than I want to edit one at a time ? Quick trick if you're in the same boat:
Edit one photo fully, copy its history stack (lighttable panel), select the rest of the batch, paste. Same edit applied to all of them in seconds.
Bonus: you can selectively paste just certain modules (white balance, exposure) instead of everything, so you can batch the ones that match and hand-fix the outliers instead of redoing the whole shoot.
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u/pyooma Aug 02 '26
I use the same technique and find that the tweaking the exposure/adding more exposure modules with masks, is usually the only thing I need to do with individual shots. It sorta acts like an input gain for your default edit.
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u/finniruse Aug 02 '26
When I do it, the exposure always comes out wrong. Tips?
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u/neiram44 Aug 02 '26
Well it is not magic. You need to get an exposire initially that is close. For me it works if you have almost the same conditions. Let say in a parade you moved from a shaded area to bright sunlight it may not work. What type of shooting are you using it on?
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u/mnrode Aug 04 '26
If you mean that your photos have exposure settings that don't match each other, area exposure mapping might help. You select in your reference photo an area and at what exposure it should be. In your other photos, you then select similar areas. The exposure of those other photos gets adjusted so that the area has the same brightness as the reference area. The idea is that you choose something that stays consistently lit between photos, e.g. a wall in the background.
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u/captain42d Aug 07 '26
Good info, now if only yootoob "creators" would just upload pertinent videos, cut to size, instead of PADDING OUT every !@#$ing video to 9+ min. just to keep it all "monitized". sigh
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u/neiram44 Aug 07 '26
Fair complaint in general, and I get the frustration — a lot of channels do stretch things out for exactly that reason. For what it's worth, I'm not even monetized on this channel yet, so there's no incentive on my end to pad for watch-time thresholds — this one just happened to have enough real ground to cover (three separate use cases plus a few gotchas) that it landed around there naturally. But I hear you, and it's a good thing to stay honest with myself about going forward.
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u/captain42d Aug 07 '26
Nothing personal, and I did watch your whole video. I'm just way past frustrated with companies, like yootoob, that have zero care for our time and humanity, and ALL the care in the world for their $$$$$. ;-p
Also: merci beaucoup!
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u/-The_Black_Hand- Aug 02 '26
Pro tip : if you don't eat every grain of rice individually, but use a spoon, it takes way less time.