[HN Gopher] Darktable 5.0.0
___________________________________________________________________
Darktable 5.0.0
Author : morsch
Score : 265 points
Date : 2024-12-31 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.darktable.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.darktable.org)
| harperlee wrote:
| From the landing page: darktable is (...) a
| virtual lighttable and darkroom
|
| Quite an interesting way to say that is a Lightroom alternative
| :)
| caustic wrote:
| Quite literally on the github home page it says that "darktable
| is not a free Adobe(r) Lightroom(r) replacement."
| cornstalks wrote:
| That doesn't mean it's not an alternative to Lightroom. That
| was put in for reasons discussed in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27722258
| albumen wrote:
| The feature list, description and thumbnail of the UI begs to
| differ.
| misnome wrote:
| Don't forget the name!
| worksonmine wrote:
| I don't like descriptions mentioning what they're trying to
| replace. I don't know what Lightroom is and what it's used for.
| A project description should be stand-alone and should tell me
| why I need it without riding on some other projects' name
| recognition.
| pbalau wrote:
| No offense, but "lightable" and "darkroom" are well
| established photography terms.
|
| A lighttable is literally a table with a light source under
| the table body and was used to easily and quickly "see" your
| developed film strips or frames to pick what you want
| "printed" on paper. There is also the term "loupe", which
| derives from the magnifying tool used to see details on the
| otherwise quite small negatives.
|
| Darkroom is a dark room where you can print your negatives on
| photo sensitive paper, you need the room to be dark, so
| ambient light doesn't affect the print process.
|
| These two terms have nothing to do with Adobe.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| "This is a vacuum" > "This is a Hoover alternative".
|
| Describing what the tool is for usually is better than
| referencing a brand name that not everyone would be as familiar
| with.
| acomjean wrote:
| I've switched to Linux, and one of the hardest things was to find
| photo organization software. Adobe Lightroom was good this. I'm
| still sorting it out on Linux.
|
| I tried Darktable and found it really useful for editing raw
| files. Once you figure out the filters they're powerful and
| professional.
|
| Darktable really opionated about how it stores files/ libraries
| however. It really wants you to have one library for all your
| photos, where I used separate libraries for various events I've
| photographed. Also going through and ranking photos wasn't as
| straight forward (is it applying the rank to the image on the
| strip on the bottom vs the image in the main window?)
|
| So I'm sorting with digikam, though it's editing features don't
| seem as powerful. It's a process.
| kataklasm wrote:
| I'm using Collections in darktable to achieve this. Have you
| tried it? Although I don't distinguish on an event basis I sort
| everything into folders by month. -2024
| --jan --feb ... --nov --dec
| -2025 --jan
| acomjean wrote:
| I did.
|
| Part of my mindset is when I'm done with an event I don't
| want to have to deal with those folders, but know where to
| find them. I have a large set of "everything else" photos
| that works well with darktable.
|
| It's partially the burden of how I used to do it... maybe I'm
| being stubborn but it did work well for me.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I had the same problem. Lots of solutions out there I think
| PhotoPrism was the last one I tried but it involved docker. I
| really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was
| debating forking an existing project.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I am a happy user of PhotoPrism. I use it with Podman. I
| initially hated the fact that it requires containers but then
| I realized this makes it much easier to work with multiple
| libraries simultaneously which was mentioned by OP. The
| Photos app on the Mac does not allow using multiple libraries
| simultaneously; I believe it needs to be restarted to switch
| libraries.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| If you really don't want to use containers, then it's
| possible (with sufficient OS knowledge) to install the
| software natively by looking at the Dockerfile and manually
| running the commands.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > I really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was
| debating forking an existing project.
|
| If you want design help let me know.
|
| Bu yes, this. There is no "in between" on linux. Photo apps
| either do everything confusingly, or it does nothing but show
| you the photo.
|
| If Darktable had "simple" and "professional" settings it
| would be awesome. Sometimes you just want a quick edit and
| other times it needs to be more complex. But I have to wade
| through endless tiny crowded options in Darktable just to
| crop and change some basic levels.
