Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> Except that a significant part of the programmer-users revolving around the project on Github and on the dev mailing-list stay convinced that there is no good or bad workflow, only personal preferences,

In which case, it's OK for a developer to ignore YOUR personal preferences and go with something less flexible. You can ruin a project by trying to accommodate multiple workflows. Let me emphasis that - RUIN A PROJECT.

In solvespace, tool use consists of selecting sketch entities and then applying a tool - example: select lines and apply a constraint (parallel, perpendicular, equal), or what I call "noun - verb". Some people want to use "verb - noun" which would mean selecting the operation (verb) first and then the thing to apply it to (nouns) and then some kind of "go" or "ok" to actually do it. Some have even submitted PRs trying to implement the later as an option.

We will not have it. The disruption to the code is too much. Verb-noun introduces state where there was none, which is a maintenance burbern (small but not zero). It requires the extra step to apply the operation. It does not offer additional capability to users.

At some point you end up "refactoring" and "building an API" to enable all this flexibility. And that's maybe OK for commercial software where people are paid to waste countless hours pandering to the whims of large customers. Architecture astronauts like that kind of stuff for its own sake. Keep them away. Refactor when it's necessary to bring new functionality, not when it's just a user preference.

Make an application, not a toolkit for making applications.

All great software for artists is very opinionated. Lightroom has very specific order. Capture One has it. OP is absolutely right, that the order of modules must be fixed. Arbitrary modules order is an unnecessary complication for artists, and there are strong technical reasons why the order should not be arbitrary.

To change modules order in Darktable, you have to know what to do. By default, the module order is correctly arranged and no intervention is required. Changing the order is an option that you can use only if you want to. No user will ever change a module's order by mistake (and in the remote case that one did, fixing that is a click away).

We have Lightroom, we have Capture One. Let one software for more technically-inclined photographers exist, where you have options and power over the pipeline. Darktable does not aim to be a Lightroom replacement.

I’m fully with you on DT being oriented towards technically inclined artists. And I think OP is more on that side than both of us combined.

I accidentally put words into OPs mouth. Not fixed module order, but correct module order. But even if OP argues for the fixed order, I would trust him fully on that. From what I recall, one of his arguments was that different modules work in different color spaces. And it does not make any sense whatsoever to feed linear RGB into a module that works in some perceptive (logarithmic) space. A car owner who installs 4 different-sized wheels on their car is not technically inclined, he’s just an idiot.

FWIW, in my 2 years of using DT, I never needed to reorder modules. I mean, I used to play with that in the begining. I would spend 4 hours on a single picture reordering modules and doing all the crazy stuff, and then eventually I would start over because the pipeline becomes unmaintainable. I just don’t see, how this can be any useful if your goal is being productive and not just fooling around with your pictures.

This is actually one of the points I disagree with the author. I mentioned in the previous story about ansel that I really like lightzone, which unfortunately has not seen much attention (the project site has been taken over by a squatter so you can only place is currently the GitHub page).

They had configurable execution order and masks well ahead of everyone else (back when lightzone was still commercial) and the interface was always straight forward. Some things are just much easier to achieve with reconfigurable orders. For example desaturating an image and then adjusting the contrast curve of the black and white photo. I just tried that in ansel and you can't do it because the desaturation is done after the tone mapper. You can probably achieve the same result but it's just more difficult.

I find that darktable (and ansel as well) suffer from too many modules touching the same fundamental things. E.g. There seem to be several modules that adjust the color calibration white balance, exposure. So I have seen multiple times that I get a very bad initial look, but I can't fix it easily with e.g. the white balance without turning those other modules off.

The duplication stems from the presence of two workflows in DT: scene-referred and display-referred.

I think OP was pushing for the scene-referred workflow and removal of the legacy display-referred workflow and all related modules. In fact Ansel made a step in that direction. It removed legacy modules (from UI at least), also, for example, it replaced sharpen and soften modules with some iirc wavelet-based thingy which does both (I forgot the name as I tried it long ago).

Can’t comment on contrast after desaturation directly. Perhaps OP could explain why it is done so. A tangential thing: desaturation is actually a complicated process. You could rely on lightness, you could rely on RGB components, etc.. I think Ansel and its Color balance and CAT modules give you full control over all this complexity. These tools are much more flexible than anything offered by competitors. But it’s certainly not easy. This is a bit related to the sibling comment about targeting towards technically inclined people.

LightZone is still very much being maintained - albeit by one developer.

There's an effort underway to recover the original web site, but the domain name owner disappeared a while ago, which complicated things.

Agreed on the paradigms around stacking / ordering & non-destructive workflows used in Lightzone. It's my preferred photo touching-up software for similar reasons.

https://github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone

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