Darktable 3.6 | Hacker News Reader

Darktable 3.6

github.com

176 pointsmorsch73 comments

I use darktable for my photography and really appreciate how powerful it is. I do wish the UI was a little more friendly. Throughout the versions I’ve run into a large number of quirks. Tool tips not being a huge thing means you have to learn what all the tiny greyscale icons mean by heart. Duplicating the exposure module to touch up a specific area means the histogram now controls the duplicate and not the original. Minor adjustments for any slider with a right click on the tiny slider knob we’re super broken for a while. These kinds of things would be great to not happen.

But I think my biggest struggle with it is documentation. The docs are written in a way that seem to assume you know a whole lot of details of the software and the theory behind image processing. I am by no means an expert so when I start reading about how a specific module does it’s transforms at some specific phase in the pipeline and in this specific color space I don’t actually get what the effect of that will have on the photo. I understand that there is a lot you can do with the software but for example it took like an hour of YouTube videos from random people for me to figure out how to add a soft focus effect (apparently I needed to invoke local contrast?) or how to darken a specific spot on a photo in a way that blended nicely with the rest of it. Personally I have gotten comfortable with it and now can do what I need to do but at the same time that learning curve was super steep. I still wonder if I should give Lightroom a try just to see if that’s more user friendly.

I mean this is in a non-snarky way but have you fed this back to the developers and considered writing documentation aimed at people like yourself?.

I have not and I know that’s a thing I can do. I don’t think I could write the documentation because (a) time and (b) I honestly don’t think I actually have enough knowledge to do that well.

I was consistently surprised how thorough the manual is. There are not many open source (or closed source!) pieces of software that come with a 220 page manual, with another 100 pages of appendices. Usually you have to pay another 30 bucks for a book, and then do it again when another version is released.

That said, it sure is a complicated piece of software and I hear that the Lightroom UI is a bit more intuitive and polished.

It’s amazing they’ve made this available, but if you need a 220 page manual to use a software then maybe the UX could be improved a bit.

I've only looked up a few things here and there, but in order for that to work the documentation needs to be pretty thorough. If you think pro software doesn't need a manual, I invite you to check just how many shelves in your local bookstore are devoted to Photoshop, InDesign etc. Those books used to come with the software.

There are limits to this. There's no amount of UX that will explain mathematical concepts as a side effect of being useful.

Sure, you can implement some UX to show the differences between different demosaicing methods and how good they are, but you're going to implement an interactive toy/tutorial (so another form of a manual), or you'll end up failing to explain the theory.

Or maybe people should RTFM

This idea that software should always come to us, and not the other way around, is untenable. And, I think, selfish.

There are valid points on both sides of that issue. On one hand, sophisticated image processing techniques require a level of user education that doesn't fit nicely into a UI. How to get the most out of the various tools belongs in the manual.

On the other hand, Darktable's UI would benefit from some polishing, and perhaps a more gentle learning curve for beginners to become productive. This is very common in open source applications, as there tend to be more programmers contributing than UX designers.

I used to be in your camp.

Make it so easy no manual is needed.

After having been subjected to this dumbification of software I myself use I'm starting to have doubts: my search engine is broken, every app is hiding the menus thereby hampering discoverability, plugin APIs gets neutered and won't be fixed because "it can confuse users".

I'm well and truly fed up.

We've gone past mere constraints and are now in the era of strait-jacketed interfaces.

What you say is particularly true for image editing and Darktable especially: there are already tons of image editors available in all levels of dumbed-down-ness. Lightroom is actually one of the more complex tools, all things considered.

Which is exactly why Darktable is special: it is verbose and technical, but offers deep control and complexity, which is truly unique in image editors.

(I want to compare it to Emacs, but it sort of lacks the extensibility to be a good analogy. But it is certainly more emacsian in spirit than any other image editor)

I agree. darktable is super powerful but the UI could use some cleanup. I also don't like the concept of film rolls. I would prefer if it just worked off a disk folder hierarchy. A dream would be to combine the file management of digikam with the darktable image processing engine.

I also agree that you have to have way more knowledge of image processing concepts compared to Lightroom and Capture One who shield you from these things.

But the biggest upside of darktable is that they expose a ton of functionality and constantly ship new stuff. Yes, you have to figure it out but at least there is progress. With Capture One I paid yearly for upgrades that didn't add much new stuff but often only polished existing features.

One more thought about the learning curve: It took me years to get used to and comfortable with a lot of quirks in Capture One so I expect the same with darktable too.

