DarkRoom/docs/manual/README.md

DarkRoom, shown

A tour of what the application does, one picture per thing. Every image on this page was captured from the desktop build driving itself — nothing is a mock-up, and nothing has been retouched outside DarkRoom. Where a feature is better seen moving, it moves.

The requirements behind each feature are in requirements.md; the reasoning is in the design documents linked from each section. This page is only about what you see.

The photographs are the author's. None show a person.

Opening a library

DarkRoom opens on a library: a folder on this machine, a folder a sync client keeps, or a Nextcloud account. A folder needs no password and uploads nothing. Choose folder… opens your desktop's own folder dialogue, which can make a new folder too; the folder used last stays on the screen with Open folder beside it, and Choose another… in place of Choose folder…. On a Nextcloud account the library folder is chosen in a browser of the server, whose New folder makes one there. (The browser is not pictured: these recordings have no server behind them. Nor is the folder dialogue, which is your desktop's rather than DarkRoom's.)

Once a folder is named, it is the library — you are not asked for it again, and Open library opens it whole. Subfolder… narrows the scan to part of it. The formats ticked are what the scan looks for; RAW is on and JPEG off by default, because a RAW editor's sensible default is the file the camera wrote first. Change library, at the foot of the sidebar, comes back here.

The library

Photographs are ordered by capture time, with a month heading where each begins. The strip on the left is the timeline — drag it to jump to a year. The bar above the grid filters by rating, flag, colour label and where the file is (on this device, or only on the server).

Rating and flagging

Hover a cell and the stars appear; click one. The filter chips above the grid count what each rating holds, and clicking 3+ shows only those. From the keyboard, 0 to 5 set the stars on the photograph under the pointer or on the selection; P picks, X rejects and U takes the flag off, and Flag on the selection bar does the same with the pointer. In develop the same keys judge the open photograph and stay on it, and the top bar carries its stars and Pick and Reject; the roll marks each frame's flag and stars.

Colour labels work as Lightroom's do: 6 red, 7 yellow, 8 green, 9 blue, on the photograph under the pointer or on the selection, and the same key again takes the label off. Label on the selection bar offers all five, purple included, and None. Each label is drawn with its initial on it, so it reads without telling the colours apart, and the filter bar has a chip for each. In develop, the top bar names the open photograph's label and sets it, and the same keys work there.

Getting about

Drag the timeline to scrub through years; Ctrl and the wheel resize the thumbnails. On a desktop a scrollbar beside the grid says how far through the library the view is — drag its thumb, or click the track to move a page — and the sidebar, the develop column and Settings have one too whenever they run past the window. On a tablet they scroll by flick alone, and a thin line at the right-hand edge shows where the view is while it moves, fading once it stops; it is only a picture, and a flick that starts on it scrolls the list.

A panorama gets a wider cell: about twice as wide as it is tall and it spans two columns, then three, then four for the widest — whichever leaves the least of the cell empty — with a thumbnail made for that width. One that would not fit in what is left of a row starts the next, so the grid still reads in the order the photographs were taken; the arrows walk it in that order, and up and down go to whatever is above or below. On a tablet, or with too few columns to put it beside anything, a panorama takes the whole row.

Help in the header, or F1, opens the controls and shortcuts: every key and gesture, screen by screen, with See it beside those this page shows, and Manual to open this page. In develop it is the ? beside Settings.

Selecting several

Select in the header — or Ctrl-click — starts a selection. Shift-click picks a range. The bar at the foot of the grid is everything a selection can be done to: collections, keywords, presets, export, and merging to a panorama.

Keywords on that bar opens a sheet; type a word and press return, and it is on every photograph selected. The list below the field is every keyword the library has, ticked where the selection carries it.

Collections

+ at the head of the sidebar makes one. Drag a photograph — or the whole selection — onto its row to file it there; click the row to see it. A photograph can be in several, and the badge on its cell counts them.

Collections nest. Drag one onto another to put it inside; + with a collection selected — or New collection inside from its menu — makes a child. A parent shows everything its children hold, and its count says so. Right-click a row (hold it, on a tablet) for the menu: rename, nest, move back to the top level, keep it offline, delete.

