[HN Gopher] Darktable 3.6
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Darktable 3.6
Author : morsch
Score : 163 points
Date : 2021-07-03 11:34 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fsloth wrote:
| Are there any good tutorial on how to use Darktable that don't
| presume previous exposure to Lightroom?
|
| But man, the presets are already great and my RAW images are
| popping with details and color.
| olm_ wrote:
| I learnt a lot from Aurelien Pierre youtube tutorials[1], one
| of the darktable devs. He also recorded very good videos on
| imaging (dynamic range, color theory...), that you'll need to
| understand to really benefits from darktable.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg
| Derbasti wrote:
| There's the Open Source Photography Course by Riley Brandt.
| It's a bit outdated by now, but remains a very gentle and well-
| produced introduction to (an older version of) Darktable, and
| image editing in general. Highly recommend.
| morsch wrote:
| I've mentioned him in another thread, but Bruce Williams has
| loads of tutorial videos that target novices:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos
|
| The series _Editing moments with darktable_ is also very
| interesting, though not a tutorial per se:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos
| bschne wrote:
| From the README:
|
| > darktable is not a free Adobe(r) Lightroom(r) replacement.
|
| Does anyone know what the deal is with this remark? At a glance,
| the feature set/use case look sort of similar to me...
| fguerraz wrote:
| darktable does very close to zero file management, or library
| management, they are purposefully staying away from this.
|
| Also, they don't want to be seen as a clone as feature parity
| is not their goal.
|
| Basically it just happen that the two pieces of software
| perform some of the same functions.
| Derbasti wrote:
| The point is, the UI looks vaguely similar to Lightroom, and
| many people come to Darktable expecting a free clone of
| Lightroom. Scores of these people then hit the forums and
| complain about "missing features" and "incorrect behavior" and
| such. It's a real problem, and happens very regularly.
|
| That's why they try to put it front and center that Darktable
| is not Lightroom, is not trying to be Lightroom, and should not
| be expected to work like Lightroom.
| paperd wrote:
| There are too many media outlets that peg darktable as "free
| lightroom" so people comein expecting that. Sure we do similar
| things, but we are the same like an F1 car and a Honda civic
| are similar.
|
| It gets really old listening to people complain how it isn't
| FREE LIGHTROOM
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I use darktable for my photography and really appreciate how
| powerful it is. I do wish the UI was a little more friendly.
| Throughout the versions I've run into a large number of quirks.
| Tool tips not being a huge thing means you have to learn what all
| the tiny greyscale icons mean by heart. Duplicating the exposure
| module to touch up a specific area means the histogram now
| controls the duplicate and not the original. Minor adjustments
| for any slider with a right click on the tiny slider knob we're
| super broken for a while. These kinds of things would be great to
| not happen.
|
| But I think my biggest struggle with it is documentation. The
| docs are written in a way that seem to assume you know a whole
| lot of details of the software and the theory behind image
| processing. I am by no means an expert so when I start reading
| about how a specific module does it's transforms at some specific
| phase in the pipeline and in this specific color space I don't
| actually get what the effect of that will have on the photo. I
| understand that there is a lot you can do with the software but
| for example it took like an hour of YouTube videos from random
| people for me to figure out how to add a soft focus effect
| (apparently I needed to invoke local contrast?) or how to darken
| a specific spot on a photo in a way that blended nicely with the
| rest of it. Personally I have gotten comfortable with it and now
| can do what I need to do but at the same time that learning curve
| was super steep. I still wonder if I should give Lightroom a try
| just to see if that's more user friendly.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Based on inkscape and gimp, you'll be waiting for a better ui
| forever.
| capableweb wrote:
| Or with a slightly happier outlook: Blender really turned
| their UX and UI around within 20 years of initial open source
| release. So change is possible, might just be really hard.
| [deleted]
| Zababa wrote:
| Gimp has been getting better in the last 10 years. Sure it's
| a long time, but how many UI/UX specialists are contributing
| to open source with their skills? At least there's a will for
| improving things.
| paperd wrote:
| Hi, I'm one of the darktable docs maintainers.
|
| We recently rewrote most of the docs. Have you checked them
| out?
|
| I agree that we should provide a more approachable description
| for a lot of modules. But we can't cover general image
| processing stuff because the manual would be unmaintainable.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I mean this is in a non-snarky way but have you fed this back
| to the developers and considered writing documentation aimed at
| people like yourself?.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I have not and I know that's a thing I can do. I don't think
| I could write the documentation because (a) time and (b) I
| honestly don't think I actually have enough knowledge to do
| that well.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| You might like to dip in to Bruce Williams' youtube channel [1]
| which has many good clear explanations of darktable features
| (though there's the odd mistake, he generally corrects it in a
| subsequent episode).
