Firstly, start Darktable, then on the top left under 'import', click the 'folder' button. I'll walk through the process of converting negatives using a couple of sample pictures. Darktable won't run as fast in a virtual environment because it will have less memory to play with, and won't be able to exploit the processing power of your graphics card (assuming you have one capable of supporting OpenCL and with 1GB or more of video RAM), but it works.ĭarktable will run, grudgingly, on 32 bit computers with 2GB of RAM but 64 bit and more memory makes it a lot faster and more stable. The Darktable website has a guide to installation on Linux (a lthough your favourite version of Linux may already have Darktable available for installation, it's likely to be an old version so it's best to go to the website to get the latest) and with Virtualbox it's easy to share folders between the host (Windows) machine and the guest (Linux) systems. If you're not comfortable installing Linux directly onto your machine then you can - as I have done - use Virtualbox or similar virtualisation software to create a virtual machine that you can install Linux onto (I use the Ubuntu flavour but there are loads to choose from). It's open source (free) but only runs on Linux.

The software I'm using is called Darktable. My new workflow allows easier fine-tuning of the results and processing of batches of images in one go which is the best of both worlds - it means you need only tweak the settings for one image in a set of negatives from the same film, then apply these settings to all the others. I guess this is something to do with the age of the negative, brand of film, or how it was developed - or a combination of all of these. Part of what drove me to look at alternatives was the discovery that different rolls of film weren't being converted consistently using my original method some of them came out yellower or bluer than others. Over the past year I've been digitising my negatives using the method I outlined in earlier posts, and found a method of converting them in batches that gives better results and more control over the process.

Darktable negative conversion