The devs are actively anti-folder structure handling within Darktable[1], which is why I still have to use Digikam or a file manager and then leave my computer for a few hours to re-import my entire collection every so often.

Re. UI, open source programs almost always end up on the side of technically correct rather than user friendly. So we're served a bunch of jargon with no easy way to find out more other than searching the web and hoping that whichever term they use has a single meaning, is only used in this context, and is used universally rather than some other term. These things are rarely all true at the same time.

All that said, Darktable is great for my simple use, and it's my main photo developing application.

[1] https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files

"The devs are actively anti-folder structure handling within Darktable[1], which is why I still have to use Digikam"

Same here. I wonder why that is. They already have some file handling ability but it seems half baked and just weird. The note from the FAQ sounds very hostile BTW.

I wonder if would be possible to set up Digikam so when you double click an image it gets opened in darktable.

In the Collections modules you can easily see your imported images based on what folder they are in.

I don’t really get why this is a problem for people. I import my files into YYYY-MM-DD dated directories, then import each as a roll. Each roll now corresponds to a directory of photos. I export them such that there is a sub directly with the JPEGs. I don’t use tags or any such feature of darktable itself to organize the photos.

Hi, the phrase"the ui could use some clean up" is inactionable and generally when people say this they mean "be more like light room" which isn't something the project is interested in.

If you have some actionable UI/UX improvements, please open an issue.

To the best of my knowledge, we currently have zero people who work only on UX/UI issues.

Larger and clearer buttons, fewer buttons in favor of more context menus, saner scrolling behavior (don’t change a slider when I want to scroll up/down in a sidebar), and let me control which exposure module is attached to the histogram.

The scrolling is a setting.

Button and text sizes are the able.

Can you give an example of what you would put in a context menu?

A simple example would be to select an image or images in the lighttable screen. Pretty much all buttons from the “selected images” section would make sense in a context menu. Right click the image and see applicable actions. Users are used to that.

If you go to Preferences > Misc, you can control which exposure the histogram controls.

One improvement would be to use drop down menus and context menus like other apps do. It’s not about emulating Lightroom but about behaving like most other GUI applications. By using drop down menus a lot of the right side of the lighttable screen could be removed. This section looks very overloaded.

Another nice feature would be to resync an imported folder to detect moved and deleted images. Also moving folders/film rolls would be nice.

I am pretty ok with the darkroom screen. My main problems are with file handling.

I personally don't feel like hiding a bunch of stuff in a menu is better UI. Websites do that will the hamburger menu and its quite annoying.

There is already a lua plugin to scan the filesystem for new files and import them. If you're going to delete files, do it from inside darktable.

If you move files, you can rigt click the film roll and select the new location.

"I personally don't feel like hiding a bunch of stuff in a menu is better UI. "

Right now darktable is hiding stuff by overloading the main UI with a ton of buttons and expandable sections. It's hard to find things there and also uses up a lot of space.

Drop down and context menus are what people are used to and they are also more efficient with space usage.

Based on inkscape and gimp, you'll be waiting for a better ui forever.

Or with a slightly happier outlook: Blender really turned their UX and UI around within 20 years of initial open source release. So change is possible, might just be really hard.

Gimp has been getting better in the last 10 years. Sure it's a long time, but how many UI/UX specialists are contributing to open source with their skills? At least there's a will for improving things.

You might like to dip in to Bruce Williams' youtube channel [1] which has many good clear explanations of darktable features (though there's the odd mistake, he generally corrects it in a subsequent episode).

The main programmer of darktable also has a channel[2] which goes very in-depth (and opinionated!) on some aspects, like the recent filmic module.

They are both useful adjuncts to the provided documentation, which can be pretty technical and abstruse.

1: https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos

2: https://www.youtube.com/c/Aur%C3%A9lienPIERREPhoto/videos

Aurélien is not the main programmer of darktable, as far as I know. I'm not sure there is one main programmer of darktable.

Not sure where I got that idea from - thanks for the correction.

It took me perhaps an hour trying to figure out how to save/export my edited photo...

Hi, I'm one of the darktable docs maintainers.

We recently rewrote most of the docs. Have you checked them out?

I agree that we should provide a more approachable description for a lot of modules. But we can't cover general image processing stuff because the manual would be unmaintainable.

The release notes are also published in the news section of the website [1] and there’s a separate blog entry [2], though I’m never quite sure what’s supposed to be the difference between the two.