|
| Digikam gets a bit closer, but it still starts as
| complicated.
|
| It would be great if the application gave you a simple
| interface at first, and then you can add on complexity if you
| need it. You want detailed curve manipulations? Great! Select
| "Add feature" and choose "Curves". This would help a lot with
| linux growth IMHO since it is the one thing I hear that
| frustrates just about everyone who does not want to use
| google photos.
|
| The Photos App from Apple is only getting worse as well and
| Adobe is a horric mess of subscriptions and AI BS.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think my issue is a lot of them slow down to a crawl and
| Digikam fell under this problem for me. Importing thousands
| of images and videos isnt easy. I did like that Photoprism
| had a WebUI made it easy to access the photos across my
| network.
| buildbot wrote:
| Yep, the only photo library tool I've used that can
| handle 40K raws is Lightroom and Photomechanic.
| Everything else can't handle ~2TB of photos.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Photos also stuffs everything into a proprietary
| database... a blunder made by far too many photo
| applications.
| ezst wrote:
| Pretty much the same, here, with digikam used to aggregate
| collections of images taken and edited by other, specialized,
| software. I don't hate that set-up: IMO, the requirements for
| processing RAWs and managing a collection are different enough
| to warrant separate tools, and I find digikam really pleasant
| to work with. What would you like to see improved?
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| What would you like to see improved?
|
| Last time I tried digikam it crashed on startup (macos). This
| was back in September. I'm sure it's not a hugely popular
| opinion in open source circles, but IMO neither digikam nor
| darktable are good enough to warrant the hassle of dealing
| with separate applications.
|
| Lightroom is a bit of jack of all trades, but it's good
| enough as a DAM that I'm not wanting for a separate app.
| ezst wrote:
| I don't have stability issues with digikam while using it
| on fedora. It's well maintained and sees frequent releases
| so if I were you and had some spare time, I wouldn't shy
| away from opening issues and reaching out to developers.
|
| And yeah, sure, if the "do it all" approach works for you,
| and the tool you desire already exists, I'm not there to
| turn you away from it! Since digikam can open any lot of
| images in a side application for edition, I'm not sure what
| kind of improvements a "kitchen sink" application would do
| to my workflows and I was curious about that :-)
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| I don't have stability issues with digikam while using it
| on fedora
|
| Right, I'm not switching to Linux just for digikam.
| Since digikam can open any lot of images in a side
| application for edition
|
| If I'm going to open a photo in Lightroom anyways, why
| not use it for asset management? I'm not wedded to an
| all-in-one solution, but neither digikam nor
| darktable/rawtherapee offer enough of an improvement over
| the respective modules within Lightroom to warrant usage.
| dheera wrote:
| I absolutely detest this whole "library" business. Why can't
| just I open a file? Or just browse a folder, click some files
| and edit them? WTF is a "library"? A "film roll"? Keep it real.
|
| I also wish they had a better color calibration workflow.
| Everything looks like trash with the new color calibration and
| filmic RGB nonsense. Especially DJI-shot raw files. Lightroom
| opens them fine.
| 10729287 wrote:
| Same here. It all began with itunes and having duplicates of
| my mp3s. I always been more of a winamp user myself ! On my
| mac I use Photomator and appreciate how it allows me to
| browse my ssd and use my very own file tree
| dvdkon wrote:
| The main problem I see with "just files in folders" is
| thumbnails. You need some thumbnail cache, ideally
| pregenerated, for speedy browsing. And once you've got that,
| you've lost the simplicity of "just files" anyhow.
|
| And you might not want them, but things like facial
| recognition, search by metadata, and object detection really
| only work with a central database/index of all the photos you
| have.
| dheera wrote:
| Just store the thumbnails in a cache or in a dotfile
| subdirectory. This can be transparent to the user. If the
| user is going linearly down or up the list you can also use
| a Kalman filter to predict what files and directories the
| user might browse next and preroad thumbnails for those
| directories in advance. Don't wait till the user actually
| scrolls to something to _start_ working on thumbnail
| generation. UI Design 101.
