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Ansel

ansel.photos

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Re: Ansel

#51

Post by PuffinBlue »

codeptualize wrote: post #42
nas wrote: post #8

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…

> "Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if its developers were not so busy turning it into an usability nightmare. Ansel is a Darktable 4.0 variant where 30.000 lines of poorly-written code and half-broken features have been removed, and 11.000 lines rewritten : it runs faster, smoother, uses less power and requires less configuration. Enjoy an app focusing on getting work done and stability." Shots fired!

This opinion comes from a former pho photographer, one who desperately wanted to love Darktable...the shots are warranted in my opinion. Darktable is a complete car crash of poor usability and militant contrarianism on established user experience design.

It has so much promise but the 'lead by committee' approach just resulted in some kind of collective 'demand avoidance' from the devs who seem to revel in delivering an unusable product. And I mean unusable for those not willing to learn an entirely new paradigm of interacting with a piece of photographic software and dive into the docs for everything, including stuff as silly as a keyboard shortcut or move between modules.

I've yet to read all the Ansel blurb but I'm pretty sure this is from the guy who's made the most improvements to Darktable in recent releases. So it's incredibly exciting to see.

I doubt it'll get any DAM capability though, even for a fork that is asking too much :-)

Re: Ansel

#52

Post by turnsout »

This might actually get me to check out Ansel as a current Lightroom Classic user. I tried Darktable a year or two ago, and there were some immediate dealbreakers. I really like the idea of someone capable and opinionated forking a popular project. I’m rooting for him!

Re: Ansel

#53

Post by cpill »

pretty awesome tool! next steps are to make a chat interface to this so non photography nerds can use it

Re: Ansel

#54

Post by ska »

Toutouxc wrote: post #33

> 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…

> Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence.

It's pretty common with open source projects. The people with time, energy, and an "itch to scratch" and the people who really know an area aren't disjoint sets, but people who fit in both are rare. Lot's of projects like e.g. GIMP start off making mistakes that would have been obvious to someone who understood the domain well, but the team makes them because they are learning as they go.

Re: Ansel

#55

Post by dave333 »

On Win 10 downloaded the install pkg but it would not run until I tried program compatibility mode for Win 8 ??

Re: Ansel

#56

Post by foobar1962 »

macintux wrote: post #24

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.

Electronic imaging in terms of television has been around since the 1940s or 50s. We all watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. It was a pretty safe bet that resolution would get better until it exceeded film.

Re: Ansel

#57

Post by foobar1962 »

macintux wrote: post #31
hurryer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hence my surprise that Ansel anticipated it with open arms 40 years ago.

Artists had been saying that photographs had no soul for almost 100 years.

Re: Ansel

#58

Post by o11c »

hurryer wrote: post #29
macintux wrote: post #24

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.

To be fair, early-2000s digital cameras were ... not great. 4 megapixels if you're lucky (not that megapixels are the only thing that matters, but they do matter, up to at least 20 megapixels).

Re: Ansel

#59

Post by cetra3 »

I use Darktable quite extensively for underwater photos, but keen to try Ansel out and see if it's less friction.

An example of friction in darktable:

- I have an external strobe which means I have to put the exposure down to its lowest when shooting, otherwise everything is washed out. Darktable in newer versions has "Compensate camera exposure" on by default, which washes out all the images until I click it off. I'm sure there's a way to make this checkbox disabled by default, but why can't it accept what comes out of the camera?

- No favourites: there used to be a way to have all your panels in a favourites tab. This was great as I usually only use a handful of modules that I use. It's gone in later versions

- The "color balance" panel, not to be confused with "color balance rgb", it's not in any of the default tabs but useful for saturation adjustments. Why are some of these useful modules hidden? Shouldn't all modules be available by default. The only way you can get to it is by searching.

- White balance: there are now two modules and it warns you if you adjust one or the other: "white balance" the standard one on the "base" tab and "color calibration" tucked away on the "color" tab. Both modules are turned on by default, but if you adjust one or the other without turning one off it has a big red warning.

- One upgrade decided to reset export settings, and so my EXIF data was stripped out when exporting. It took me way too long to figure it out.

Re: Ansel

#60

Post by acherion »

okl wrote: post #25
acherion wrote: post #19

Weird, I scrolled down to see what cameras it supports, and there was a link labelled "Supported Cameras" that goes to https://rawspeed.org/CameraSupport.html but that's a squatted domain now. Is there a list somewhere? It doesn't instill much confidence in me if I can't even see what camera RAW formats are supported.

How about this? https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed/blob/develop/data/...

Thanks! I filtered out the lines in that XML blob for make="Nikon" (I shoot Nikon) and saw the list of cameras supported that I was interested in :)
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