home | download | howto | module docs | git

how to manage presets

presets are pivotal for working with graphs efficiently. setting up specific things such as dodging and burning with drawn masks involves adding several modules and orchestrating parameters across modules. presets enable you to do this in one click. in a way, presets are a bunch of configuration lines to be appended to the current graph. unlike in darktable, in vkdt presets can apply changes to the processing graph globally, not just to a single module. presets are not a template but a simple list of commands to be applied to the graph. this includes changing parameters, inserting new modules, and performing connections between modules.

also see the list of presets shipped with vkdt.

vkdt ships a few carefully orchestrated presets in the data/presets subdirectory of the installation. these have been created with the default processing in mind, for instance consider inpaint.pst:

module:inpaint:inpaint
module:draw:inpaint
connect:draw:inpaint:output:inpaint:inpaint:mask
connect:demosaic:01:output:inpaint:inpaint:input
connect:inpaint:inpaint:output:crop:01:input

which adds two new modules and inserts them between demosaic and crop, assuming that these two come directly after each other in the existing graph:

nodegraph

of course this may fail to apply on heavily customised graphs.

custom user presets can be created and are located in ~/.config/vkdt/presets/.

create a custom preset

you can create your own preset by using the gui (default hotkey ctrl-o). if you'd rather use a text editor, you can also copy the .cfg of an image to ~/.config/vkdt/presets/ and delete all lines you don't want to be included in the preset.

applying a preset

the default hotkey in darkroom mode is ctrl-p and will bring up the menu to select a preset from a list.

hotkey bindings

for quick access to everyday operations, you can tie custom preset scripts directly to a hotkey. if you browse through the hotkeys in the settings expander in darkroom mode, you'll find entries like exposure+:

keyaccel

these realised as small scripts in the data/keyaccel/ or ~/.config/vkdt/keyaccel/ directories which follow the same syntax as .cfg or .pst files. if the first line is a comment (starting with #), it will be displayed as additional info in the gui.

to support incremental changes to the parameters, you can use the paraminc and paramdec commands, see the existing scripts for examples.

November 2024