Darktable 5.0.0 | Hacker News Reader

Darktable 5.0.0

darktable.org

330 pointsmorsch122 comments

Since no one mentioned it yet. There is a darktable fork called ansel https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel that tries to remove bloat and make darktable more user friendly.

It's rather opinionated and done by Aurélien Pierre.

For those interested in the why https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent... there is also a YouTube video with strong language. There is an appimage so I recommend people to at least try it.

> What happens when a gang of amateur photographers, turned into amateur developers, joined by a bunch of back-end developers who develop libraries for developers, decide to work without method nor structure on an industry software for end-users, which core competency (colorimetry and psychophysics) lies somewhere between a college degree in photography and a master’s degree in applied sciences, while promising to deliver 2 releases each year without project management ? All that, of course, in a project where the founders and the first generation of developers moved on and fled ?

A number of open source design software comes to mind, but I am too scared to name them.

Yeah it's a common problem, but it is in the nature of open source to be done by enthusiasts (of course it can be done by professionals/enterprises, but I think it's fair to say that most open source software stems from a personal need).

I'm really not judging any project, because a working solution that is done by enthusiastic amateurs is better than no solution at all and let's be honest, most of my code is amateurish at best/hacked in a week/month as well.

It's only bad if you see a project heading in the wrong direction and not being able to stop this, but for this god invented forks ;)

If he's so hung up on the open source process of Darktable, I can't wait to hear what he has to say about enterprise software, LOL.

It can't be that bad if there's a new active generation of developers. Not every project (FOSS or commercial) survives this step.

> Since no one mentioned it yet

Yes they did, couple minutes before you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42558923

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42558937

I can't try it because I do my photo editing on a high-end mac and they don't care to keep their macOS builds working because only 4% of existing darktable users are on macOS (and the dev doesn't have a mac to test on). (Nevermind that a lot more would be if darktable didn't suck, and that we're all paying for Lightroom instead because of it.)

I've seen this fork mentioned around a couple of times so I've decided to read the articles on https://ansel.photos/en/news/. I'm not trying to deny that his motives are right, but the way and how often he bashes on darktable developers is really off-putting. I'll only cite a couple but they're easy to find:

> a handful of guys with more freetime and benevolence than actual skills

> So I fixed the whole logic [...] You might think that was a problem solved and a job well done, but that’s leaving Darktable’s geniuses out of the equation.

If you want to work alone I guess you can have that sort of negative attitude... but to me it clearly says "don't use or contribute to this software".

It's easier to spot mistakes after others have already made them, and then come up with better approaches. And it's easy to find yourself complaining about what is basically a prototype somebody else made and spared you the effort. It can definitely pump your ego up.

I'm saying this because one-man forks almost never lead to popular adoption, and almost always lead to abandoned forks, even if the new developer is technically gifted. I'm somewhat reminded of KWinFT (KDE fork) that has been somewhat recently renamed to Theseus' Ship.

I understand that you acquired a repulsion to design by committee, but when dealing with large projects you can't do it all by yourself, so you need to start learning how to deal with people. But who knows, maybe it's possible to find other like-minded contributors who are not so easily thrown off by the immaturities of a project's leader.

  but to me it clearly says "don't use or contribute to this software"

As an end user the sheer arrogance and condescending attitude that the darktable devs bring to the table is far more offputting than someone (an ex-darktable dev no less) losing patience with that behavior.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for taking the high road. If the attitude of the upstream devs is so toxic to drive you to create a fork, then why not differentiate yourself by creating a toxicity-free community to the best of your abilities?

You might even adopt forum rules similar to HN’s but with a focus on improving access to open source photographers’ tools (which is what this software is supposed to be in the first place).

Darktable has so thoroughly sucked the fun out of digital photography for me that I can hardly blame Aurélien for being salty. I just don't care that much that his frustration boiled over because he's at also doing something constructive.

Seconding chongli, you can be very frustrated with the devs and not be toxic; losing patience, even if justified, does not justify being an asshole, and even genius devs like Linus have grown to understand this. I agree with some points Aurélien makes and do find Darktable to be a bit frustrating to use, and I'm sure he's right about a lot of the reasons it's slow and not great to develop on, but he crosses a line, going from criticizing to belittling others and propping himself up at the same time, and just sounds like an insolent and narcissistic person, which makes me basically never want to try his fork.