[1]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-360-released/ [2]: https://www.darktable.org/2021/07/darktable-3-6/

The first is for general consumption, the second is the dev blog entry of the changes.

The second link is probably the best illustration of the new features. There's also -- as usual -- a video covering some of the new features by Bruce Williams (who's a pro photographer, not a dev, just to avoid misunderstandings): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7lmrEEvOKM

The news post is supposed to be "change log" style, while the blog post is meant for regular user consumption.

Dark table is incredibly impressive for free open source software.

I honestly don't know how they do it.

They also "stuck the landing" -- the release schedule for darktable 3.6 was posted to the mailing list in the middle of April, with a release date of today.

  - release        - T0    : July 3rd
  - code freeze    - T0-10 : June 23rd - start create binaries
  - string freeze  - T0-12 : June 11th - start translation
  - feature freeze - T0-30 : June 1st  - only code fix
  - safe mode      - T0-45 : mid-May   - only safe simple code

More professional than most commercial software development.

Are there any good tutorial on how to use Darktable that don't presume previous exposure to Lightroom?

But man, the presets are already great and my RAW images are popping with details and color.

I learnt a lot from Aurelien Pierre youtube tutorials[1], one of the darktable devs. He also recorded very good videos on imaging (dynamic range, color theory...), that you'll need to understand to really benefits from darktable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg

I've mentioned him in another thread, but Bruce Williams has loads of tutorial videos that target novices: https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos

The series Editing moments with darktable is also very interesting, though not a tutorial per se: https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos

There's the Open Source Photography Course by Riley Brandt. It's a bit outdated by now, but remains a very gentle and well-produced introduction to (an older version of) Darktable, and image editing in general. Highly recommend.

From the README:

> darktable is not a free Adobe® Lightroom® replacement.

Does anyone know what the deal is with this remark? At a glance, the feature set/use case look sort of similar to me...

darktable does very close to zero file management, or library management, they are purposefully staying away from this.

Also, they don't want to be seen as a clone as feature parity is not their goal.

Basically it just happen that the two pieces of software perform some of the same functions.

The point is, the UI looks vaguely similar to Lightroom, and many people come to Darktable expecting a free clone of Lightroom. Scores of these people then hit the forums and complain about "missing features" and "incorrect behavior" and such. It's a real problem, and happens very regularly.

That's why they try to put it front and center that Darktable is not Lightroom, is not trying to be Lightroom, and should not be expected to work like Lightroom.

There are too many media outlets that peg darktable as "free lightroom" so people comein expecting that. Sure we do similar things, but we are the same like an F1 car and a Honda civic are similar.

It gets really old listening to people complain how it isn't FREE LIGHTROOM

I like darktable but I have a hard try understanding why it (and lightroom) tries so hard to fit into the "darkroom photo studio" metaphor. For most of the people using digital cameras today, film photography was already dying or dead when they were born.

I totally agree with your main point. We see other comments here where the core metaphor just doesn't resonate for them.

But is the latter part true? I got my first digital camera in 1998 and I was a pretty early adopter. It honestly was not much of a camera; it had an entire 1 megapixel of resolution: https://www.dpreview.com/products/olympus/compacts/oly_d400z

If we're looking to fix a date when film started dying, I don't think we could put it before the year film sales peaked, which was 1999: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-longer.html

People who start a photography curriculum in 2021 were born in 2002 / 2003. I'd say early adopters were users of 1992-1994 Kodak digital cameras - by 2002, both Nikon and Canon already had 6.something megapixels reflex if I'm not mistaken.

Sorry, I'm still not following. If 2002 is your marker for the beginning of the death of film, and if people born then are starting a photography curriculum in 2021, how could they be "most of the people using digital cameras today"?

I thought that the median age in the world was around 20 but it's actually ~30. Though I doubt a lot of 30 years old today ever had exposure (heh) to a traditional film workflow.

Ah, got it. We might also want to look specifically at the market for digital cameras. The median age in US and Europe is more like 40; Japan is 48. And the median age of people using digital cameras is surely higher than the population median.

2007, gut feeling based on "iPhone introduced" and roughly when I last bought a camera (which was digital) rather than a phone (which had a digital camera I used for 'all' my photos).

I more strongly suspect the number depends on the space and when "professional workhorses" get replaced. Today the low-end prosumer market has been subsumed by mobile phones, and DSLRs and such more frequently use bits than film.