|
| Also, many consumer cameras embed thumbnails in metadata
| that can be extracted almost instantaneously. For those
| there is no image resizing work to do. But you can still
| load the thumbnails into memory in advance to make it even
| snappier.
|
| Just don't make me add the folder to a "roll" or "library"
| just to browse it for 5 seconds.
| jitl wrote:
| You might be happy organizing your own folders but 99.9% of
| people are happier to dump their photos into a software and
| have the software manage the files and folders behind a
| database and make cloud sync and sharing go brr.
| Derbasti wrote:
| I edit with Darktable, but organize with DigiKam. Not that
| Darktable is bad, but I prefer to organize my rendered JPEGs,
| not my RAWs.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| You may want to have a look to a software called tonphotos if
| you just want to sort and filter pictures. If I remember well
| it doesn't allow image edition though.
|
| For the moment pay for lightroom just for my needs but the
| bills are starting to sting... To stay on windows, the best
| alternatives I found are zoner photo studio X and Mylio photo
| but the first one doesn't do face recognition and the second
| one doesn't handle a camera I used several years ago.
|
| Digikam would be good I guess but I can't stand the UI.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| The problem is the seemingly endless parade of photo software
| that forces you to add everything to a "database," instead of
| simply a directory structure. It's tedious as hell, and must be
| manually kept up to date all the time instead of simply picking
| up any files added to the structure.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| It's already available on flathub;
| https://flathub.org/apps/org.darktable.Darktable
| FiniteLooper wrote:
| I'm very interested in DarkTable, but I have years on photography
| in Adobe Lightroom. I'm growing tired of LightRoom, but I feel
| like I'm now locked into that ecosystem. Is there some kind of
| migration to move my LightRoom edits out of there and into
| something like DarkTable?
| glitchcrab wrote:
| No, it's simply not possible. You can migrate some information
| using sidecar files but Lightroom's edit details are
| proprietary and so cannot be migrated.
|
| https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/overview/sidecar-f...
| jl6 wrote:
| I've been using Digikam for 20 years, and although it's
| pretty good now, it has been a rough 20 years in some
| respects. Nevertheless I'd do it all again rather than suffer
| the trap of putting data into a system designed to prevent
| you getting it out.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Edits are essentially impossible to transfer between RAW
| development software, and even between major versions of
| the same software. It's not specific to Lightroom, Digikam,
| or Darktable. You would have to replicate everything, from
| the color science to quirks and bugs. Adobe literally ships
| previous versions of Lightroom's processing code in each
| new Lightroom version, to avoid messing anything up. As
| does Darktable (it still contains the previous code for
| compatibility) and any other software.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I wrote this [1] when I moved from LR to DT. Its my best
| attempt to batch-create xmp sidecars (which DT can^Wclaims to
| read) from the LR catalog. Despite the terrible name it was
| adequate for my purposes, but I only ahoot jpeg not RAW.
|
| [1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/XmpLibeRator
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Congratulations to the Darktable team on their latest release.
|
| I tried and tried with Darktable, but found the UI and features
| extremely frustrating. This [1] post, about a year ago, convinced
| me to stop inflicting pain on myself and move on. I use Capture
| One Pro now and am happy with the decision.
|
| But I'm glad that DT exists as a FOSS solution for those who want
| that.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38412582
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I am in the same boat. Lightroom just works and is
| significantly faster to do the same basic things as DT. What
| got me to switch was the transition from Legacy to V3 module
| order and the absolute mess that created for no discernible
| reason: my photos that were developed using an older version of
| DT suddenly looked straight up broken and anything new I
| imported defaulted to Legacy even though I said to always
| default to V3 to the point where each photo had to be switched
| individually to V3, a process that on a reasonably powerful
| computer took about 1.5 seconds.
|
| Moreover the churn of modules that are available but you aren't
| supposed to use got old fast. I really do wish I could keep
| using a FOSS solution but Lightroom has taken my time to edit a
| batch of photos from many hours to under an hour with better
| results and virtually no learning curve. Sadly DT has managed
| to sell me an Adobe product.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Same for me. I tried DT for 2 years but never got comfortable
| with it. Lightroom just works for me from editing to
| keywording and geotagging. And the AI masking stuff in
| Lightroom is really good.
| infotainment wrote:
| I really wish someone would fork Darktable to build "Darktable
| but with a UX that isn't horrible."
|
| One day!
| cjonas wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what ansel tried to do?
