Darktable 2.4.0 released
darktable.org
darktable.org
Also if you want to learn a lot about "developing" digital photographs (it really is a digital darkroom), I learned a lot from this youtube list of 42 Darktable tutorial edit sessions [2]. Very powerful and fun stuff.
[1] https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-windows/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-zRRM1...
On the other hand, Darktable has some serious issues that make it less than ideal for me.
First, on my old laptop Darktable is super, super slow... especially when the image I'm editing has lots of operations performed on it. In that case, performing a simple operation on top of the existing ones or just zooming in or out could take a full minute, and exporting a single image could take 30 minutes or more (compared to GIMP, which takes less than a minute). Just going from lighttable to darkroom or back could take multiple minutes.
Second, some operations are just much easier and more intuitive to do in GIMP. For example, making perspective changes in GIMP using the perspective tool -- you just drag the corners of the image where you want them. In Darktable you're limited to moving sliders around, which is far more annoying.
Finally, Darktable is mostly geared towards improving photograph quality, while GIMP is more of an all-around image editor and drawing/painting program which can improve the quality of photographs but is not limited to that but can do much more.
Well, GIMP has new software releases all the time, and works quickly on my old laptop.
You can't blame the fact that Darktable is slow on it being new.
I used Adobe Photoshop on a 60 MHz Power Macintosh in 1996 and was quite productive with it.
The word "software" is a mass or uncountable noun. It has no plural form. Thus "a modern software" is grammatically incorrect.
I'd hesitate to call that an issue. It's more a different focus - if you've only got one or two images to deal with, then sure, GIMP (or Photoshop) is more capable, but when you've got a couple hundred or more raws from a full day's shooting - many of which were taken under the same lighting conditions and thus need similar processing - you really start to want something that's designed specifically around dealing with such large collections. That's where applications like Darktable and Lightroom, with their collection management and workflow capabilities, really come into their own.
(Super excited for the Windows release!)
Another big difference is that Darktable does non-destructive changes: you have a history of operations that you applied and you can rollback to any step. None of the steps directly modifies the pixels of the image, instead the program computes the changes made by all of the effects in the history for every pixel in the image, then shows you a preview (or exports it).
Handling a big RAW file and all the modifications that you've done is an intensive process, and that's why it requires a beefier computer than Gimp for instance. There is also OpenCL support, to leverage the power of your GPU.
I can't speak too much to the question of speed, except to say that my nice laptop from 2012 is sluggish with darktable. My decent desktop from 2017 is fairly fluid. Neither has a graphics card, but a decent graphics card with OpenCL support makes things much more fluid. Waiting a minute for a simple operation is not something I've experienced, and suggests, as they say, that something, somewhere, is wrong.
As another commenter writes, the problem is that darktable must do a crazy lot of math to display the image -- every step of the image editing process. There is a good bit of caching along the way, but at some point, the math must be done.
darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
>Mention that having (photographer) developers as part of the target audience is good for understanding the real world problems, challenges, and workflows.
>Something about capability - highlight about some big important features! Maybe mention flexibility here (ease of writing new modules).
>Something about community, mailing list, maybe discuss forum, and the Flickr page? Number of contributors (indicate health of the project and users). Some other metric of vitality of the community (possibly how to get involved)?
a couple of UI/UX issues I found:
= When I open a tool panel from the "more modules" the panel is added to the tools but its collapsed instead of expanded.
= some filters should be toned down (the sliders have very extreme results with minor movements, this makes it hard to fine tune)
its a much more polished effort than gimp though. I'll keep an eye on darktable!
But honestly I can’t complain because this thing allows me to make decent photos fantastic.
In case that is an X-Y question, how do I undo in darktable?
Normally v2.4.0 improves this. As stated in their release notes: “Add undo support for masks and more intelligent grouping of undo steps”.
Basically, in v2.2, even low-level operations that didn't have a visible impact were in the undo list, so when you pressed Ctrl+Z it would undo something, but you wouldn't see any change. You would actually have to press Ctrl+Z several times to finally see something on the screen.
This was changed and should be more human-friendly :)
> how do you understand the history function?
This is indeed a little bit more complicated that just a list of things to undo. You can read a bit more about it in the user manual: https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.ht...
Until I figure something out, I'm waiting for Luminar or whatever Lightroom competitor that Affinity Software is going to come out with later in 2018.
https://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/12/6-14-now-av...
In my case, mainly for viewing and editing Canon raw format photos?
I personally find the file/library management aspect of Darktable so lacking that it's personally useless to me. I absolutely despise Adobe and would pay double what I give them for a decent Lightroom alternative, but it just doesn't exist yet and won't anytime soon.
On Win both Picasa (also discontinued), Lightroom (non-cloud also discontinued), and various open source alternatives are less polished and slower than Photo Gallery. I will try out Darktables 2.4.
The cool thing of Windows Live Photo Gallery is that everything is saved back to the file. If you tag a photo (even hierarchy tags like Places/City/NewYorkCity) the tag is stored also in the photo file, so when you copy somewhere else, all metadata (EXIF, XMP, IPC) is still there. And all photos are NOT-imported to a central database. So you can organize the photos like you want and Photo Gallery just indexes the folders and stores thumbnails and metadata in a central database file for fast viewing and searching. Most a alternatives to a Photo Gallery want to import all photos to a special directory or even to a central database (see Picasa, and Lightroom) which is like iTunes where all your metadata like the 5 star rating sits then in a central database - that is soooo wrong!! - instead of storing the changes back to the photo files.
Even the built in filesystem access is poor.
Nothing on Linux is acceptable though, so they're not alone, it's just sad that something so promising is so hobbled.
So, it's not a Picasa replacement then?