I do agree that the low-end of the market was starting to phase out in the mid 90s, but they still sold disposables for super cheep. The digital cameras main application was a niche where someone wanted pictures for their computer or websites but didn't have a better chain for loading in analog film.

Early 2000s might be the start of transition, when equipment became good enough that digital had benefits over film. Workhorse equipment replacement may have taken another 5-10 years?

For a second I thought this was about Light Table [0] and got excited. What ever did happen to that project?

[0] http://lighttable.com/

Are there any "serious" photographers here that successfully switched away from Lightroom to Darktable? How does the quality of the adjustments compare these days? Last time I checked, Lightroom was able to recover far more detail for example when raising the shadows of even a jpeg. Is that still the case?

I consider myself serious, though I don't photograph for a living.

The new scene referred workflow and specifically the Tone Equalizer module can pull a lot of details out of the shadows and does it really well.

I've never used Lightroom but it seems their highlight recovery is better, but that's about it.

For the benefit of myself and others checking this out the first time: How do open my DNG in Darktable? I've been fumbling around in the UI for 10 minutes. I'm definetly not a noob but the UI eludes me.

To answer myself - there is no "Open file" functionality. Images need to be "Imported to database".

The UI takes a long time to get used to. The concept of film rolls is a little weird and knowing which functionality is available in what context is also often not very intuitive.

You can actually sort of just open a file directly by running darktable <filename> which will open the file in the editor (the darkroom in darktable parlance; the file is automatically added to the database).

I suppose if you don't care about the photo library management aspects of darktable, you could use it like this entirely, especially since apparently 3.6 adds an export button in the darkroom.

https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/special-topics/p...

I'd love to help but can you be more specific? Until then, taking a guess at what you mean exactly:

- importing a DNG into the application: in the top-left there's an "import" button and a "folder" button to import files and/or folders. Navigate to the folder with your DNG. Select it, import it, like you'd expect opening files to work

- after importing you're still in the "lightroom" section, which is the gallery of all imported photos. On the left you can filter by "film roll", representing photos you imported together. You can also rate selected photos zero to five stars, label them rejected or with a color (all on the bottom row), and then further filter out photos via controls at the top.

- to edit a photo you need to go to the "darkroom" view. Either select a photo and click on darkroom, or just double-click. After that, well, there are a lot of options to explore, haha. There's quite a few YouTube tutorials that are a lot better at explaining the interface than a text description here would be.

Good luck and have fun!

Thanks, this is precisely the feedback I was hoping to receive.

Looks great and all but I would love a desktop version of Snapseed.

I've been running Snapseed in Anbox on my laptop since I'm trying to stay away from Windows, which means no Adobe software (Lightroom). It's been really good, especially after switching to Wayland made touch input way smoother.

Oooh, I'll have to try that. Thanks!

I absolutely love Darktable and also Sagelight. My photo editors ever.

> and also Sagelight.

I take it that's?: https://www.sagelighteditor.com/

39.95 usd, life time upgrades photo editor formerly known as lightbox.

Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete with Photoshop. Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess?

Current version is actually free.

>"Might be a bit more streamlined than gimp, I guess"

It does not pretend to be photoshop at all. I found the concept and power of tooling brilliant.

> Current version is actually free.

Oh, I looked at the FAQ which listed the (old) price, the current version is donationware/gratis indeed:

https://www.sagelighteditor.com/purchase3.html

> Reasons to Donate to Sagelight Editor

> Current Version. The current version is the original release version, with some bug fixes and updates. Donations go to updating the current version and adding some functions.

> Next Version 5.0. Version 5 is 75% complete, featuring a complete revamp of the UI, many new functions, and new a new-and-improved noise-reduction. Donations also go to finishing this version.

> Get Version 5 free. If there are enough donations, I can give version 5 away for free. If you donate $5 or more, keep your information and you get Version 5 for free, even if it goes back to a regular purchase.

>Looks interesting - but as usual it's though to compete with Photoshop.

I mean, it's becoming easier and easier to compete with expensive software-as-a-service that doesn't even have a basic vectorscope included, so I also have to drop more money into 3rd party plugins just to be able to work with non-caveman tools. (not saying Sagelight has one, just disappointed with Photoshop lagging behind the other software for photo editing in many respects)

Image-manipulation tools should stop trying to build a database of files, and instead operate on directories. Otherwise, the displayed library doesn't reflect new files when you copy them into the directory hierarchy.

This always sucked about iTunes too, whereas EphPod simply used the files on disk and thus was always accurate.

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