Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

As a long time GIMP user, coming to Darktable has been a revelation. I'm super impressed with how powerful and polished Darktable is, and overall I really love it.

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.

Gimp and Darktable are very different beasts. Darktable is tailored to work on RAW pictures coming directly, unprocessed from your camera. Gimp cannot do that and only works on compresseda and/or rasterized images (thinkg JPG or PNG).

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.

> Darktable is mostly geared towards improving photograph quality, while GIMP [...]

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!)

Yes, sliders are really a pain. However from my experience it's much more convenient to move sliders with keyboard arrows (hover a mouse over slider and use the arrows). it still sucks, but sucks less :)

Did you try the middle mouse button click on the Darktable sliders? That's a great feature which gives you much more control over the sliders.

Ah. wow. At the time I had a mouse it didn't work that way. Nowadays I use trackpoint only and even have no physical mouse at all. But that's good to know there's a progress. Thx.

In addition, darktable has a newer perspective correction module which does a nice job of automatic fitting. See the write-up at https://www.darktable.org/2016/03/a-new-module-for-automatic....

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.

Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop handles a modern software, even a brand new version, with shitty performance. Media processing be it images or video isn't made for old laptops.

"Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop handles a modern software with a shitty performance."

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 think he/she can and did.

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.

A brand new laptop is maybe 20% faster than a laptop from 4 years ago so there is really no complaint to be made about old hardware. intel CPU almost stopped improving.

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