You can also create and edit shapes using the mask manager module. The controls required to create and alter drawn masks may be enabled by selecting either the “drawn mask” or “drawn & parametric mask” icon at the bottom of a module. This means that a shape will always work on the same image area regardless of any modifications that may be subsequently applied. Shapes are expressed in the coordinate system of the original image and are transformed along with the rest of the image by any active distorting modules in the pipe ( lens correction, rotate and perspective for example). Shapes are stored internally as vectors and are rendered with the required resolution during pixelpipe processing. Once a shape has been drawn on an image it can be adjusted, removed, or reused in other modules. Shapes can be used alone or in combination. But, Chris does a great job of walking you through the process and the caveats to get you up and running quickly.With the drawn mask feature you can construct a mask by drawing shapes directly onto the image canvas. If you’re used to using Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW and Photoshop and want to make the transition to this free and open-source image editing software, then there is definitely a bit of a learning curve.

You can’t save the changes you made in GIMP back out to your RAW file, either (just as you can’t in Photoshop). There are no smart objects, so you can’t go back and edit your RAW tweaks in Darktable after you bring your image into GIMP.

But there are a few gotchas, which Chris goes over in the video above.ĭarktable and GIMP don’t talk to each other in the same way that Lightroom (or Adobe Camera RAW) talks to Photoshop. It’s doesn’t quite have all the bells of Photoshop and very few of the whistles, but it’s come a long way since its initial release back in 1996 and today stands up quite well as a fairly feature-packed image editing application. GIMP is essentially a free alternative to Photoshop.

Darktable vs gimp