A rather less positive view of Darktable than msny of the opinions in this thread:
https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
Darktable
131–140 of 183 posts
Re: Darktable
#132To 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…
Darktable editing workflow is centered around modules. Exposure, denoise, various color adjustments, etc are all separate modules. Dynamic range compression (and other common operations) has several implementations: base curve, filmic, sigmoid, and AgX. They all essentially do the same thing but have effectively superseded each other as they were added to newer releases.
Darktable keeps the old modules around but hides them, opening a file processed years ago will still go through the pipeline with the base curve module and come out the same. As a bonus, it is possible to use "obsolete" modules that may handle certain images better, achieving a particular look, or you are comfortable with the older module and prefer not to use the new replacement.
Re: Darktable
#133See 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!
There's a lot of well reasoned, but pretty caustic, developer blog notes for the project.
Refreshing breath of honest air, imnho. I don't agree with the author in all things, but I enjoy how well and directly they express their viewpoints.
Re: Darktable
#134A rather less positive view of Darktable than msny of the opinions in this thread: https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
Some needed context is that article is over 3 years old.
Re: Darktable
#135I guess I am in the minority but I did not have a good time with Darktable. I used it for a few years and then had to hold my nose and transition to Lightroom. On decent hardware (MacBook Pro that was only a few years old) it was dog slow. But the worst part was transitioning from their version 2 to version 3 of the workflow or whatever they called it. None of my old photos would render correctly after that and half of the modules I learned to use to edit my photos were not obsolete.
The documentation for it is dense. It’s like you need to know the inner workings of the software to be able to do things like basic color correction. And even basic masking was just awkward as hell. When I quit it did not have smart object detection either so removing things from the background required editing the photo in external software.
Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast, it is intuitive, and it does not expose modules that the documentation says to never use.
I really wish I could use open source software for this. But I have yet to find a good alternative that lets me do what I want (which is fairly basic, I don’t go crazy with my editing) that doesn’t require me to get a Masters degree in its usage.
Re: Darktable
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 close…
There's quite a difference in my experience between "using coding AI tools" and "using coding AI tools _well_", especially when it comes to editing code.
Re: Darktable
#137Earlier 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…
Stupid question, if there's an old version that you liked, couldn't you just keep using that version?
It's a pain in the ass to maintain when it has dependencies on older stuff while I upgrade the rest of the system
Re: Darktable
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 close…
There's quite a difference in my experience between "using coding AI tools" and "using coding AI tools _well_", especially when it comes to editing code.
Doesn't really matter in this case. Doesn't matter enough for people to pull out their wallet. You can re-fork from clean OSS and re-implement any time while you sleep, using whatever AI subscription you already have.
Re: Darktable
#139I'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…
Another +1 for this. I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
Is there a catalog conversion tool?
Re: Darktable
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another +1 for this. I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
Is there a catalog conversion tool?
Don’t think so. I just exported all files to jpeg 90% into the Lightroom library folder structure. Then moved all the RAWs to an archive disk. I just add any directories I want to do edits on into the Darktable library.