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Ansel

ansel.photos

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Re: Ansel

#81

Post by Tomte »

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…

> moving away from a "display-referred" to a "scene-referred" workflow

What is that?

Edit: they have a page about it: https://ansel.photos/en/workflows/scene-referred/

Re: Ansel

#82

Post by cwillu »

“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.”

Re: Ansel

#83

Post by [deleted] »

cwillu wrote: post #82

“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.”

[deleted]

Re: Ansel

#84

Post by atoav »

chefandy wrote: post #76
jillesvangurp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aurelian's youtube channel is pretty insightful. He explains a lot of what is behind the scene referred modules. And as you say, he has been driving a lot of that work. I've been using Darktable for many years for all my photo editing and it has improved massively in the last few years. He does a great job explaining how raw file processing works (in any raw photo processing tool) and how Darktable does it. https://w…

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it. I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do t…

I agree with you point about UX-professionals. I am not a professional UX designer, but I work in product/graphic/web design since 20 years. As such I volunteered for an open source project once, in a push which (according to the founding developer) was of great value to the project. Basically I just looked at all things as if I had seen them the first time and tried to formulate solutions that replaces gotchas with discoverability, makes unexpected things expected, sand down paper cuts, etc.

This only worked because the founding developer was the benevolent dictator for life and I had one guy that I needed to convince. And that guy clearly was a genius in what he did and accepted that I was better than him in what I did.

Now I don't know the Darktable project's organizational structure, but given the grievances aired here I assume there is no clear shared vision and nobody feels responsible for being really in charge of the software as a tool that solves problems.

Now I am a nerd myself, but there is a kind of open source nerddom, where the people are in it for the coding first and not primarily for creating an elegant and nice to use tool. This can be okay, if there is someone in a deciding position of the project that at least cares about that aspect. If all contributers are just fiddling away in their own corners of the software you will get a patchwork of a software where different parts feel completely different.

Re: Ansel

#86

Post by goodmachine »

chefandy wrote: post #76
jillesvangurp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aurelian's youtube channel is pretty insightful. He explains a lot of what is behind the scene referred modules. And as you say, he has been driving a lot of that work. I've been using Darktable for many years for all my photo editing and it has improved massively in the last few years. He does a great job explaining how raw file processing works (in any raw photo processing tool) and how Darktable does it. https://w…

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it. I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do t…

This is exactly right.

If you've written further on this subject, I'd like to read it.

Re: Ansel

#87

Post by [deleted] »

jiggawatts wrote: post #64

Some feedback from a long-time Lightroom user: Nikon "High-efficiency RAW" support is missing. This is IMHO the fault of Nikon and their vendor TicoRAW. If you're going to come up with a new RAW format, then it is your responsibility to commit the decoder to open-source libraries! Sure, patent and license the encoder, but if you keep the decoder closed-source and proprietary, then you're a . The installer is an EXE i…

[deleted]

Re: Ansel

#88

Post by kqr »

actionfromafar wrote: post #46
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…

I tried to use Darktable coming from Lightroom, and I have seldom felt as stupid. I just couldn't grasp how Darktable worked.

On the flip side, coming from Darktable and trying out Lightroom felt like trying to do good old darkroom work with my hands tied behind my back.

Darktable offers a few really powerful, generic tools that you can use in different ways to get different effects – things like equaliser, parametric masks, LAB curves, etc. It makes little sense to use it without reading up on some of those more advanced tools first.

Lightroom, in contrast, focuses more on offering a small selection of pre-defined tools for specific purposes. But once you want to do something outside of that (parametric masking is one of those things I really missed) you're shit out of luck.

Re: Ansel

#89

Post by WA »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #85

The author's search engine: https://chantal.aurelienpierre.com might be the real hidden gem here. It's neat!

Interesting philosophy, but just tried it with "bokeh" and well, the results are pretty bad? "Related keywords" are interesting, but many miss the last letter. The result list shows some reviews for old smartphones. Nothing relevant at all. Whereas if I type this into Google, results look way better.

Tried the reverse: One related keyword for "bokeh" is "out-of-focus". I typed "out of focus" into both Google and Chantal. Google: first result mentions bokeh. Chantal: Also mentioned somewhere, but not as a related keyword.

Re: Ansel

#90

Post by jillesvangurp »

cetra3 wrote: post #59

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'…

You can create a preset for the exposure module and define rules when it kicks in. For example based on the camera manufacturer, focal length, iso, etc. I use that to increase the default exposure compensation with my Fuji. I deliberately underexposes to prevent highlights from clipping. So I usually want a +1.25 exposure compensation. Likewise, you might want denoising on for high iso files.

You can organize modules into profiles and simply hide all the ones you don't use. The default profile hides some of the deprecated or display referred modules. You can change this.

White balance indeed has a deprecated variant for display referred and a scene referred one that works completely different that you typically use together with color calibration (which is where you should do most of your color correction, including color temperature changes). The reasons are mathematical and beyond me to explain properly (Aurelian does a great job on his Youtube channel). It boils down to not throwing away the baby with the bath water in terms of rounding errors accumulating and switching color model (to the one used by your display) too early in the pipeline. It might look pleasing but then it bites you when you want to tweak tone or do other things. This is the whole point of working with the scene referred modules.

Having all the legacy modules around is indeed somewhat confusing and Aurelian solves this in Ansel by hiding all the deprecated modules now. They are there for legacy files still.

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