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Darktable

darktable.org

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Re: Darktable

#31

Post by ryanjshaw »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #23

To me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same. The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline. How do the FOSS alternatives handle this? If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pi…

Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.

In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.

If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.

Re: Darktable

#32

Post by vividfrier »

guohaochuan wrote: post #14

digiKam( https://www.digikam.org/ ) is also very good.

I tried. Just way too many bugs for even the simplest of things to be reliable.

I have very simple needs. I'm a hobby photographer who now has a bunch of kids. I want to shoot JPEG, I want to cull photos and maybe touch the exposure meter, and then upload my selected photos to Google Photos (aiming to replace this with Immich but not there yet).

And I want to do it on Linux. I can't believe this workflow is so wild that there simply isn't a single reliable option...

(Fwiw, digikam would allow me to import the photos and I could locate them via Finder. But through Digikam they never showed up - only the folders containing the photos. No filters were applied)

Re: Darktable

#33

Post by mcdonje »

Darktable is great. You can easily do pro-level photo editing. Anything you need for editing RAW files, you can do. The modules are powerful. The UI is good. There is a learning curve, but there are also learning curves for the paid software options.

Re: Darktable

#34

Post by lionkor »

I've been using darktable for a while to edit my RAW photos. The amount of features, viable workflows, and in general the quality of the software is baffling for a free product. I would happily pay 200 bucks or something per year to use this, it makes all other RAW editing software obsolete.

I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.

Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.

I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.

With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.

I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.

Re: Darktable

#35

Post by lionkor »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #31
drdexebtjl wrote: post #23

To me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same. The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline. How do the FOSS alternatives handle this? If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pi…

Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me. In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on wh…

Have you looked at the documentation? In Darktable you can click the questionmark, then click on any feature, and very extensive, well written documentation walks you through how, when and when not to use each module and feature.

Re: Darktable

#37

Post by throwup238 »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #23

To me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same. The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline. How do the FOSS alternatives handle this? If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pi…

> The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.

A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.

I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).

Re: Darktable

#38

Post by bix6 »

flipthefrog wrote: post #22
tokai wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private equity owed proprietary Mac and Windows exclusive. No thanks.

Want the best software for editing photos? No thanks, I'd rather use inferior open source solutions. Go Gimp

Yeah who needs the best software for hobbyist editing? $20/mo to Adobe forever until they jack it up even more, no thanks.

Re: Darktable

#39

Post by bix6 »

I am switching soon. I hear a lot of people complain about the catalog management. What solutions have you found?

Re: Darktable

#40

Post by esafak »

TheqO wrote: post #10
e12e wrote: post #6

See also: https://ansel.photos/en/

Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep . Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare. They got beef!

I'm digging their Sentry charts. That's the kind of discipline we need more of. Stability is a feature.
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