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Not only that. I'd like to have AI masking, effective clone
| tools, lens corrections and please... actually working
| defaults! You import RAWs (compressed RAFs) and it render
| horrible results!
|
| Its bloated with useless functions, it's slow, UI is ugly...
| Why not focus on important? Stop developing another demosaic
| method and make it more user friendly, less nerdy piece of
| tool.
| willcodeforfoo wrote:
| Unrelated, but wondering if anyone here could recommend a
| Darktable-ish web-based photo organization app, less focused on
| editing but supporting tagging, starring, etc.?
| haunter wrote:
| Look through this, there is no one perfect solution
|
| https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
| Carrok wrote:
| Photoprism
| CapSel wrote:
| Something like immich? https://immich.app
| ezst wrote:
| Nextcloud memories (which is a third-party app, not to be mixed
| with the photos one, bundled with NC) is pretty decent IMO.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| immich, photoprism, librephotos
| WithinReason wrote:
| Is there any open source software that has stable diffusion-based
| denoising for RAW files?
| deanc wrote:
| I've used Darktable for quite a few years now, casually, because
| seriously I'm not paying 100+ euros a year as a casual to edit my
| photographs in lightroom. Darktable's flaw has _always_ been its
| UX as well as performance (at least on MacOS it was pretty laggy
| on maxed out Intel 2019 Macbook back in the day, but it runs like
| butter on Apple Silicone macs). They really should consider
| adding a beginner mode with the most common filters and hide
| everything else. The learning curve can be quite steep having to
| learn about things that are par for the course in Darktable such
| as Filmic RGB etc.
| dantondwa wrote:
| While you're definitely right about it having a steep learning
| curve, it's also true that not many RAW editors do what
| Darktable does. Darktable aims at serving advanced, tecnically-
| minded users. It's complicated, but in a way, it's nice it is,
| for those who need it.
| deanc wrote:
| > It's complicated, but in a way, it's nice it is, for those
| who need it.
|
| Same argument for linux :) Darktable can do so much more than
| Lightroom (minus the AI stuff), so why not make it more
| accessible under a beginner mode. You'd have more people
| using the software, benchmarking features, logging crashes
| etc. You might even attract a few interested developers also
| at the same time or donators.
|
| Hell, I'd even call it Lightroom mode.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| There's an important difference between powerful and
| difficult to use. Darktable lands solidly in the latter camp.
| This mythical power being used as an excuse is doubly
| frustrating as:
|
| - Network effects mean competitors will struggle to gain
| traction
|
| - Darktable shamelessly apes the Lightroom UI which gives a
| superficial impression that it'll be similarly intuitive.
| It's not.
|
| My favorite interface behavior is that in Darktable clicking
| on empty space (accidentally or in an attempt to unfocus a
| widget) will usually send an event to a nearby widget. That's
| not power, that's just sloppy design. Oh and sliders give no
| indication of how to input an exact value.
|
| Or there's color balance. There are two competing modules.
| One presents a complex and unintuitive interface, the other
| offers to mimic camera settings but triggers warnings if you
| dare touch it. In the way that Tesla makes cars for people
| who love gadgets but hate cars, Darktable is a product for
| folks who love monkeying with code but hate photography.
|
| Ansel solves much of this, but brings its own shortcomings to
| the table.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _While you 're definitely right about it having a steep
| learning curve, it's also true that not many RAW editors do
| what Darktable does._
|
| If a Darktable developer happens to read this, I'd suggest
| looking at Nitro1 for inspiration. I use it with Photos, and
| although Nitro doesn't _need_ Photos (i.e. it can work
| directly with the filesystem), it 's a good way to experience
| both "easy" and user-friendly "expert" paths.
