Live view

posted on Wed 30 May 2012

screen shot of live view in darktable

For quite some time darktable supports tethering your camera. What was missing all the time was live view. This is about to change though. If you use master (and have a camera supporting it) you can now either use the eye button in the “camera settings” module or hit ‘v’ on your keyboard to start live view from within tethering mode. Since the preview is scaled to fit your screen it might be a good idea to hide some of the side panels. If you are using a Canon EOS (I only tested this with my 40D) you can also use your middle mouse button to zoom into the preview. Another click brings you back to regular live view.

There are a few things left to do:

When stopping life view/leaving tethered mode the mirror of the camera doesn’t return to its normal position
The zoomed preview doesn’t look nice when the side panels are expanded. I didn’t want to scale this down.
Zooming doesn’t work for non-Canon cameras.
Sometimes turning off live view doesn’t work.
At least with my camera the release button no longer works when doing live view. I have no idea if there is anything we can do about it. Using the “capture image(s)” button in darktable works though.
Possibly some other unnoticed bugs.

So, feel free to play around with it, try to break it and report back. And keep in mind that this will suck your batteries dry really fast …

End of transmission

Update: There is a video of the current state in this blog post.

These are comments from the old website, archived as static HTML

off-topic on Thu May 31 10:48:28 2012:
40D? Now's the time to get a 5D mark II while they're still being sold for half the price of a mark III ;-) (don't mean to sound like a spammer, just a tip)
Chris Lindsay on Sat Jun 02 23:31:21 2012:
Hi the is great news! I have a Canon 500D but have not had any success getting tethering to work. I believe it may be something to do with device being mounted automatically, from what I have read. Has anyone had any success getting tethering and now LiveView working for Canon 500D?

Keep up the great work with DT, been using for over 2 years now.

Chris
Didier on Tue Jun 05 07:35:19 2012:
This feature does'nt work with my nikon d7000 and darktable on ubuntu 12.04.
I have no "eye" button and the "v" key do nothing.
The capture button does its job normally, so I can take photos through Darktable but without "liveview".
Didier on Tue Jun 05 07:37:59 2012:
To Chris Lindsay : On Ubuntu 12.04, I need to unmount the drive to have my D7000 "discovered"
smn on Tue Jun 05 09:34:03 2012:
This is true for all systems/distributions.
The device has to be unmounted in order to allow Gphoto2 accessing it.
tatica on Thu Jun 21 14:42:58 2012:
works perfect with my 1000D - and stop complaining about having a 40D :P
houz on Thu Jun 21 21:30:10 2012:
It's still quite expensive. Too expensive to justify buying another camera. :(
pinguindark on Mon Jul 02 03:47:39 2012:
I fail to work with my 100d, so that you did your work? :/
Island Light Photography on Wed Jul 18 02:21:26 2012:
Using a Pentax k5 (and also K20) all I get is "No camera with tethering support available for use."
Are Pentax cameras supported? If so: what order of plugging in and turning on must be followed?
Skand Hurkat on Sun Jul 22 13:21:38 2012:
Gphoto2 (the package that handles camera support) does not support the Pentax K-5 (http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php). For that matter, even Pentax does not support tethered shooting on the K-5, though an enthusiast hacked his K-x to support tethered shooting (http://www.pktether.com/). It supports the K-5 too, though, as with any free software, it comes without warranty.