Worth noting Aurélien was a Darktable dev, so he's not some outsider that's coming in like a wrecking ball. I think it's much to Linus' benefit that he's mellowed out over time. However I'm not going to be quick to condemn someone who's already contributed significantly to DT.

You're quite a bit less motivated than I am to try Ansel I suppose. I found DT (and the devs' defense of their decisions) intolerable. To the extent that I got Ansel built on my mac. Aurélien indeed fixed some of my biggest complaints with DT, but unfortunately he ripped out some bits I actually wanted to use.

At this point I suppose Ansel can go one of two ways: DragonFlyBSD or LibreSSL.

I'm a 100% with you on this, but I always try to be as neutral about this as I can. A character/temper of a developer should not be the main topic of discussion, the software should be though.

To your comment about committees. That (or the lack thereof) is a big critique point the ansel developer makes. A leadership of one is better than the leadership of none. And since he forks darktable and mostly removes and replaces some functions I don't see it as a problem in this case, especially since he has been maintaining the project for many years now.

Anyway like I said, I would recommend trying the software and if you think it's worse than darktable just don't use it :) I for instance have multiple software packages installed and am quite annoyed to have to use multiple packages for one "thing" and I always try to use the best tool for the job. On photo management/editing I'm quite torn

It's funny how when one guy does it for a small fork on a small project, people get riled up about it. However, when there's a bigger project like HomeAssistant, people let that behavior slide.

As far as Darktable/Ansel goes, he's right. Darktable's UI and philosophy is pretty horrid. I shouldn't have to know seven different algorithms to apply a denoise filter. The vast majority of professional photographers are artists, not computer scientists. I want the application to pick the best one for me. All commercial applications these days take it one step further with some pretty good AI tools, too.

Which creates shallow artists who just want it to "look pretty now." Not saying there isn't a place in the world for that, but there are always trade offs with tools that manipulate your human vision of art, and to say "there are too many denoise filters, just pick one for me" will be severely limiting when you realize that what you really wanted was grain removal, but that's not how your AI denoise filter works.

Again, there's room in the world for all manner of software uses. But to argue that Darktable is bad because it gives too many options, misses the goals of a great many artists, which is to understand what's happening to the pixels they captured in the field.

Auto modes have their places, as does retaining specificity of features. I don't think they're exclusive to each other.

And I don't think simple choices create shallow artists (or that the goal of Darktable is to create artists). Someone who doesn't have any arts education already doesn't have the technical understanding or vocabulary to really know what they're doing, so maintain the extra barrier? How many professional grade tools can you think of that have simple or guided modes?

The great part about software is that done well, it's often designed to be functional without a depth of specialty or expert knowledge, at least no more than a homeowner telling the builder "make my driveway to here" needs to know how to source and formulate concrete so that the end product looks good and doesn't crack or weather.

You're arguing that software makes or breaks artistry, and it doesn't. Composition, subject, and lighting still get you 90% there. Software just comes in at post and it plays less of a role than the HN crowd thinks it does.

Maybe it's my circles (photojournalists) but none of them care about different algorithms in post. Their artistry comes from a complete mastery of layers and masks along with old fashioned tone and color sliders. Those tools are far more powerful than knowing the difference between method 1 and method 2 of a Gaussian Blur filter that have no discernible visual difference anyway.

Hard agree - you probably aren't making great art from learning a different denoise algorithm, but you certainly are by learning composition skills. There are great photographers out there who barely even touch the adjustments in software. And when they are touching the adjustments, it's probably not so technical focused as choosing a different algorithm. It'll be "creative" adjustments like tone mapping and colour LUTs.

The problem with DT isn't just that it presents too many options, it's that the interface itself is bad and the options are presented poorly. Providing a million knobs to fine tune things is not a substitute for smarter, more coarse adjustments. The vast majority of end users don't want to have to manually set the TCP flags for each network request in a web browser. Darktable is better if you're wanking about with an academic paper, but it's just a plain bad experience for photo editing.

With your example, the multitude of denoise filters is appropriate because one of them is actually the grain removal. When in fact grain and noise are two separate issues.

How about demosiacing? There are nine different algorithms to choose from. Great if you're writing a research paper, useless if you're actually working on a photo.

How about white balance? If you thought that twiddling the knobs in the "white balance" was the way to go, boy are you in for a surprise. That'll just trigger warnings and errors. What you really wanted was "color calibration". You didn't want to change the color temperature, you wanted to worry about gamut compression and illuminant.

