stefanofornari/darktable-book — Issue #8: Feedback from Nicolas Dade
Author: stefanofornari
Created: 2012-01-06 18:12:43+00:00
State: open

Nicolas S. Dade n-darktable1045@nsd.dyndns.org via lists.sourceforge.net

10:43 AM (8 hours ago)

to darktable-users
I like the book, and it helped clear up a few things I didn't fully understand about darktable.
(which itself has rapidly become my go-to raw image development tool).

As I read it I kept notes of where I though things were unclear or could be misinterpreted,
as well as any typos and places where the English was ungracefull or idomatically incorrect.
Here's the result:

Ideas:
Page 12: rotating a photo to correct one slightly off-kilter
It's might be easier for beginners to use the right-mouse button a draw a line and have the software figure out the angle. Otherwise how would they know the angle to use for their own photos? Trial and error maybe, but that is slow and awkward.

Page 14: pressing Enter to validate a crop
I discovered that double-clicking in the cropped area sets the crop too, and it's one less keypress
Though really I found the cropping non-intuative. For weeks I though it was broken b/c my crops were not working. B/c unlike the other operations, the crop operation must be validated.
I don't fully understand why it works that way, rather than just cropping where the crop marks are placed.

Page 15: magic values for the white-balance fix
No beginner is going to know what sort of values to enter for their photos. Why not have them drag the temp-in slider and tint, and watch the result. Or use a photo with a gray or white area and use the spot white blance. Those are the ways a beginner uses white balance.

Page 16: "set both spinner max size to 0"
I think the word "spinner" here needs a plural, or needs to go entirely. You might think of the size entry widget as a spinner, but that's not how a beginner sees it
Also the max sizes are not zero in Figure 14, while everything else is set in accordance to the text, which is a little confusing

Page 15: "note the light gray border"
You might want to say "thin border", otherwise I could think you were talking about the thicker film-slide-like border, which is also light grey.

Page 48: "diagonal frame formed as illustrated in Error: Reference source not found."
I'm not sure why the error, since the figure 18 is there, on the next page.

Typoes and Eaa2L errors:
Typoes and Eaa2L errors:
Page 11:
"crop and rotate plu-in will"
s/plu/plug/

Page 17:
"The first impact with"
s/impact/interactions/
"Who comes from analog photography is"
s/Who comes...is/Readers who come...are/

Page 42:
"Being the color cast a linear function"
s/Being the color cast a/Since the color cast is a/

Page 52:
"the braking pattern"
s/braking/breaking/
"one o the"
s/o/of/

Page 59:
"nothing more than thinking...will make a great photograph"
s/nothing more...will/there's nothing better...to/
"fully plain...instead, also"
s/plain/horizontal/
s/also/even/

Page 60:
"silver were applied"
s/were/was/
"force a different"
s/force/forces/
"Why someone may want"
s/someone may/would someone/

Page 64:
"the lesser the diameter the circle"
s/lesser/smaller/
s/diameter the/diameter of the/

Page 69:
"On the opposite side"
s/opposite side/other hand/
"this is well shown by"
s/well shown/easily seen/ (or maybe /reflected in/)

Page 71:
"be not linear"
s/not /non-/
"control on"
s/on/over/
"to familiarize with"
s/to familiarize/to become familiar/

-Nicolas Dade