|
| 1https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/, the
| spiritual successor to Aperature by the former lead of
| Aperture, Photos, and related digital imaging technologies.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I remember there is also the ansel.photos project, which is a
| fork of Darktable, aiming to remove architectural debt. I wonder
| how they're doing.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| > _darktable is an open source photography workflow application
| and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for
| photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database,
| lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you
| to develop raw images and enhance them._
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| Since no one mentioned it yet. There is a darktable fork called
| ansel https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel that tries to
| remove bloat and make darktable more user friendly.
|
| It's rather opinionated and done by Aurelien Pierre.
|
| For those interested in the why
| https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
| there is also a YouTube video with strong language. There is an
| appimage so I recommend people to at least try it.
| n144q wrote:
| > What happens when a gang of amateur photographers, turned
| into amateur developers, joined by a bunch of back-end
| developers who develop libraries for developers, decide to work
| without method nor structure on an industry software for end-
| users, which core competency (colorimetry and psychophysics)
| lies somewhere between a college degree in photography and a
| master's degree in applied sciences, while promising to deliver
| 2 releases each year without project management ? All that, of
| course, in a project where the founders and the first
| generation of developers moved on and fled ?
|
| A number of open source design software comes to mind, but I am
| too scared to name them.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| Yeah it's a common problem, but it is in the nature of open
| source to be done by enthusiasts (of course it can be done by
| professionals/enterprises, but I think it's fair to say that
| most open source software stems from a personal need).
|
| I'm really not judging any project, because a working
| solution that is done by enthusiastic amateurs is better than
| no solution at all and let's be honest, most of my code is
| amateurish at best/hacked in a week/month as well.
|
| It's only bad if you see a project heading in the wrong
| direction and not being able to stop this, but for this god
| invented forks ;)
| Derbasti wrote:
| If he's so hung up on the open source process of Darktable, I
| can't wait to hear what he has to say about enterprise
| software, LOL.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| > Since no one mentioned it yet
|
| Yes they did, couple minutes before you:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42558923
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42558937
| sneak wrote:
| I can't try it because I do my photo editing on a high-end mac
| and they don't care to keep their macOS builds working because
| only 4% of existing darktable users are on macOS (and the dev
| doesn't have a mac to test on). (Nevermind that a lot more
| would be if darktable didn't suck, and that we're all paying
| for Lightroom instead because of it.)
| teamoet wrote:
| I've seen this fork mentioned around a couple of times so I've
| decided to read the articles on https://ansel.photos/en/news/.
| I'm not trying to deny that his motives are right, but the way
| and how often he bashes on darktable developers is really off-
| putting. I'll only cite a couple but they're easy to find:
|
| > a handful of guys with more freetime and benevolence than
| actual skills
|
| > So I fixed the whole logic [...] You might think that was a
| problem solved and a job well done, but that's leaving
| Darktable's geniuses out of the equation.
|
| If you want to work alone I guess you can have that sort of
| negative attitude... but to me it clearly says "don't use or
| contribute to this software".
|
| It's easier to spot mistakes after others have already made
| them, and then come up with better approaches. And it's easy to
| find yourself complaining about what is basically a prototype
| somebody else made and spared you the effort. It can definitely
| pump your ego up.
|
| I'm saying this because one-man forks almost never lead to
| popular adoption, and almost always lead to abandoned forks,
| even if the new developer is technically gifted. I'm somewhat
| reminded of KWinFT (KDE fork) that has been somewhat recently
| renamed to Theseus' Ship.
|
| I understand that you acquired a repulsion to design by
| committee, but when dealing with large projects you can't do it
| all by yourself, so you need to start learning how to deal with
| people. But who knows, maybe it's possible to find other like-
| minded contributors who are not so easily thrown off by the
| immaturities of a project's leader.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| but to me it clearly says "don't use or contribute to this
| software"
|
| As an end user the sheer arrogance and condescending attitude
| that the darktable devs bring to the table is far more
| offputting than someone (an ex-darktable dev no less) losing
| patience with that behavior.
| chongli wrote:
| Still, there's a lot to be said for taking the high road.
| If the attitude of the upstream devs is so toxic to drive
| you to create a fork, then why not differentiate yourself
| by creating a toxicity-free community to the best of your
| abilities?
|
| You might even adopt forum rules similar to HN's but with a
| focus on improving access to open source photographers'
| tools (which is what this software is supposed to be in the
| first place).