Now let's say you're working on a photo and have already narrowed down some settings you'd like to commonly apply. Well. First you have to drop out of the "darkroom" module and go to the "lighttable" module. Then you have to accept that your edit history is going to get fucked because darktable doesn't store a history of individual changes but rather aggregates them often by module. So if you hit undo, you potentially undo more than just the "style" you just applied. But what style did you just apply? Darktable (intentionally) doesn't keep that information around at all. You can have the style add an instance name, but Darktable eventually gets confused if you go back and forth between different presets.

To add insult to injury, there's no A/B view in Darktable. Nine different demosiacing algorithms but no easy way to compare them.

Darktable misses the forest for the trees.

Not to detract from the entirely justified criticism, but in case it helps somebody: The "Snapshot" feature in Darktable can be used to compare two renderings. It is a bit clumsy but this can be used to compare output of two algos.

That pretty well underscores my point, however. Darktable can do much of what Lightroom does, just in a more tedious manner. When confronted with this the DT devs respond with a "DT is just too powerful for most users". The biggest problem with DT isn't that it's too powerful it's that the interface is just dreadful.

If you like, or want to use Darktable/Ansel - check out Harry Durgin on YouTube.

He does a fantastic job of explaining how to use Darktable (and photo manipulation software in general) to get the best out of it.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCngiFhMSngeFwUGtsXA-17w

Except when you look at projects like FreeCAD, the lone developer forking the project (real thunder) has seemingly done more for the project than the original developers. A lot of this has to do with the fact that everything needs to be endlessly discussed on the FreeCAD forums before anything gets done. Considering the limited resources on the original developers hands, this is a recipe for stagnation and standstill. It is faster and simpler to just do the work and then merge the patches from the fork than to go through the official, slow and unproductive way.

Yeah sure very few people use realthunder's fork including me, but I have so far significantly benefitted from his work in the official FreeCAD release.

There are dozens of things that just need to be implemented and not pointlessly discussed in FreeCAD. The things I'm talking about are absurdly blatant and obvious to anyone. You know, things like a transparent preview of the operation you're doing. A sane attachment editor that doesn't choose a sketch orientation at random.

The negativity is necessary since the original developers are shutting valid criticism up with fake positivity.

Except they didn’t merge patches from RealThunder’s fork for TNP, for example. They used it as a guide and reference implementation and wrote a new implementation.

In general they do not just merge his work; they have to rewrite it. RealThunder is prolific but he evidently doesn’t use the same coding standards as the rest of the project, and makes changes across workbenches where he chooses for his own ideas, when in the core project they have other maintainers.

He has the total freedom to do this, and I agree his fork is illustrative of good solutions in some cases, but this is not a good way to just fix master. So they don’t.

Transparent previews in Part Design — and a general mechanism for them elsewhere - is coming in 1.1.

I notice you talking about the attachment editor choosing a random orientation a lot: in my experience it does not choose randomly, if you use an appropriate attachment scheme. I think I have rotated a sketch attachment once in my last two dozen or so uses, and that rotation was indicated by the design. The heuristic is complicated though, and the interface has several frustrations. There could be better UI for working through the attachment schemes.

1.1 has a change to core datums (Part Design-style LCS, datum planes, lines and points available throughout FreeCAD, not just in Part Design) that should make some of the more esoteric attachment schemes less often required, because you will be able to place an LCS once

There is also rawtherapee which I switched to after using DT for about a year.

Rawtherapee workflow seemed to work better for me and I haven't really looked back.

Frankly, Ansel is outdated by now. No color equalizer, no camera styles, no Sigmoid.

Mainline Darktable has overtaken it.

Is it something like ART, a fork of RawTherapee?

http://art.pixls.us/

It's interesting how bloated those open-source editors are. There are a ton of useless options. Instead of focusing to implement needed tools like AI masking or lens correction, we have bunch of de-mosaic non function methods or multiple sharpening tools that are non practical to use in classical workflow. Even defaults render broken RAW files!

It's like many volunteer programmers doing software without ever actually using RAW development professionally.

People come to volunteer with the interests and skills they have. It’s easier to let problems that are hard or not interesting fall to the wayside, and for the maintainers to take what they can get (especially if they think that happy contributors will contribute more).

this is the same as GIMP and Audacity and many other FOSS projects: a proliferation of menus and niche features and zero overarching design and ideas

That's because the incentives don't align between developers and users on OSS projects when they aren't catering to developers. There is no product management as a go-between that is tasked with understanding the user base and edits feature requests and developer contributions into a coherent package.