|
| The main programmer of darktable also has a channel[2] which
| goes very in-depth (and opinionated!) on some aspects, like the
| recent filmic module.
|
| They are both useful adjuncts to the provided documentation,
| which can be pretty technical and abstruse.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/c/Aur%C3%A9lienPIERREPhoto/videos
| morsch wrote:
| Aurelien is not the main programmer of darktable, as far as I
| know. I'm not sure there is one main programmer of darktable.
| morsch wrote:
| I was consistently surprised how thorough the manual is. There
| are not many open source (or closed source!) pieces of software
| that come with a 220 page manual, with another 100 pages of
| appendices. Usually you have to pay another 30 bucks for a
| book, and then do it again when another version is released.
|
| That said, it sure is a complicated piece of software and I
| hear that the Lightroom UI is a bit more intuitive and
| polished.
| asutekku wrote:
| It's amazing they've made this available, but if you need a
| 220 page manual to use a software then maybe the UX could be
| improved a bit.
| eitland wrote:
| I used to be in your camp.
|
| Make it so easy no manual is needed.
|
| After having been subjected to this dumbification of
| software I myself use I'm starting to have doubts: my
| search engine is broken, every app is hiding the menus
| thereby hampering discoverability, plugin APIs gets
| neutered and won't be fixed because "it can confuse users".
|
| I'm well and truly fed up.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| We've gone past mere constraints and are now in the era
| of strait-jacketed interfaces.
| Derbasti wrote:
| What you say is particularly true for image editing and
| Darktable especially: there are already _tons_ of image
| editors available in all levels of dumbed-down-ness.
| Lightroom is actually one of the more complex tools, all
| things considered.
|
| Which is exactly why Darktable is special: it is verbose
| and technical, but offers deep control and complexity,
| which is truly unique in image editors.
|
| (I want to compare it to Emacs, but it sort of lacks the
| extensibility to be a good analogy. But it is certainly
| more emacsian in spirit than any other image editor)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Or maybe people should RTFM
|
| This idea that software should always come to us, and not
| the other way around, is untenable. And, I think, selfish.
| Zak wrote:
| There are valid points on both sides of that issue. On
| one hand, sophisticated image processing techniques
| require a level of user education that doesn't fit nicely
| into a UI. How to get the most out of the various tools
| belongs in the manual.
|
| On the other hand, Darktable's UI would benefit from some
| polishing, and perhaps a more gentle learning curve for
| beginners to become productive. This is very common in
| open source applications, as there tend to be more
| programmers contributing than UX designers.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| There are limits to this. There's no amount of UX that will
| explain mathematical concepts as a side effect of being
| useful.
|
| Sure, you can implement some UX to show the differences
| between different demosaicing methods and how good they
| are, but you're going to implement an interactive
| toy/tutorial (so another form of a manual), or you'll end
| up failing to explain the theory.
| morsch wrote:
| I've only looked up a few things here and there, but in
| order for that to work the documentation needs to be pretty
| thorough. If you think pro software doesn't need a manual,
| I invite you to check just how many shelves in your local
| bookstore are devoted to Photoshop, InDesign etc. Those
| books used to come with the software.
| benibela wrote:
| It took me perhaps an hour trying to figure out how to
| save/export my edited photo...
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I agree. darktable is super powerful but the UI could use some
| cleanup. I also don't like the concept of film rolls. I would
| prefer if it just worked off a disk folder hierarchy. A dream
| would be to combine the file management of digikam with the
| darktable image processing engine.
|
| I also agree that you have to have way more knowledge of image
| processing concepts compared to Lightroom and Capture One who
| shield you from these things.
|
| But the biggest upside of darktable is that they expose a ton
| of functionality and constantly ship new stuff. Yes, you have
| to figure it out but at least there is progress. With Capture
| One I paid yearly for upgrades that didn't add much new stuff
| but often only polished existing features.
|
| One more thought about the learning curve: It took me years to
| get used to and comfortable with a lot of quirks in Capture One
| so I expect the same with darktable too.
| paperd wrote:
| Hi, the phrase"the ui could use some clean up" is
| inactionable and generally when people say this they mean "be
| more like light room" which isn't something the project is
| interested in.
|
| If you have some actionable UI/UX improvements, please open
| an issue.
|
| To the best of my knowledge, we currently have zero people
| who work only on UX/UI issues.
| l0b0 wrote:
| The devs are actively anti-folder structure handling within
| Darktable[1], which is why I still have to use Digikam or a
| file manager and then leave my computer for a few hours to
| re-import my _entire_ collection every so often.
|
| Re. UI, open source programs almost always end up on the side
| of _technically correct_ rather than user friendly. So we 're
| served a bunch of jargon with no easy way to find out more
| other than searching the web and hoping that whichever term
| they use has a single meaning, is only used in this context,
| and is used universally rather than some other term. These
| things are rarely all true at the same time.
|
| All that said, Darktable is great for my simple use, and it's
| my main photo developing application.
|
| [1] https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "The devs are actively anti-folder structure handling
| within Darktable[1], which is why I still have to use
| Digikam"
|
| Same here. I wonder why that is. They already have some
| file handling ability but it seems half baked and just
| weird. The note from the FAQ sounds very hostile BTW.
|
| I wonder if would be possible to set up Digikam so when you
| double click an image it gets opened in darktable.
| paperd wrote:
| In the Collections modules you can easily see your imported
| images based on what folder they are in.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| Image-manipulation tools should stop trying to build a database
| of files, and instead operate on directories. Otherwise, the
| displayed library doesn't reflect new files when you copy them
| into the directory hierarchy.
|
| This always sucked about iTunes too, whereas EphPod simply used
| the files on disk and thus was always accurate.
| fsloth wrote:
| For the benefit of myself and others checking this out the first
| time: How do open my DNG in Darktable? I've been fumbling around
| in the UI for 10 minutes. I'm definetly not a noob but the UI
| eludes me.
| fsloth wrote:
| To answer myself - there is no "Open file" functionality.
| Images need to be "Imported to database".
| morsch wrote:
| You can actually sort of just open a file directly by running
| _darktable <filename>_ which will open the file in the editor
| (the darkroom in darktable parlance; the file is
| automatically added to the database).
|
| I suppose if you don't care about the photo library
| management aspects of darktable, you could use it like this
| entirely, especially since apparently 3.6 adds an export
| button in the darkroom.
|
| https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/special-
| topics/p...
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| The UI takes a long time to get used to. The concept of film
| rolls is a little weird and knowing which functionality is
| available in what context is also often not very intuitive.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I'd love to help but can you be more specific? Until then,
| taking a guess at what you mean exactly:
|
| - importing a DNG into the application: in the top-left there's
| an "import" button and a "folder" button to import files and/or
| folders. Navigate to the folder with your DNG. Select it,
| import it, like you'd expect opening files to work
|
| - after importing you're still in the "lightroom" section,
| which is the gallery of all imported photos. On the left you
| can filter by "film roll", representing photos you imported
| together. You can also rate selected photos zero to five stars,
| label them rejected or with a color (all on the bottom row),
| and then further filter out photos via controls at the top.
|
| - to edit a photo you need to go to the "darkroom" view. Either
| select a photo and click on darkroom, or just double-click.
| After that, well, there are a _lot_ of options to explore,
| haha. There 's quite a few YouTube tutorials that are a lot
| better at explaining the interface than a text description here
| would be.
|
| Good luck and have fun!
| fsloth wrote:
| Thanks, this is precisely the feedback I was hoping to
| receive.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| For a second I thought this was about Light Table [0] and got
| excited. What ever did happen to that project?
|
| [0] http://lighttable.com/
| LandR wrote:
| Dark table is incredibly impressive for free open source
| software.
| morsch wrote:
| I honestly don't know how they do it.
|
| They also "stuck the landing" -- the release schedule for
| darktable 3.6 was posted to the mailing list in the middle of
| April, with a release date of today. - release
| - T0 : July 3rd - code freeze - T0-10 : June 23rd -
| start create binaries - string freeze - T0-12 : June
| 11th - start translation - feature freeze - T0-30 : June
| 1st - only code fix - safe mode - T0-45 : mid-May
| - only safe simple code
|
| More professional than most commercial software development.
| mfsch wrote:
| The release notes are also published in the news section of the
| website [1] and there's a separate blog entry [2], though I'm
| never quite sure what's supposed to be the difference between the
| two.
|
| [1]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-360-released/
| [2]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-3-6/
| aritmo wrote:
| The first is for general consumption, the second is the dev
| blog entry of the changes.
| morsch wrote:
| The second link is probably the best illustration of the new
| features. There's also -- as usual -- a video covering some of
| the new features by Bruce Williams (who's a pro photographer,
| not a dev, just to avoid misunderstandings):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lmrEEvOKM
| paperd wrote:
| The news post is supposed to be "change log" style, while the
| blog post is meant for regular user consumption.
| FpUser wrote:
| I absolutely love Darktable and also Sagelight. My photo editors
| ever.
| e12e wrote:
| > and also Sagelight.
|
| I take it that's?: https://www.sagelighteditor.com/
|
| 39.95 usd, life time upgrades photo editor formerly known as
| lightbox.
|
| Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete with
| Photoshop. Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess?
| FpUser wrote:
| Current version is actually free.
|
| >"Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess"
|
| It does not pretend to be photoshop at all. I found the
| concept and power of tooling brilliant.
| e12e wrote:
| > Current version is actually free.
|
| Oh, I looked at the FAQ which listed the (old) price, the
| current version is donationware/gratis indeed:
|
| https://www.sagelighteditor.com/purchase3.html
|
| > Reasons to Donate to Sagelight Editor
|
| > Current Version. The current version is the original
| release version, with some bug fixes and updates. Donations
| go to updating the current version and adding some
| functions.
|
| > Next Version 5.0. Version 5 is 75% complete, featuring a
| complete revamp of the UI, many new functions, and new a
| new-and-improved noise-reduction. Donations also go to
| finishing this version.
|
| > Get Version 5 free. If there are enough donations, I can
| give version 5 away for free. If you donate $5 or more,
| keep your information and you get Version 5 for free, even
| if it goes back to a regular purchase.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete
| with Photoshop._
|
| I mean, it's becoming easier and easier to compete with
| expensive software-as-a-service that doesn't even have a
| basic vectorscope included, so I also have to drop more money
| into 3rd party plugins just to be able to work with non-
| caveman tools. (not saying Sagelight has one, just
| disappointed with Photoshop lagging behind the other software
| for photo editing in many respects)
| jcelerier wrote:
| I like darktable but I have a hard try understanding why it (and
| lightroom) tries so hard to fit into the "darkroom photo studio"
| metaphor. For most of the people using digital cameras today,
| film photography was already dying or dead _when they were born_.
| wpietri wrote:
| I totally agree with your main point. We see other comments
| here where the core metaphor just doesn't resonate for them.
|
| But is the latter part true? I got my first digital camera in
| 1998 and I was a pretty early adopter. It honestly was not much
| of a camera; it had an entire 1 megapixel of resolution:
| https://www.dpreview.com/products/olympus/compacts/oly_d400z
|
| If we're looking to fix a date when film started dying, I don't
| think we could put it before the year film sales peaked, which
| was 1999: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-longer.html
| mjevans wrote:
| 2007, gut feeling based on "iPhone introduced" and roughly
| when I last bought a camera (which was digital) rather than a
| phone (which had a digital camera I used for 'all' my
| photos).
|
| I more strongly suspect the number depends on the space and
| when "professional workhorses" get replaced. Today the low-
| end prosumer market has been subsumed by mobile phones, and
| DSLRs and such more frequently use bits than film.
|
| I do agree that the low-end of the market was starting to
| phase out in the mid 90s, but they still sold disposables for
| super cheep. The digital cameras main application was a niche
| where someone wanted pictures for their computer or websites
| but didn't have a better chain for loading in analog film.
|
| Early 2000s might be the start of transition, when equipment
| became good enough that digital had benefits over film.
| Workhorse equipment replacement may have taken another 5-10
| years?
| jcelerier wrote:
| People who start a photography curriculum in 2021 were born
| in 2002 / 2003. I'd say early adopters were users of
| 1992-1994 Kodak digital cameras - by 2002, both Nikon and
| Canon already had 6.something megapixels reflex if I'm not
| mistaken.
| wpietri wrote:
| Sorry, I'm still not following. If 2002 is your marker for
| the beginning of the death of film, and if people born then
| are starting a photography curriculum in 2021, how could
| they be "most of the people using digital cameras today"?
| jcelerier wrote:
| I thought that the median age in the world was around 20
| but it's actually ~30. Though I doubt a lot of 30 years
| old today ever had exposure (heh) to a traditional film
| workflow.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Are there any "serious" photographers here that successfully
| switched away from Lightroom to Darktable? How does the quality
| of the adjustments compare these days? Last time I checked,
| Lightroom was able to recover _far_ more detail for example when
| raising the shadows of even a jpeg. Is that still the case?
| paperd wrote:
| I consider myself serious, though I don't photograph for a
| living.
|
| The new scene referred workflow and specifically the Tone
| Equalizer module can pull a lot of details out of the shadows
| and does it really well.
|
| I've never used Lightroom but it seems their highlight recovery
| is better, but that's about it.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Looks great and all but I would love a desktop version of
| Snapseed.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I've been running Snapseed in Anbox on my laptop since I'm
| trying to stay away from Windows, which means no Adobe software
| (Lightroom). It's been really good, especially after switching
| to Wayland made touch input way smoother.
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