Bursts

Frames taken a moment apart that look alike fold into one cell, with a badge counting them. Click the badge — tap it, on a tablet — to open the burst in the grid, and again to fold it back. A folded burst shows its earliest frame; to have it show another, open it and click the ring on the frame you want.

With faces indexed, narrowing the grid to a person puts Eyes open beside their name on the filter bar, which leaves out the frames where they blinked.

Duplicate originals

A library put together by hand often holds the same RAW more than once — a dated folder, a bck folder beside it, a renamed copy another program exported. When the catalog finds files with the same camera, capture time and size in more than one place, Duplicate originals appears under the trash in the sidebar with how many there are; Settings offers the same page beside the other whole-library passes.

The page lists each group with its picture and its paths. One copy is marked Stays: the one outside a folder named like a backup (bck, backup, copy, old…), then the one still named the way the camera named it (_MG_4623, IMG_0001, DSC_0042), then the one catalogued first. Tap another path to keep that copy instead, and untick Include to leave a group alone.

Nothing moves until Check has read the first and last megabyte of every copy and each copy's sidecar. A group whose files differ, or whose copies carry two different edits, is marked skipped and says why — two edits of one frame are kept for virtual copies. What the check reads is kept, so a second visit costs nothing. The line under each group says what the copy that stays will gain: the highest rating, every keyword and collection, a flag or label the copies agree on, faces and the names on them, and the edit if only a copy had one. Where the copies disagree on a flag or a label, the one that stays keeps its own and the line says so.

Move N copies to trash does it, one group at a time: each group is merged and its spare copies moved together, or not at all. The copies go to the trash, not away — select them in the trash view and Restore puts them back where they were.

Developing a photograph

Click a thumbnail to open it. The column on the right is every adjustment; the strip at its head narrows it to one group.

Light

Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, blacks, whites and a tone curve. Hold Before to see the photograph as it was.

Tone Mapping, last in the group, is how the scene is fitted onto the screen, and it runs after every other adjustment. White Point says how many stops above middle grey reach white — raise it to bring a bright sky back from white, lower it for a brighter, punchier picture — and Contrast sets the slope of the curve between. Every adjustment above it works on the scene as the camera recorded it, highlights beyond white included, so pulling the highlights recovers what the sensor caught rather than what the screen could show. A JPEG has been fitted to a screen already, by the camera, so on a JPEG these two do nothing.

Looking closer

Double-click for 1:1; drag to move about; double-click again to fit. The wheel zooms to any amount in between. Past 1:1 the file's own pixels are drawn as hard-edged blocks rather than smoothed, so what you see is what the sensor recorded.

AI denoise

How every raw is developed. AI Denoise, at the top of the Adjust panel, replaces how the camera's raw data is turned into colour: a network trained on this library's own photographs removes the noise and the blotches of colour that come with it, while keeping the fine detail. Look at it at 1:1, where noise lives.

Method chooses how:

• Best, the default: clean skies and sharp lettering, edges kept as crisp as the camera recorded them.
• Fast: a smaller network, taught the same way. Visibly noisier at very high ISO than Best, but still far cleaner than none, and quicker.
• Bilinear: the camera's ordinary conversion, noise and all.

A photograph last edited with Medium, which earlier versions offered, opens with Best.

The photograph shows the camera's ordinary conversion while the network works, with its progress in the bar at the top, and changes when it is done — on a laptop's graphics card, about a second for a 20-megapixel photograph with Best, reading the file included; longer on a processor alone or on the tablet. After installing, the graphics card spends up to a quarter of an hour preparing each network, once, in the background; the photographs developed meanwhile take a little longer. The result is kept, so a photograph opened again, or exported, does not wait a second time, and switching back to a method already used is quick. Strength eases it off: below 100 % it puts back some of what was removed, as grain without colour, for a picture that does not look too smooth.

The lamp and railing of a night frame at ISO 8000, at 1:1, by each method:

Bilinear	Fast
Best

It works on raw files from any camera with the usual colour pattern of red, green and blue squares — not on JPEGs, and not yet on Fujifilm's X-Trans. How noisy the camera is at each ISO was measured for the Canon EOS 6D; for other cameras it is read from a DNG's own figures or estimated from the photograph, and the finished job in the activity list says which. An export uses the method the photograph has.

