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Darktable 2.4.0 released

darktable.org

1–10 of 78 posts

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#2
Is the home page supposed to contain placeholder like phrases? Such as:

>Mention that having (photographer) developers as part of the target audience is good for understanding the real world problems, challenges, and workflows.

>Something about capability - highlight about some big important features! Maybe mention flexibility here (ease of writing new modules).

>Something about community, mailing list, maybe discuss forum, and the Flickr page? Number of contributors (indicate health of the project and users). Some other metric of vitality of the community (possibly how to get involved)?

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#3

Is the home page supposed to contain placeholder like phrases? Such as: >Mention that having (photographer) developers as part of the target audience is good for understanding the real world problems, challenges, and workflows. >Something about capability - highlight about some big important features! Maybe mention flexibility here (ease of writing new modules). >Something about community, mailing list, maybe discuss…

Can't say, but it actually seems pretty forced, like a joke. All of those placeholders actually link to the resources they'd want. I'd guess it's a poke at regular start-up style "We are awesome because X" statements on their home page.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#5
The big news with this release is that it's the first to support Windows. I've been using this on linux for a year as a hobbyist Photographer and it's exceedingly glorious. Have not tried out the Windows build but apparently you can do that now [1].

Also if you want to learn a lot about "developing" digital photographs (it really is a digital darkroom), I learned a lot from this youtube list of 42 Darktable tutorial edit sessions [2]. Very powerful and fun stuff.

[1] https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-windows/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-zRRM1...

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#6
It's a shame open source projects with great features still have astoundingly bad copywriting.

No one cares about it having a database behind the scenes or the upgrade/downgrade process, tell me what it can do and how it compares to the real alternative, Adobe Lightroom.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#7
As a long time GIMP user, coming to Darktable has been a revelation. I'm super impressed with how powerful and polished Darktable is, and overall I really love it.

On the other hand, Darktable has some serious issues that make it less than ideal for me.

First, on my old laptop Darktable is super, super slow... especially when the image I'm editing has lots of operations performed on it. In that case, performing a simple operation on top of the existing ones or just zooming in or out could take a full minute, and exporting a single image could take 30 minutes or more (compared to GIMP, which takes less than a minute). Just going from lighttable to darkroom or back could take multiple minutes.

Second, some operations are just much easier and more intuitive to do in GIMP. For example, making perspective changes in GIMP using the perspective tool -- you just drag the corners of the image where you want them. In Darktable you're limited to moving sliders around, which is far more annoying.

Finally, Darktable is mostly geared towards improving photograph quality, while GIMP is more of an all-around image editor and drawing/painting program which can improve the quality of photographs but is not limited to that but can do much more.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#8
post #6

It's a shame open source projects with great features still have astoundingly bad copywriting. No one cares about it having a database behind the scenes or the upgrade/downgrade process, tell me what it can do and how it compares to the real alternative, Adobe Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom is not free so its the not at the same level. Nobody compares Blender on the same level as Maya either.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#9
post #6

It's a shame open source projects with great features still have astoundingly bad copywriting. No one cares about it having a database behind the scenes or the upgrade/downgrade process, tell me what it can do and how it compares to the real alternative, Adobe Lightroom.

HN links to the news article so I was confused as to what Darktable was, I clicked on a few of the links in the menu and couldn't figure out quickly what it was, I then googled to find out it was an alternative to lightroom, so I googled darktable and clicked on the link to find out there's a homepage with the information I was looking for initially... But there's no menu item to get to the homepage?

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#10
For those that (like me) have never heard of it before (since the info isn’t on the linked page):

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.

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