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Darktable 2.4.0 released

darktable.org

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Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#31

Post by kyriakos »

First Time User on Windows, its a bit slow during import compared to lightroom (you can't see thumbnails unless you highlight the image file name - maybe I am doing this wrong so I am not sure).

a couple of UI/UX issues I found:

= When I open a tool panel from the "more modules" the panel is added to the tools but its collapsed instead of expanded.

= some filters should be toned down (the sliders have very extreme results with minor movements, this makes it hard to fine tune)

its a much more polished effort than gimp though. I'll keep an eye on darktable!

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#32

Post by kam »

jasonjayr wrote: post #18
bedros wrote: post #11

I wish they support photo management, at least import photos into organized folders by date

I was excitedly looking for how they manage this, but alas, it looks like not well :( Is there any tools nowadays that: (a) Lets the user keep Favorited/marked images in a local storage location (b) 'ages-out' other files to secondary storage pools (removable disks, cloud storage) (c) Keeps Low-res thumbnails of all images in the collection? I keep trying to find something that would help keep tabs on a growing colle…

For my workflow, I copy from the camera SD card to an external HDD, then import to Darktable from there. It stores its thumbnails and database under my home directory, and I can ensure it has thumbnails and medium-resolution previews of all photos with `darktable-generate-cache`. On any photo, I can click "copy locally" [1], and it syncs it to my internal SSD so I can edit without the HDD plugged in.

[1] http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/local_copies.html

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#33

Post by ePierre »

pmoriarty wrote: post #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 sim…

Gimp and Darktable are very different beasts. Darktable is tailored to work on RAW pictures coming directly, unprocessed from your camera. Gimp cannot do that and only works on compresseda and/or rasterized images (thinkg JPG or PNG).

Another big difference is that Darktable does non-destructive changes: you have a history of operations that you applied and you can rollback to any step. None of the steps directly modifies the pixels of the image, instead the program computes the changes made by all of the effects in the history for every pixel in the image, then shows you a preview (or exports it).

Handling a big RAW file and all the modifications that you've done is an intensive process, and that's why it requires a beefier computer than Gimp for instance. There is also OpenCL support, to leverage the power of your GPU.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#34

Post by jwagenet »

ekianjo wrote: post #8
jaaames wrote: 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.

I'd disagree with the Blender example. I think GIMP and Inkscape are a notch or two behind their counterparts, but Blender can do almost all the things Maya or Max can, with the primary downsides being ui/workflow shortcomings and industry adoption.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#35

Post by ePierre »

contravariant wrote: post #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…

I just assumed it was a work in progress... the rest of the pages seems finished, maybe they didn't put the final version of the index page online :)

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#36

Post by ePierre »

sowbug wrote: post #24
IgorPartola wrote: post #16

I only started using darktable recently. It’s been great with the exception of speed and the MacOS UI having tiny controls. I have a reasonably powerful MacBook Pro and would have expected it to handle things like changing exposure levels pretty quickly. But honestly I can’t complain because this thing allows me to make decent photos fantastic.

Since you recently climbed the learning curve and might have this fresh in your mind, how do you understand the history function? Sometimes do something and then want to undo it. This isn't easy for me in darktable -- it seems control-z does nothing, there are no standard menus, and every time I've touched the history section on the left side of the application, I end up destroying much more work than I intended. In…

> it seems control-z does nothing

Normally v2.4.0 improves this. As stated in their release notes: “Add undo support for masks and more intelligent grouping of undo steps”.

Basically, in v2.2, even low-level operations that didn't have a visible impact were in the undo list, so when you pressed Ctrl+Z it would undo something, but you wouldn't see any change. You would actually have to press Ctrl+Z several times to finally see something on the screen.

This was changed and should be more human-friendly :)

> how do you understand the history function?

This is indeed a little bit more complicated that just a list of things to undo. You can read a bit more about it in the user manual: https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.ht...

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#37

Post by frik »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #22

So, is this a good replacement for Picasa on windows? In my case, mainly for viewing and editing Canon raw format photos?

I succeeded in installing the discontinued "Windows Live Photo Gallery" on Win7, despite M$ efforts to burn down all old pre-Win10 tents.

On Win both Picasa (also discontinued), Lightroom (non-cloud also discontinued), and various open source alternatives are less polished and slower than Photo Gallery. I will try out Darktables 2.4.

The cool thing of Windows Live Photo Gallery is that everything is saved back to the file. If you tag a photo (even hierarchy tags like Places/City/NewYorkCity) the tag is stored also in the photo file, so when you copy somewhere else, all metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPC) is still there. And all photos are NOT-imported to a central database. So you can organize the photos like you want and Photo Gallery just indexes the folders and stores thumbnails and metadata in a central database file for fast viewing and searching. Most a alternatives to a Photo Gallery want to import all photos to a special directory or even to a central database (see Picasa, and Lightroom) which is like iTunes where all your metadata like the 5 star rating sits then in a central database - that is soooo wrong!! - instead of storing the changes back to the photo files.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#38

Post by old-gregg »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #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…

What kind of camera are you using? I've been trying _hard_ to switch from Lightroom to Darktable and so far I have been failing to even match the output of in-camera JPEG engine of my Canon 5D Mk4... The skin tone is just not there... like it knows what highlights are and what shadows are but loses something in the middle. Well-lit RAW are fine, but when the light is challenging I always get better results in Lightroom or Canon's RAW converter (or even in-camera JPEGs) although that's actually when RAW is supposed to help the most.

Re: Darktable 2.4.0 released

#40

Post by user5994461 »

unixhero wrote: post #17
pmoriarty wrote: post #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 sim…

Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop handles a modern software, even a brand new version, with shitty performance. Media processing be it images or video isn't made for old laptops.

A brand new laptop is maybe 20% faster than a laptop from 4 years ago so there is really no complaint to be made about old hardware. intel CPU almost stopped improving.
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