Moving between photographs

The roll along the foot of the canvas holds the photographs the grid was showing; click one to open it. The right arrow, D or space opens the next, and the left arrow or A the one before; held down, they go on past the stretch the roll has loaded, through everything the grid would show. The edit on screen is saved on the way, so stepping along a shoot loses nothing.

On a Nextcloud library a photograph may not be on this device yet. Its thumbnail from the grid stands in at once; if the original has to come down, the thumbnail dims under Not on this device yet, with how far the download has got — Downloading — 12.4 of 38.0 MB — and a bar, and the photograph opens when it lands. Step on before then and the one you step to is the one that opens: a download that arrives late is kept for later and never takes the place of the photograph whose name is showing. (Not pictured: a folder library, which these recordings use, never has a photograph to wait for.)

White balance from the photograph

Press pick in the White Balance group, then click something neutral — a white wall, a grey card, the air conditioner here. The picker sets the sliders from the photograph, not from where they were: below, the frame is dragged cold first and one click puts it right. A blown highlight is refused, since a clipped pixel has no colour left to balance.

Composing

Crop by dragging the frame's corners, straighten with the slider, lock a ratio from the chips. Done composing returns to the photograph.

Vertical and Horizontal, under Straighten, correct the lines that converge when the camera is tilted up at a building; the crop refits to what is left.

A crop that leaves a mask wholly outside the frame says so, and offers to take the crop back or keep it.

Local adjustments

Local in the rail turns the column into a mask stack. Find subjects runs a segmentation model over the photograph; what it recognises appears as a list of categories with how much of the frame each covers. Click one and it is a mask — then every slider below edits only that region. A mask's slider adds to the photograph's own rather than repeating it: contrast −20 in the mask over −30 on the whole frame is −50 there, and +30 in the mask cancels the frame's −30 inside it.

A mask is a stack of parts. Paint into it, subtract a gradient from it, grow or shrink its edge, choose how it falls off. Show masks as draws the mask tinted, as alpha, or as an outline; the eye on its row switches it off.

Linear and radial gradients, a tone range and a colour range are the other ways to make one; each can be combined with any other. ∩ Intersect keeps only where the new part and the mask agree: below, a gradient over the lower half, then two strokes that survive only where the gradient is.

Repair

Repair in the rail: click a mark and it is covered from a source DarkRoom chooses beside it. Drag either circle to move it; the size, feather and opacity are in the panel. Heal blends; clone copies.

Film

The Film chooser at the head of Adjust applies a spectral simulation of a named stock; below it, the print exposure and push controls a film has and a sensor does not. A stock takes the place of Tone Mapping: it is the last thing that happens to the picture, so every other adjustment decides the exposure the negative receives. The list opens over the column and scrolls on its own — by wheel, drag or flick, or with Up, Down and Enter — down to the black-and-white stocks at its end.

The film's sliders work on a mask as they do on the whole photograph, the way a printer dodges and burns: in a layer, Print Exposure darkens or lightens that region of the print, Push develops it further, and the stock stays the one the photograph was made on. Where layers overlap, the photograph takes the average of what they ask for. Below, a negative stock on an alpine frame, then a gradient over the sky whose Print Exposure burns it in.

History, snapshots, presets

Every change is a step; Undo and the History panel walk them. Snapshot keeps the current state under a name. Presets, at the foot of the tool rail on the left, opens a menu of presets beside the rail, over the photograph, filed in folders that start closed: your own under Yours, then the ones DarkRoom ships — Essentials, Skies, and Film, which holds Colour, Cinema and Black and white, one measured stock each. Choosing a folder opens it; choosing a preset applies it. The menu's last row, Save or manage…, opens the presets sheet, which lists the same folders and saves the settings to apply elsewhere, renames and deletes them, and imports Lightroom presets — Folder… for a folder of them, .xmp file… for one.

A / in a name files the preset: Portraits/Warm skin is Warm skin in a Portraits folder under Yours, and renaming it is how it moves. An imported Lightroom folder keeps its groups the same way.

A shipped preset is a look: it changes what it names and leaves the photograph's own corrections alone, as an imported Lightroom preset does. Saving under a shipped preset's name makes your version the one that name applies, marked changed; Revert brings the shipped one back, and renaming yours makes it one of your own. A film preset carries its stock: choosing one sets the Film chooser and leaves the rest of the edit where it was.

