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Darktable

darktable.org

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Re: Darktable

#121

Post by Mashimo »

jlarocco wrote: post #110
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…

It's kind of shitty to pirate Capture One. The full, non-subscription price is only $350, which is less than most cameras, and not a bad price for "pro level" software. I agree that it's a lot better than Darktable and RawTherapee, but if you don't want to pay for it you should settle for one of the open source tools. They're not so bad they're unusable, and editing RAW photos isn't exactly something you need to do.…

It's 390 EUR / 450 USD for a software without updates that I use a couple of times privately per year.

I'm not proud of it. But I'm also not really ashamed.

Re: Darktable

#122

Post by Mashimo »

Arainach wrote: post #116
Mashimo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not if you use the library management, it's not no. People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available. I still would say Firefox can be a chrome replacement.

There are many image editors. The primary appeal of something like Lightroom is image editing workflow - library management and editing combined. Being able to organize and move around your library is a core feature. My images are also stored in date-based folders, but C1/Lightroom allow me to very quickly move between folders and identify the file I want, search for files I've rated highly or tagged with keywords/co…

A believe you. But it's not like that for everyone. Every raw editor I ever used was strictly for editing a single project at a time.

Re: Darktable

#123

Post by donatzsky »

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…

As the one responsible for writing much of the FAQ, I can assure you that's not what is meant. The point is to hopefully make new users aware that they can't assume their Lightroom knowledge will help them, and thus encourage them to consult the manual or some tutorials. It's an unfortunate fact that many coming from Lightroom think they already know everything and don't have to learn anything new, but when they fail to make head or tails of darktable they conclude that the issue is that it's trash and not that they didn't bother educating themselves - and they will often loudly proclaim this on Reddit in a rather entitled manner.

But yes, the library features could do with some improvements.

Re: Darktable

#124

Post by donatzsky »

selfawareMammal wrote: post #41

Is this better than Lightroom?

Better is subjective, but the editing is much more powerful. However, it's also a completely different editing paradigm (largely on-rails vs. layers/nodes), so some acclimatisation is required.

Re: Darktable

#126

Post by donatzsky »

I'll take this opportunity to shamelessly plug my darktable beginner guide, which aggregates advice and the currently best tutorials: https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with...

If you're coming from the likes of Lightroom or Capture One you will have to learn a very different way of working, but in return you get a lot of control over the edit.

Re: Darktable

#127

Post by buildbot »

kkukshtel wrote: post #15

I highly recommend people try out Capture One. After using Lightroom for years, switching to Capture One a few years ago felt like someone turned the lights on. Far and away the best photo and media mangement software I've ever used by at least two orders of magnitude, and reasonalbe license cost and generous free tier.

Capture One in my opinion has much higher output quality, better defaults, and specifically for supports Phase One backs better than anything else. I have not done a scientific study or anything comparing the outputs (maybe I should!), but it’s just really good at producing gorgeous photos.

Media management though is IMO much worse than Lightroom? No keyword search, the catalog gets extremely slow over 10k images, and no filters for different cameras or lenses, as far as I know. I use peakto instead to manage and search my 40k RAWs then open them for editing only in C1.

Re: Darktable

#128

Post by qurren »

pmarreck wrote: post #119
qurren wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Darktable for almost a decade quite happily, but recently am moving off of it because they made one MASSIVE blunder with the new shitty color grading and white balancing tool that never gets any of my images right, all the tones are off, and it doesn't have sane defaults that renders things at least "almost correctly" at first go like the previous white balance tool did. It was way better a couple years ago…

I now have a business idea: Curated Open-Source App Forks. Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the open-source software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow, and automatically updated it over time? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream, fixes any conflicts, does t…

Honest answer from me: Probably not, because vanilla Claude Code already does a great job of maintaining my forks with open-source main, and also handles the packaging and installation beautifully.

There is a huge overlap between (OSS users, people who can code) and an even bigger overlap between (OSS users, people who can use coding AI tools)

The people who can't even use coding AI tools almost universally use closed-source software like Adobe Lightroom that you can't fork easily.

Re: Darktable

#129

Post by drdexebtjl »

akersten wrote: post #27
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…

Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a pat…

Right, but do these incremental upgrades preserve the look of the image? Or do they just keep the library accessible?

For example, increasing exposure in poorly lit adds noise, so you might counteract with a noise removal filter. Later on, the developers come up with a better exposure boosting algorithms that takes more sensor characteristics into account, and produces less noise.

Ideally, you’ll get this new algorithm on all new photos, but not the old ones. It’s unreasonable to expect you to go through all images you already processed and decrease the effects of the noise removal filters.

Or maybe you liked the noise on those pictures, and now it’s gone, and you need to add it back.

It’s a very reasonable to expect your photos to look the same long term.

Re: Darktable

#130

Post by c7b »

qurren wrote: post #114
lionkor wrote: post #34

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 s…

I've used Darktable for almost a decade quite happily, but recently am moving off of it because they made one MASSIVE blunder with the new shitty color grading and white balancing tool that never gets any of my images right, all the tones are off, and it doesn't have sane defaults that renders things at least "almost correctly" at first go like the previous white balance tool did. It was way better a couple years ago…

Stupid question, if there's an old version that you liked, couldn't you just keep using that version?
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