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Darktable has so thoroughly sucked the fun out of digital
| photography for me that I can hardly blame Aurelien for
| being salty. I just don't care that much that his
| frustration boiled over because he's at also doing
| something constructive.
| yladiz wrote:
| Seconding chongli, you can be very frustrated with the devs
| and not be toxic; losing patience, even if justified, does
| not justify being an asshole, and even genius devs like
| Linus have grown to understand this. I agree with some
| points Aurelien makes and do find Darktable to be a bit
| frustrating to use, and I'm sure he's right about a lot of
| the reasons it's slow and not great to develop on, but he
| crosses a line, going from criticizing to belittling others
| and propping himself up at the same time, and just sounds
| like an insolent and narcissistic person, which makes me
| basically never want to try his fork.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| I'm a 100% with you on this, but I always try to be as
| neutral about this as I can. A character/temper of a
| developer should not be the main topic of discussion, the
| software should be though.
|
| To your comment about committees. That (or the lack thereof)
| is a big critique point the ansel developer makes. A
| leadership of one is better than the leadership of none. And
| since he forks darktable and mostly removes and replaces some
| functions I don't see it as a problem in this case,
| especially since he has been maintaining the project for many
| years now.
|
| Anyway like I said, I would recommend trying the software and
| if you think it's worse than darktable just don't use it :) I
| for instance have multiple software packages installed and am
| quite annoyed to have to use multiple packages for one
| "thing" and I always try to use the best tool for the job. On
| photo management/editing I'm quite torn
| snapetom wrote:
| It's funny how when one guy does it for a small fork on a
| small project, people get riled up about it. However, when
| there's a bigger project like HomeAssistant, people let that
| behavior slide.
|
| As far as Darktable/Ansel goes, he's right. Darktable's UI
| and philosophy is pretty horrid. I shouldn't have to know
| seven different algorithms to apply a denoise filter. The
| vast majority of professional photographers are artists, not
| computer scientists. I want the application to pick the best
| one for me. All commercial applications these days take it
| one step further with some pretty good AI tools, too.
| secstate wrote:
| Which creates shallow artists who just want it to "look
| pretty now." Not saying there isn't a place in the world
| for that, but there are always trade offs with tools that
| manipulate your human vision of art, and to say "there are
| too many denoise filters, just pick one for me" will be
| severely limiting when you realize that what you really
| wanted was grain removal, but that's not how your AI
| denoise filter works.
|
| Again, there's room in the world for all manner of software
| uses. But to argue that Darktable is bad because it gives
| too many options, misses the goals of a great many artists,
| which is to understand what's happening to the pixels they
| captured in the field.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Auto modes have their places, as does retaining
| specificity of features. I don't think they're exclusive
| to each other.
|
| And I don't think simple choices create shallow artists
| (or that the goal of Darktable is to create artists).
| Someone who doesn't have any arts education already
| doesn't have the technical understanding or vocabulary to
| really know what they're doing, so maintain the extra
| barrier? How many professional grade tools can you think
| of that have simple or guided modes?
|
| The great part about software is that done well, it's
| often designed to be functional without a depth of
| specialty or expert knowledge, at least no more than a
| homeowner telling the builder "make my driveway to here"
| needs to know how to source and formulate concrete so
| that the end product looks good and doesn't crack or
| weather.
| purew wrote:
| There is also rawtherapee which I switched to after using DT
| for about a year.
|
| Rawtherapee workflow seemed to work better for me and I haven't
| really looked back.
| Derbasti wrote:
| Frankly, Ansel is outdated by now. No color equalizer, no
| camera styles, no Sigmoid.
|
| Mainline Darktable has overtaken it.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Is it something like ART, a fork of RawTherapee?
