31–40 of 167 posts
Somewhere very recently I encountered a quote from Ansel Adams, in which he seemed to anticipate that "electronic" photos would be the next big thing, in (IIRC) 1980. Wish I could find that again. Seemed remarkably prescient.
In early 2000 a lot of photographers were saying that digital photography is not "real", it doesn't have a "soul", it should not be allowed in photo contests and it's just worthless in general.
Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence.
On the other hand, open-source photography and bitmap editing is still waiting for its own Blender or Godot and I applaud anyone willing to have a go at it. What's available (GIMP, RawTherapee, darktable, ...) can mostly sort of get the job done, but if you're the kind of person who seeks relaxation, pleasure and aesthetics in photography, the open-source software feels just too geeky, too unfocused, too unrefined.
I'm currently on DxO + Affinity and even though they cost quite a lot of money, I'd probably shoot and enjoy the whole thing significantly less if I had darktable and GIMP waiting at home.
> You will find very few people with this kind of full-stack understanding of light and color able to also write efficient computer programs and read academic research papers on applied mathematics. Yet, you will find a lot of image editing applications and a lot of guys trying… Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence. On the other hand, open-source photography and bitmap editing is still waiting for its own B…
The amount of control and physics-based editing you're doing is very unique.
This wasn't what darktable was like a few years ago, but this guy has been making incredible strides to implement his vision.
> You will find very few people with this kind of full-stack understanding of light and color able to also write efficient computer programs and read academic research papers on applied mathematics. Yet, you will find a lot of image editing applications and a lot of guys trying… Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence. On the other hand, open-source photography and bitmap editing is still waiting for its own B…
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And well-known existing product name.
I never heard of it. After looking it up, I don't get the appeal. Not sure why someone would want to take fancy screenshots of video games unless they're marketing a game.
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…
https://www.youtube.com/@AurelienPIERREphoto/videos
I had no idea he was working on this.
Having come across his rants on Darktable last year, I think he does have a point on the UX front. A lot of the filtering in the light table (where you organize your photos) is a bit of a mess of confusing buttons, options, and weird convoluted abstractions. I never liked that part of the software. I can work with it but years in, it remains counter intuitive how you get your files in there and manage them. It's just convoluted and weird all over. A lot of bad ideas layered on top of each other. Aurelian kind of freaked out when last year some pretty major changes were just pushed through without much debate. And I agree with him, it didn't really improve much things.
Anyway the magic is in the darkroom part, which is the part where you edit photos. There is a wide variety of modules aimed at different expertise levels. Scene referred mode is basically a big upgrade over what a lot of other packages do, which is to blindly apply pre-defined curves for cameras without much regard for the actual pixels in the raw image. Filmic and other modules do this a bit more intelligently by actually looking at the pixels, using some heuristics and working from the lowest levels of the pipeline all the way up to do the right things. It adds up to a lot less work when editing photos for me compared to earlier versions. Mostly photos come out pretty OK without much tweaking. I might tweak perceptive saturation a bit, add some contrast in filmic, etc.
Basically, the workflow is roughly: 1) tweak the exposure as needed for the gray point. Filmic adapts with sane settings for black and white points and you typically don't have to tweak that. 2) add some contrast in filmic 3) maybe add some local contrast 4) in the color balance module fiddle with perceptive saturation. Done. There are a few more things I do for sharpening, profiled denoise (as needed), etc. But that's pretty much it. One nice thing is being able to apply defaults based on rules to photos.
I might play with Ansel a bit if I can find some time over Christmas. Kind of curious to see what he's done to lighttable and the rest.