Suggestion: Dark Frame Library

[Saijin_Naib]

I've been exploring Darktable and a feature that has really wowed me is the Dark Frame library concept. In short, the user dumps whatever number of dark frames from whatever bodies they have at whatever combinations of ISO and shutter speed they can into a folder. Darktable will optionally subtract these darkframe(s) from a RAW that is closest in ISO/shutter when matched to the body in the EXIF.

With one dark frame, a very minor reduction in luminance/chroma noise was apparent. Switching to 6 dark frames completely removed my hot pixels and reduced color cast and fine color noise on pushed exposures/high-ISO INCREDIBLY.

I'm working towards using the DeepSkyStacker recommended 30x dark frames to see if there is any benefit to that number of dark frames for non-astrophotography exposures.

It really cleans up the images wonderfully.

Areas for improvement:
Folder can't be recursed for subfolders by camera/setting
Original RAW files only supported (TIFF/PNG/other lossless raster of equivalent bit-depth or greater should be possible as well)
Averaging happens at image load, takes significantly long to open image with 6x dark frames. Generation of averaged/stacked proxy TIFF/PNG would likely speed this process up.

No Darkframe Subtraction:

6x Darkframes (averaged) Subtracted: