[HN Gopher] Darktable 4.0
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Darktable 4.0
Author : aendruk
Score : 176 points
Date : 2022-07-02 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.darktable.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.darktable.org)
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| Really glad there's advanced open-source tools like darktable and
| RawTherapee.
|
| I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable
| for a few years now.
|
| I prefer the UI and workflow or RT, but dt has better performance
| on my machine. And RT has this strange longstanding bug where the
| image is extremely blurry during editing, and only becomes clear
| after exporting. According to a github issue, a workaround is to
| disable lens correction (and anything else in the "transform"
| tab) but this didn't work for me, prompting my most recent switch
| to dt.
|
| current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the
| edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side
| panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know
| I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them
| yet.
| jseliger wrote:
| I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use
| it on MacOS. I believe I somehow imported my entire /pictures
| folder at some point, producing many thousands of images in a
| film roll; I just downloaded 4.0.0 and have spent some time
| trying to figure out how to reset the film roll, or darktable
| altogether. Or how to create a new library. There's no typical
| top toolbar on MacOS.
|
| In clicking around, I've selected "add to library," and
| darktable is now beachballed. CaptureOne will continue to be my
| default.
|
| (Before someone points this out, let me acknowledge that the
| apparent problems with darktable are undoubtedly my fault in
| some capacity and that I'm Using It Wrong, or that I can't
| properly read the manual, or that I should watch more videos on
| how to use darktable.)
| Normille wrote:
| >I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to
| use it on MacOS
|
| Same here. I just downloaded V4 to see if there was any
| improvement from last time I tried to use it
|
| * Open app, Select 'Add to Library' --> spinning beachball of
| doom
|
| delete the ~/.config/darktable directory, to give me a clean
| start...
|
| * Open app. App opens in a weird window the full width of my
| screen but only half the depth. I try to resize the window.
| It won't rezise, even though I get resize arrows when
| hovering over the corner. Finally manage to make it usable by
| hitting the fullscreen widget.
|
| * Try 'Add to Library' again. This time it allows me to
| select my photos archive folder. I see there's a tickbox
| marked 'Recursive' so I click on that as I have subfolders in
| my photos archive. I can't select the box. Then the spinning
| beachball of doom starts again...
|
| * Force quit
|
| * Delete app.
|
| Life's just too short to mess about with an app that hangs
| twice, requiring a force quit, before I've even managed to do
| a single thing with it.
| morsch wrote:
| It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is
| an afterthought. You guys have to deal with Adobe, or use a
| less advanced alternative.
| brudgers wrote:
| To reset Darktable's databases, delete the two databases
| (files ending in ".db") in the equivalent to
| ~/.config/darktable on your Mac.
|
| One contains your custom configurations like presets, the
| other contains info about file locations, ratings, film
| rolls, etc.
|
| Deleting and reimport takes time when a lot of files are
| involved, but is my preferred way of handling the changes of
| large scale file operations.
|
| But film rolls might not be the best way to manage files.
|
| After six years, I found searching the database using tags
| and Exif data such as camera and date ranges with the
| collection tool works better _for me._
|
| What also helps me is never deleting or moving an image file.
|
| That way the database stays current and I avoid the busy work
| of file and folder manager.
|
| To put it another way, for me flat search is better than
| hierarchy navigation.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Darktable is great! This year I restarted photography, ina
| serious manner, after quite some time. Serious as in I try to
| get beautiful pictures I could hang on a wall. I also started
| to do proper post processing, and darktable is quite handy.
|
| My dad used to be a pro photographer, now retired, and gave me
| crash course in RAW processing. Besides some handling
| differences between lightroom and photoshop he nothing negative
| to say about darktable. And neither do I, it's not darktables
| fault that my photo library is a mess.
| humanlion87 wrote:
| Does your dad have any suggestion on resources/books that
| others can use to learn the same crash course he gave you? :)
| moelf wrote:
| I wish the effort is united between dt and rt (and maybe
| digiKam for management), then we'd have a Blender-level
| competitor against LightRoom maybe
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| A merger between digiKam and darktable would be my dream.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now
| digikam won't open! This is with the latest app image, and
| there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a
| bug report for the same error message that came up on a
| different program, and it seems app image isn't as self
| contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro
| 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this
| bug preventing me from opening digiKam!
| Elv13 wrote:
| AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put
| effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper
| limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal
| and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries,
| anything that depends on system libraries needs to be
| compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example
| is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or
| libvdpau for hardware media decoding. You can't just bundle
| those, you _have_ to use the system ones. Using any system
| library forces you to use glibc (AppImage don 't work on
| Alpine). OpenSSL and a few other a libs you usually want to
| use the system one and have a built-in fallback because of
| security concerns.
|
| Making perfect AppImages is often possible, but the
| automated tooling isn't smart enough. A proper AppImage
| (this one is by me) look like this:
| https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-
| edito... . Obviously this doesn't scale very well to
| projects with 300 dependencies like Digikam. My NeoVIM
| appimage linked above "really, really" bundles all
| dependency and compile your NeoVIM config to luajit
| bytecode. It's 3.9mb compared to the upstream one which is
| 15mb without any config. Note than 0.7mb of that 3.9 is the
| spellcheck dictionary, 0.4 my enormous config, 0.5 the
| AppImage overhead and 0.7 all the legacy plugins still
| written in vimscript.
| thg wrote:
| > current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at
| the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the
| side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target.
| I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired
| for them yet.
|
| You can make them bigger through some CSS tweaks:
| https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/prefere...
| sneak wrote:
| It's open source, you can change anything. The UI shouldn't
| be so annoying and hostile out of the box regardless.
|
| I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response
| was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked
| back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested
| by users with developers silently watching.
| deanc wrote:
| I love DarkTable, it's an amazingly powerful tool, but for 99% of
| people the terms they use to describe editing are entirely alien.
| I take photos on my X100F for fun, want to do little edits here
| and there and filmic rgb etc. are completely foreign concepts.
|
| I'd like to see far more work on the UX. I can imagine a scenario
| where you load it for the first time and you're presented with a
| choice for beginner or advanced UI. Beginner UI would drop you
| into a Lightroom-esque filtered set of modules, and take you
| through a tutorial of the UI.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| The alien terms are actually familiar to videographers,
| colorists, and people who understand color theory in general.
| For some reason I don't understand, video folks have always had
| much better tools for handling color, dynamic ranges etc, and
| also the much saner pipeline than photographers.
| warning26 wrote:
| Sure, but that doesn't mean the UX is good. "This is
| meaningful to videographers and colorists" is a not a great
| defense of UX for an app that is targeted towards
| _photographers_ , not videographers or colorists.
|
| Lightroom and Capture One (and heck, even Affinity Photo),
| make common photography tasks like highlight recovery easily
| accessed with a single slider. Sure, the Darktable UI may be
| "meaningful to colorists", but that doesn't necessarily
| result in a good UX for the main people that are likely to
| want to use it.
| mywacaday wrote:
| What's the reason behind this "As always, please don't use the
| autogenerated tarball provided by github, but only our tar.xz
| file. The checksums are:"
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| Maybe referring to the source tarball github generates for
| releases?
| Normille wrote:
| The wording is a bit vague, but I presumed they meant to use
| the tar.xz if you intended to checksum the file.
| jacooper wrote:
| Let's see if this changed anything.
|
| But my previous experience with editing Sony RAWs on Rawtherappe
| and Darktable wasn't good.
|
| The color science is missed up in Darktable and in Raw therappe,
| I just couldn't get something decent out.
|
| I would be editing for an hour and end up with a weird looking
| image, while in lightroom I would be done in 10 minutes.
|
| People might say that I'm just used to lightroom but I'm not, I
| was using Capture one, then didn't shoot anything for multiple
| years, then just went pack to Lightroom and could edit photos
| without major frustrations and get decent results quickly.
|
| Creative apps in general are a very weak point of the Linux
| desktop, and when they exist, that have many weird requests and
| problems that just using them on windows is easier(Davinci
| resolve requiring the crappy closed source AMD drivers)
| morsch wrote:
| First time I'm hearing this. I think Sony owners make up a
| sizable portion of the user base.
|
| I never had an issue with the RAWs from an a6300 and another
| entry level Sony mirrorless. Though I never used anything other
| than dt, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.
| Youden wrote:
| I shoot Sony and use Darktable exclusively.
|
| I think your problem might be the base curve module and its
| default "Sony" preset, which looks like garbage. Try setting it
| to "neutral", it should look a lot better (presets are under
| the little arrow next to the "base curve" header).
|
| The base curve presets, if I understand correctly, aim to make
| the photo look similar to the out of camera JPEGs. In my
| opinion, they look like garbage.
|
| But these days I use Filmic for everything. My process is
| basically switch off base curve, switch on Filmic, adjust
| exposure so that mid exposure looks reasonable, adjust white
| and black exposure in Filmic to taste and done.
|
| The important thing to me is that this works for every photo,
| not just the easy ones. ETTR photos of high dynamic range
| scenes work just the same.
|
| I'll occasionally run the photo through DXO and export a DNG
| with DXO's noise reduction for further work in Darktable too.
| Makes the shadows noise-free no matter how hard you push them.
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> The color science is missed up in Darktable [...], I just
| couldn 't get something decent out._
|
| If you want help you need to explain what you did or tried. Did
| you work in display referred or scene referred? I can recommend
| submitting one of your raw files to a Play Raw[0]. People will
| edit your raw file and send back an .xmp file with the edit
| metadata so that you can see what they did. [0]
| https://discuss.pixls.us/c/processing/playraw/30
| H_L wrote:
| Took a quick look at some posts there and this stood out:
| https://discuss.pixls.us/t/extreme-highlight-recovery-in-
| dar...
|
| In my opinion, the Lightroom edit in the OP is the best. Many
| of the replies with Darktable edits look extremely bad. Some
| have extreme color artifacts.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Highlight reconstruction was a major and well-known
| shortcoming in versions they were using. Better highlight
| reconstruction for large blown-out areas was finally added
| in darktable 4.0.
| mikae1 wrote:
| darktable has a pretty steep learning curve and it introduces
| concepts from cinema (the scene referred workflow) that may be
| known to video editors and colorists, but that are surely alien
| even to seasoned still image editors and retouchers.
|
| For anyone that wants to learn darktable I wholeheartedly
| recommended the forum at
| https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19
|
| The darktable developers frequent this forum and it's an
| indispensable resource.
| thg wrote:
| I'd additionally add Bruce Williams' "Understanding Darktable"
| series to that list:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlYWvzmJQTrRq7JrYdD7k...
| mikae1 wrote:
| If I need to pick a favorite:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbDlOwmmQnkRmcb2_5WERg
| FpUser wrote:
| Thank you people for your amazing work. I use Darktable all the
| time. It is very good editor.
| pkd wrote:
| One of the contributors to the project had not very nice things
| to say about the changes in this version. Ranty, but worth
| listening: https://youtu.be/56e5Yc-IQ84
| nuclx wrote:
| I gave Darktable a try (never used Lightroom), and as an amateur,
| it is still kind of hard for me to achieve something better than
| the "out of camera" JPGs when post-processing RAW photos from my
| rather old Canon DSLR camera. I don't want to do elaborate stuff
| like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the
| photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and,
| rarely, brightness/aperture. Saturation is maxed in OOC-JPGs
| anyways leading to clipping if it's increased more for the
| overall image. And what I almost forgot, lense correction and
| rotating towards drawable vertical or horizontal lines are great
| features.
|
| So what it does for me is basically barely noticably adjusting
| the saturation/contrast values, fixing the horizon and applying
| lense correction.
| blockarchitech wrote:
| Lightroom user here.
|
| It's over hyped. Yeah, it's cool and all but anything else
| would do the same thing. The only thing that I actually found
| is better in Lightroom is the AI detection features. Same can
| go with Photoshop and paint.net (or gimp if you're into that
| kinda thing.)
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Keep in mind that darktable really insists on doing things from
| the ground up, and pretty much requires you to understand the
| underlying pipeline and what you want to achieve. If you are
| just experimenting with random sliders, you aren't likely to
| get good results.
|
| It mostly sticks to standard industrial and scientific
| definitions instead of marketable names, and contains very
| little "magic" that is common to commercial photography
| software (such as saturation intentionally not being actual
| saturation, hidden curves, and so on). So you can use any good
| book on photography/videography and color science, and directly
| apply it to most of the stuff it has.
|
| Additionally, the developers spend _a lot_ of their time
| explaining their reasoning and writing about the theory in
| general, for example:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos - this channel is
| consistently great for both basic and non-obvious things
|
| https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 - main
| darktable forums, has very good discussions and explanations
|
| https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ Dr. Rant of darktable.
| Primarily technical stuff.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _This gamut sanitization is the third and last to be added to
| darktable, which now has a fully-sanitized color pipeline from
| input (color calibration), through artistic changes (color
| balance rgb) to output (filmic v6). Users can now color-grade
| pictures safely in the knowledge that invalid input colors can be
| recovered in the least destructive fashion possible early in the
| pipeline, and valid colors can't be pushed out of gamut along the
| pipeline._
|
| Oh my goodness this sounds amazing
| taopenIDE wrote:
| The name 'Darktable' reminded me of an IDE that was being plugged
| on HN a lot around the year 2012 -ish.
|
| It had a lot of momentum at the time as it was plugged a lot on
| HN, it was open source and had a similar feel to Atom.
|
| But I have not heard of it since and I'm finding it hard to
| recall the name. Weird.
| trombonechamp wrote:
| The name "Darktable" is a play on Adobe Lightroom, since
| "lightroom" is a combination of "light table" and "darkroom",
| both concepts from film photography.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| You are probably thinking of Lightable, which IIRC has ceased
| development. It never really lived up to the initial hype.
| whitepoplar wrote:
| http://lighttable.com/ ?
| jetrink wrote:
| Does anyone use darktable for inverting color film? I currently
| use a plugin for Lightroom and while I love the plugin, it would
| be great to be able to get rid of the Lightroom subscription.
| tmjwid wrote:
| For B&W negadoctor is very easy, nothing major with it other
| than setting white balance, then setting the film base colour
| and then adjusting D-MIN/D-MAX to the exposure you want. You
| can then leave it there or go crazy.
|
| Colour is a bit more hands on and with negadoctor you really
| can get a nice starting base but it's much more manual. You
| need to make sure colour profiles and white balance match your
| scaner/dslr scan. The you need to set up the shadow casts and
| highlight colours. Much more manual just to then get a rather
| flat image with correct colours to your liking. Then it's more
| regular raw workflow so altering contrast and saturation but
| it's nothing too hard still. But it's 100% more hands on the
| using NLP (this is what I'm assuming you are using. Check
| YouTube see what you think.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I don't but here's some documentation https://darktable-
| org.github.io/dtdocs/en/module-reference/p...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| If you want a quick-and-dirty inversion, you can take a tone
| curve tool, set it to the XYZ color space and make it go top-
| left to bottom-right instead of the normal bottom-left to top-
| right. That should work afaik.
| preya2k wrote:
| Building an open source software with a GUI and announcing that
| said GUI has been reworked in this release, and then not
| attaching screenshots of said changes :(
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| I had an issue with RAW decoding when the dji mini 2 came out.
| Dec's were extremely responsive and helpful, and the software is
| free and extremely powerful to boot.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Darktable 3.8.0 Released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672729 - Dec 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Darktable: An open source photography workflow application_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281775 - Aug 2021 (36
| comments)
|
| _Darktable 3.6_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27720908
| - July 2021 (73 comments)
|
| _Darktable 3.2.1_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156113 - Aug 2020 (47
| comments)
|
| _Darktable 3.0_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874528
| - Dec 2019 (120 comments)
|
| _Darktable 2.4.0 released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 - Dec 2017 (74
| comments)
|
| _Darktable 2.2.0 released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 - Dec 2016 (82
| comments)
|
| _Darktable 2.0 released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 - Dec 2015 (44
| comments)
|
| _A look at Darktable 2.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 - Nov 2015 (10
| comments)
|
| _Why there are no darktable builds for Windows_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883018 - July 2015 (1
| comment)
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