Copying settings

Copy in the top bar, or Ctrl+C, takes this photograph's settings; Paste, or Ctrl+V, puts them on another, and says what it would paste — how many adjustments, and whether the crop comes too. In the grid, Paste to N on the selection bar pastes onto every photograph selected. Which kinds of edit a copy carries is chosen in the presets sheet, or with Ctrl+Shift+C: a look carried across a shoot usually leaves each frame's own crop alone.

Merging a panorama

Select the frames, then Merge to panorama from the selection bar. The frames are read, aligned, and drawn on the suggested projection with each one outlined where it landed — twelve hand-held portrait frames across an alpine valley, here. Change the projection (a 150° sweep on a flat perspective is what the middle of the film shows, and why cylindrical is suggested), ask for the border to be filled rather than cropped, then Merge. The composite is written beside its sources as a DNG and is in the grid the moment it is written — in a wide cell beside its frames, placed by when they were taken — with the merge as the first step in its history. Its thumbnail is made during the merge, from the finished picture, as develop will show it when you open it; on a server library it is in the grid while the file is still uploading. A second merge of the same frames is named -pano-2, never written over the first.

Each frame has a box in the Frames list. Untick one to leave it out, and the rest are aligned again at once, without reading the frames again; tick it to bring it back. A frame that cannot be placed is named there with why, and Merge stays off until it is unticked. Blown sky stays white in the preview and in the composite.

A panorama is usually far wider than a graphics card can draw in one piece. It opens in develop all the same, on a reduced copy that is drawn from the full resolution wherever you zoom in, and it exports at full size. The same goes for a panorama Lightroom stitched and saved as a DNG.

Export

Export in the develop header, or Export N from a selection. Format, size, colour space, sharpening and naming are in Settings, and apply to every export until changed. Where the file goes is an album.

An album is a folder exports go to, listed under Albums in the sidebar, below the collections. Press + there, or New album… in the export sheet (Ctrl+E), name it, and choose its folder: on this device, in the system's folder dialogue (on the tablet, Android's folder picker), or on the server, in a browser that can make a folder as well as open one. Not inside the library — a JPEG exported there would come back from the next scan as a photograph of its own, and the browser says so rather than letting you.

The folder holds only the exported files. The album remembers which photograph each came from, so selecting it in the sidebar shows the originals behind its JPEGs — edit one and export it again. Albums reach your other devices as collections do; a folder on this device does not, so an album made on the desktop asks the tablet for a folder of its own. Right-click an album, double-click it or press the arrow on its row to rename it, give it another folder or delete it; deleting an album leaves its files where they are.

An export with no album chosen is refused, and the header says so. With one chosen, the buttons name it: Export to Exports in develop, Export 4 to Exports on the selection bar.

Settings

Background activity with progress, thumbnail and face indexing, how many duplicate originals the library holds and the way to their review, storage on this device, display and colour, export defaults, what is written to XMP sidecars, the manual, and a diagnostics bundle for a bug report.

People

Face detection and identity run over the library and group faces by person; the Identity page is where suggestions are confirmed, rejected and split, and People on the filter bar narrows the grid to someone. Not pictured here, for the obvious reason — faces.md has the design.

Where things are written down

Feature	Design
Local masks and segmentation	segmentation.md, mask-editing.md
Repair	spot-removal.md
Panorama	panorama.md
Faces and identity	faces.md
Gestures, generated from the code	gestures.md
Navigation and layout	ui-navigation.md
Sync and storage	storage.md

How this page is made

tools/manual/ drives the desktop build on a private X server and records each scene; record.sh <library> re-makes every picture here. Run it after a change to the interface and commit what changed. The pictures are in LFS.

The application carries this page. cargo run -p traceability -- manual renders it to index.html beside it, which the packages install with the pictures and the app opens from Help, from Settings, and from the "See it" link beside a gesture on the help sheet. CI fails when the two differ.

Making it the first time turned up nine faults, each fixed in its own commit before the pictures were taken: the folder picker could not choose the top level, month headings overprinted each other, a category mask widened the column off the window, the mask tint outlived its mode, the first sync uploaded an empty thumbnail shard, a merge that ran out of GPU memory left the page on Stop for ever, the export settings promised to ask for a folder and did not, the keyword sheet sent its keys to the grid, and an empty trash told you to check your library folder.