Japan in B&W

26 February 2025

I was mucking about in darktable and DXO PhotoLab trying to get some workflow going between the two. Darktable uses the lensfun database for lens corrections and it doesn’t have the corrections for the lens I used in Japan. Luckily Andy Astbury’s YouTube video pointed out that DXO’s PureRaw (and by chance PhotoLab too) can send a corrected DNG file back into darktable once you’ve corrected the things you want to correct. For me that’s lens distortion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, boring technical stuff I don’t need to read. I’m here for the photos man! OK, hold on, The reason I went down this path is because I like my vertical and horizontal lines to be exactly that and not all distorted. So as a way of fine-tuning my workflow between the two apps I put through a few images that showed significant distortion just to prove a point. And as a way to distinguish this experiment from the numerous others I undertake (which I won’t bore you with), I went with a black and white treatment. Granted, not all of these had to be weaved through this dartkable/dxo and back workflow. That, I think, is reserved for when I’m being really picky about my lines. I had no intention of revisited these Japan photos but I’m glad I did. I really like how they turned out.