Its a raw editor only and the docs are clear about this. To edit some files you have to import them, but importing them is for the sole ourpose of performing raw edits. There's some rudimentary tagging/rating abilities but the sorting capabilities are poor and you cant actually reorganise files on disk.
Theres no way you'd import say 20,000 photos (or in my case about 100,000) and keep a catelogue. You'd have to split it into individual shoots/days to get any kind of performance (thats if importing that many wouldnt crash it, it did previously).
They only grudgingly include a file system browser which is also hobbled.
If Darktable actually included photo management as a first class citizen (by that i simply mean even just a simple file browser like lightroom has) it would probably win this particular software space. But the devs choose to actively work against that functionality so its just another minor free app.
Is there any tools nowadays that:
(a) Lets the user keep Favorited/marked images in a local storage location
(b) 'ages-out' other files to secondary storage pools (removable disks, cloud storage)
(c) Keeps Low-res thumbnails of all images in the collection?
I keep trying to find something that would help keep tabs on a growing collection of images, with growing file sizes from newer cameras, but it all seems like doing it manually is the only way to go :(
[1] http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/local_copies.html
Or if you want something more integrated, my editor Filmulator has that, though it's far from being feature complete...
~/Images/$year/$location/$event/raw
Especially handy when you need to mix your photos with someone else's (I add -$author to photo name). I wrote a simple script to rename photos to this pattern based on EXIF info. Works pretty well (just ensure the time is set correct).
~/Images/$year/$month/$day-title/{ RAW JPG Public }
You can do exactly what you just said with PhotoMechanic, or Rapid Photo Downloader, and still open lightroom and navigate the file structure.
Trying that with Darktable is a pain. It wants you to import and the file sytem browser is poor.
Plus, are you going to edit all the photos you've downloaded? Are you not going to rate, discard, reorganise the keepers, tags and sort etc etc? Darktable is leagues behind lightroom in this capability, not to mention noise handling, camera specific tone curves and speed of use.
It is a powerful editor, but its setup for hobbyists and tinkerers who go from file to file and repeat every single step manually. The batch processing is convoluted and at my last try pretty inflexible.for example.
I want to love it and use it. But its limited.
I don't necessarily edit every picture, but I want to look at white-balance, and similar things, for every shot in a specific session. (Most of the time I can replicate settings from one image to the next - when I'm using studio-strobes the lighting doesn't change.)
The only images I outright delete are those where a model blinks mid-shot, or a strobe fails to fire. In an hour-session I might have 750 images, and I'll likely rank/rate all of them, but only export 20% to JPG, and then those will be pruned as I decide which are the good ones.
I tried Lightroom, but that was excruciatingly slow to import the photos, and on top of that it had very counter intuitive controls. It was also not cheap at all, and subscription based.
I tried Google Photos (my current setup), but while cloud storage is nice, it’s UI sucks (it is Google after all), but most annoyingly you can’t actually name people in photos. Instead you have to wait for the face to get processed, then peruse 1000 faces of strangers just to find the face (hopefully) and then assign a name for it. Seriously, I can’t name my daughter in any picture taken in the last 2 years because of this.
Apple Photos seems like the product I most want, but it insists that all the photos get stored locally, which is a nonstarter. Its cloud storage doesn’t make any sense because it seems like sync, which never what I want. Finally, it barfs if you try to import too many pictures at once.
I’ve been using python scripts to manages my photos, but I’d really like good graphical manager that supports geo and face tagging, maybe some of the event stuff like Google Photos. Does anyone else have this problem? I can’t believe I’m the only one with these problems, but at the same time it’s hard for me to see a niche market for this. Any thought?
Later, I export all my processed photos to Flickr[1] (1TB of space for free) and use their albums, tags, geolocation features to categorize them further. By processed photos, I mean photo I have reworked with DT (so not all my pictures, but the ones that really matter).
You can also grap some existing lua plugin like the one who can export/import to GIMP.
[1] https://www.darktable.org/lua-api/ and https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts
They're all poor in some way. Lightroom is closest, especially with the latest uodate to improve speed in the Classic CC version.
Other than that there are exceptional importers like Photomechnic ($$$) or Rapid Photo Downloader (free) but photo managers are all poor.
Its unbelievable too. All it needs is a free version of lightrooms librart module that works on the embedded raw jpegs (like Photomechnic and Rapid Photo Downloader) and it would win photo management.
Im learning to code with part of the motivation being I'm going to make my own that actually works because its so easy to see whats needed. By next christmas i hooe to have a rough first working attempt.
No one cares about it having a database behind the scenes or the upgrade/downgrade process, tell me what it can do and how it compares to the real alternative, Adobe Lightroom.
Only Blender is the ugly swan, that still has this inhouse-style homegrown UI from the early 1990s UNIX where Blender originated. Nothing in a Blender works as expected, the mouse buttons are opposite to everyone else, the toolbars go all over the place and spam the workspace, no tabs, weird floating windows, keyboard shortcuts from hell, camera controls like coded by 5 year old kid, and so on. Even GIMP has a more sane UI, it's actually not that bad at all. But don't get me started on Blender. Blender needs a complete new UI, otherwise it would be such a shame, the program is good but it's very user hostile and the interface has a step learning curve for no reason at all, and the devs see no reason at all to get over their pride and will never change Blender's UI, which is unfortunate. So maybe someone forks Blender and scraps the old UI and adds a sane UI comparable to industry alternatives - it would help adoption of Blender a lot. Sometimes it looks like they get paid to keep Blender lower key, so that Maya and co still can be sold.
While I agree that it's not obvious, that's a common practice (Hacker News does the same) so you should probably keep that in mind.
You can also contact the team to propose your help[2]. Maybe it is time for you to give back to an open source project with great features by offering your copywriting skills.