|
| http://art.pixls.us/
|
| It's interesting how bloated those open-source editors are.
| There are a ton of useless options. Instead of focusing to
| implement needed tools like AI masking or lens correction, we
| have bunch of de-mosaic non function methods or multiple
| sharpening tools that are non practical to use in classical
| workflow. Even defaults render broken RAW files!
|
| It's like many volunteer programmers doing software without
| ever actually using RAW development professionally.
| gazook89 wrote:
| People come to volunteer with the interests and skills they
| have. It's easier to let problems that are hard or not
| interesting fall to the wayside, and for the maintainers to
| take what they can get (especially if they think that happy
| contributors will contribute more).
| Almondsetat wrote:
| this is the same as GIMP and Audacity and many other FOSS
| projects: a proliferation of menus and niche features and
| zero overarching design and ideas
| gmueckl wrote:
| That's because the incentives don't align between
| developers and users on OSS projects when they aren't
| catering to developers. There is no product management as a
| go-between that is tasked with understanding the user base
| and edits feature requests and developer contributions into
| a coherent package.
| fooblaster wrote:
| can anyone recommend a tutorial for some of the basic features
| that that is more for the engineer audience? There are many
| videos on YouTube but many are very out of date.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I'm a darktable user (which fascinates my photography friends,
| because I'm the only semi-serious photographer they know who uses
| it), and think it's time to switch to something better. What non-
| adobe tools are other people using?
| Derbasti wrote:
| Capture One or DxO. These are the only ones as good as
| Lightroom in their rendering. I'm afraid they are both much
| more expensive.
|
| ON1, ACDSee, Luminar, Zoner, Silkypix, Radiant, RAW Power,
| Photomator are other options, but IMO have rather significant
| flaws that make them less good.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Have a look at AfterShot Pro. Very fast, powerful, and easy to
| use.
| omoikane wrote:
| I use DxO PhotoLab, which came with perpetual license. I paid
| ~$100 for PhotoLab 1 and ~$70 for an upgrade to PhotoLab 4, and
| haven't upgraded since. I thought it was well worth it.
|
| (I plan to upgrade to a newer version eventually, but thought I
| would upgrade my computer first)
| CharlesW wrote:
| I switched from Lightroom to Nitro (macOS, iOS, iPadOS), by the
| former Apple lead for Aperture, Photo, and other digital
| imaging technologies. Two years later, I'm very happy with that
| choice. https://www.gentlemencoders.com/about/
| sbarre wrote:
| I want to use this program, but the lack of support for RAW
| formats that are at this point 3+ years old (RW2 and ORF) is a
| bummer.
|
| I don't know where the gap is (DT, or the libraries, or some
| licensing problem) but the end result is that this app doesn't
| support the RAW formats I use, and I don't think I'm using
| anything particularly exotic.
|
| I'll keep checking in on each new release though..
| bfrog wrote:
| I've just recently started with a real camera and editing raw
| files. Darktable has so many modules and options it's quite
| intimidating. After a month of tinkering and trying it out I
| still don't really have a solid handle of what module i need for
| the outcome I want which I think maybe just comes to experience?
|
| I still don't fully grok what filmic is supposed to do, it seems
| like several things in one.
| morsch wrote:
| Just stick to a few modules, you really don't need much if all
| you want is to get a lot out of your photos.
|
| Here's a tutorial with a suggested list:
| https://luxagraf.net/essay/craft/darktable-getting-started
| Exposure (lighten or darken an image) Filmic RGB
| (control how light the whites and how dark the blacks)
| Color Calibration (set the white balance) Color Balance
| RGB (enhance colors and color contrasts) RGB Primaries
| (rarely, but color correction) Diffuse or Sharpen
| (Sharpen) Crop Tone Equalizer (raise shadows)
| Retouch (fix spots) Rotate and Perspective Len
| Correction (fix distortion in wide angle lenses)
|
| For the most part, I don't even touch most of these. But I'd
| add profiled denoise, though it's probably auto applied and you
| don't need to touch it (like lens correction).
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