Ansel

> I have given 4 years of my life to the Darktable project, only to see it destroyed by clueless geeks playing code stashing on their spare time, everyone pushing his own agenda with no sense of design, in a project where nobody is responsible for anything and where we work too fast on everything at the same time.

Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project? I've only used it a few times, but it seems nice for someone who knows how to use it (which isn't me!) but curious what drama happened.

Re: Ansel

#6

Post by mrkeen » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

Banditoz wrote: post #5

> I have given 4 years of my life to the Darktable project, only to see it destroyed by clueless geeks playing code stashing on their spare time, everyone pushing his own agenda with no sense of design, in a project where nobody is responsible for anything and where we work too fast on everything at the same time. Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project? I've only used it a few times, but it seems nice for…

I just assumed it was what people used. I tried but couldn't get the hang of it. Couldn't flatten or remove things from the history.

Re: Ansel

#7

Post by andyjohnson0 » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

Banditoz wrote: post #5

> I have given 4 years of my life to the Darktable project, only to see it destroyed by clueless geeks playing code stashing on their spare time, everyone pushing his own agenda with no sense of design, in a project where nobody is responsible for anything and where we work too fast on everything at the same time. Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project? I've only used it a few times, but it seems nice for…

> Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project?

Are you referring to the fact of there being no releases in the last year or so?

Edit: Ignore the above - it's incorrect.

Re: Ansel

#8

Post by nas » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

This is the work of a former "darktable" developer (Aurélien Pierre) who decided to fork the codebase and go it alone. He has strong opinions about the correct way to do things. I like some of the cleanup on the UI that he has done. For now, Ansel and darktable are compatible in terms of the underlying database. So you can easily switch back and forth between them. If the fork diverges significantly, it would be more difficult to maintain the compatibility.

darktable has seen some major changes in the past few years, moving away from a "display-referred" to a "scene-referred" workflow. Aurélien contributed a lot of code to make that work, most significantly, the Filmic module. darktable is not as user friendly and as polished as other commercial tools (Lightroom, Affinity, Capture One) but it is capable if you take the time to learn it.

Re: Ansel

#9

Post by h0l0cube » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

mrkeen wrote: post #6

Banditoz wrote: post #5

> I have given 4 years of my life to the Darktable project, only to see it destroyed by clueless geeks playing code stashing on their spare time, everyone pushing his own agenda with no sense of design, in a project where nobody is responsible for anything and where we work too fast on everything at the same time. Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project? I've only used it a few times, but it seems nice for…

I just assumed it was what people used. I tried but couldn't get the hang of it. Couldn't flatten or remove things from the history.

It’s not your fault. It has the worst UX of anything I’ve used. Be careful if you use the mousewheel anywhere, you don’t know what unexpected action it’s going to perform. Drawing vector shapes for masks is wildly frustrating too. It does have a lot of powerful modules though… and it’s free.

Re: Ansel

#10

Post by camtarn » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 9:15 PM UTC

Oof. Looking at the "Transitioning from Darktable" page ( https://ansel.photos/en/doc/special-topics/from-darktable/ ), the author is extremely disparaging about Darktable developers. Very off-putting, even if some of the changes seem sensible.

[edit] Make that quite a lot of the changes, actually, including getting rid of some really dangerously bad bits of UI design. Still dislike the guy's attitude but I've got to admit he has a point.