Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Darktable

darktable.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 183 posts

Re: Darktable

#71

Post by roblh »

BeetleB wrote: post #61
erksa wrote: post #16

Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE. If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming. Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at. Built many processes around it fo…

> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE. And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.

You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything.

Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.

Re: Darktable

#72

Post by speed_spread »

ghostly_s wrote: post #5
randomstate wrote: post #3

Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.

Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ: >Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common. What th…

I wish Darktable and Immich could be integrated into a single system.

Re: Darktable

#73

Post by Mashimo »

Itoldmyselfso wrote: post #69
Mashimo wrote: post #42

Darktable is one of the few Apps that I loved and advocated for, only to land back on a pirated copy of CaptureOne. Which is I think the only pirated software that I still have installed. I was super into darktable and had fun using it. The UI and UX was not an issue for me. Loved the masks. But over time it got harder and harder for me to get decent color grading from it. I don't know what changed. When I tried to c…

Pirated copies seem like a blackbox of potential malware, even if virus scans fail to find any problems (and they often give 10-30% false positives on most keygens/cracks). Even if the code is hosted in github, there has been plenty of cases of malware/viruses being hosted there too.

Yuuup.

Got it from an invite only torrent side, but yes, there is still a risk. But I don't want to pay 390 EUR (and not get any updates)

Re: Darktable

#74

Post by Mashimo »

roblh wrote: post #71
BeetleB wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE. And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.

You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything. Also, an aside. I…

How are you organizing your photos?

For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.

Re: Darktable

#75

Post by jillesvangurp »

erksa wrote: post #16

Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE. If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming. Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at. Built many processes around it fo…

> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.

It has a very clunky UX for this. But it actually has a lot of useful features for organizing large amounts of photos. There's a guy Bruce Williams on Youtube who has been doing tutorials on Youtube for Darktable for many years that has many relevant videos on this topic. But you can do rule based collections with filters on tags, camera type, and whatever other meta data is there.

It's probably a bit different from what you are used to and IMHO it's over engineered and there are some bad ideas for usability that never really got addressed and are made worse by the developers just putting buttons and controls in all the wrong places. But once you get over that, it actually does have a lot of powerful features for getting organized.

There's actually a fork of Darktable called Ansel that addresses a lot of the UX issues that has been in the works for a few years. The creator of the fork got annoyed with the level of indifference on this topic. There were other reasons as well (he was the creator of the filmic module in Darktable). But most of his UX work at least looks to me as something that the Darktable people might consider adopting.

Re: Darktable

#76

Post by orbital-decay »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #47
orbital-decay wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do the FOSS alternatives handle this? In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.

I just suggested a different way. Embed the pipeline’s actual code in the metadata. This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.

Proprietary software doesn't have any problem with embedded code, for example TTF does exactly that with fonts and they're still being licensed.

Code embedding has been considered many times but the rabbit hole is way too deep. You are embedding unverified executable code, to begin with. Then there's diversity problem: too much code, too many implementation specifics with every quirk being able to mess up the result. All of that spanning multiple generations of color science pipelines, experts, hardware, and third-party software to interact with. Since the advent of ML (for denoising and segmentation in particular) you have to also embed the weights as well, making it outright impossible.

All this leads to RAW processing code going the way of scientific and financial code: once written, it's frozen and the substrate is emulated if necessary. Even the bugs are preserved.

Re: Darktable

#77

Post by drdexebtjl »

lionkor wrote: post #35
ryanjshaw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intuitive UX teaches you without asking you to read the documentation.

That said I don’t think the UX of LR and Photoshop is particularly good, especially in recent years. People just expect their skills to transfer over, but I don’t think FOSS should be doomed to clone the UX of proprietary software it seeks to replace.

Re: Darktable

#78

Post by lolc »

e12e wrote: post #6

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

I used Ansel for a while, and I agree that Darktable is suffering from feature creep. Ansel right away had some usability improvements. But the amount of regressions introduced was wild. The anger you can read in the messaging was apparently also employed to cut code, and things got flaky. In the end some features I used stopped working in all releases I tried, and I went back to Darktable. Maybe Ansel is stabilizing now, and I should try again.

Re: Darktable

#79

Post by jillesvangurp »

lukah wrote: post #9
actionfromafar wrote: post #2

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel

I haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?

The history is that Aurelien Pierre was leading some big changes in Darktable around the time the filmic module was introduced and the bigger switch from rethinking the internal architecture and processing pipeline to be happening in the right color spaces before things get crammed down into the RGB display color space. There's a lot of subtlety to that. But it boils down to a lot less rounding errors and loss of information for basic edits related to color correction, tone mapping, etc.

Aurelien Pierre was the main developer of filmic and several related modules and a key driver of that whole transition. A few versions ago there were some other developers that forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX. He argued against that and people ignored him and he basically decided to do it properly with Ansel and strip away all the stuff he never liked as well as beat some sense into especially the lightroom part of Darktable which is where you organize your photos. IMHO he did a great job on that from what I've seen so far.

Since the fork, a lot of stuff happened of course and there are now several competing alternatives to filmic in Darktable (Sigmoid and Agx). They each have their pros and cons and the differences can be very subtle; especially if you are new to the topic. There's a lot of complexity here. Which is why UX matters. And a point of criticism with especially Filmic is that it is a very complex module. But I'm still on Darktable and Ansel is actually not compatible with the newer Darktable versions.

Post reply on HN