Darktable 4.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Darktable 4.0

#31

Post by orbital-decay » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 8:55 PM UTC

nuclx wrote: post #29

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. Sat…

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#32

Post by deanc » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#33

Post by orbital-decay » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:08 PM UTC

deanc wrote: post #32

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 advance…

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#34

Post by tmjwid » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:16 PM UTC

jetrink wrote: post #22

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.

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#35

Post by sneak » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

thg wrote: post #5

2bitencryption wrote: post #2

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 i…

> 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...

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#36

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

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)

Re: Darktable 4.0

#37

Post by pkd » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

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

Re: Darktable 4.0

#38

Post by morsch » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

Normille wrote: post #28

jseliger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

>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 resiz…

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#39

Post by H_L » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

mikae1 wrote: post #20

jacooper wrote: post #13

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 w…

> 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/p…

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.

Re: Darktable 4.0

#40

Post by Elv13 » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #16

moelf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 pre…

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.