Basically this. The "scratching your own itch" approach to open source development doesn't work if your users aren't software developers.

Or the inverse. If your open source developers aren't photographers.

Both is wasting of potential and energy. Projects became abandoned soon or later because it miss supply on demand. Which is beneficial for proprietary software development. Which sucks a lot and ignore purpose of open source development.

I have used Ansel for many months before giving up and switching to Lightroom (blasphemous, I know). Ansel is still very much alpha software. My experience was it's slow, buggy, and lacking usability. Lightroom just works for the most part, Darktable and Ansel don't. I hope Ansel can succeed despite having just 1 developer.

Also, I think the angle Aurelien is taking with Ansel is peculiar. He's really hard on the colour science aspects. I read somewhere Ansel is targeted towards computer novices yet colour science experts. I wonder if a significant user base exists there. Do most pro photographers have degrees in colour science? Plus photography at the end of the day is an art for most people. It's telling when I can achieve my creative goals in a few clicks in Lightroom vs hours in Darktable/Ansel...

Ansel slow and buggy, yes, "but you should have seen the other guy". Between the two my bet is on Ansel.

I momentarily used Darktable, and IIRC there were fewer bugs. Performance was about the same for image processing. I guess these things will come out in the wash as Ansel is developed (although maybe very slowly because of the whole 1 man thing).

I've used both and darktable is far superior. Most of the edits I do would be difficult in Ansel...

I’ve switched to Linux, and one of the hardest things was to find photo organization software. Adobe Lightroom was good this. I’m still sorting it out on Linux.

I tried Darktable and found it really useful for editing raw files. Once you figure out the filters they’re powerful and professional.

Darktable really opionated about how it stores files/ libraries however. It really wants you to have one library for all your photos, where I used separate libraries for various events I’ve photographed. Also going through and ranking photos wasn’t as straight forward (is it applying the rank to the image on the strip on the bottom vs the image in the main window?)

So I’m sorting with digikam, though it’s editing features don’t seem as powerful. It’s a process.

I'm using Collections in darktable to achieve this. Have you tried it? Although I don't distinguish on an event basis I sort everything into folders by month.

  -2024
   --jan
   --feb
   ...
   --nov
   --dec
  -2025
   --jan

I did.

Part of my mindset is when I’m done with an event I don’t want to have to deal with those folders, but know where to find them. I have a large set of “everything else” photos that works well with darktable.

It’s partially the burden of how I used to do it… maybe I’m being stubborn but it did work well for me.

I had the same problem. Lots of solutions out there I think PhotoPrism was the last one I tried but it involved docker. I really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was debating forking an existing project.

I am a happy user of PhotoPrism. I use it with Podman. I initially hated the fact that it requires containers but then I realized this makes it much easier to work with multiple libraries simultaneously which was mentioned by OP. The Photos app on the Mac does not allow using multiple libraries simultaneously; I believe it needs to be restarted to switch libraries.

If you really don't want to use containers, then it's possible (with sufficient OS knowledge) to install the software natively by looking at the Dockerfile and manually running the commands.

> I really just want the Photos app from Mac on Linux. I was debating forking an existing project.

If you want design help let me know.

Bu yes, this. There is no "in between" on linux. Photo apps either do everything confusingly, or it does nothing but show you the photo.

If Darktable had "simple" and "professional" settings it would be awesome. Sometimes you just want a quick edit and other times it needs to be more complex. But I have to wade through endless tiny crowded options in Darktable just to crop and change some basic levels.

Digikam gets a bit closer, but it still starts as complicated.

It would be great if the application gave you a simple interface at first, and then you can add on complexity if you need it. You want detailed curve manipulations? Great! Select "Add feature" and choose "Curves". This would help a lot with linux growth IMHO since it is the one thing I hear that frustrates just about everyone who does not want to use google photos.

The Photos App from Apple is only getting worse as well and Adobe is a horric mess of subscriptions and AI BS.

I think my issue is a lot of them slow down to a crawl and Digikam fell under this problem for me. Importing thousands of images and videos isnt easy. I did like that Photoprism had a WebUI made it easy to access the photos across my network.

Yep, the only photo library tool I’ve used that can handle 40K raws is Lightroom and Photomechanic. Everything else can’t handle ~2TB of photos.

I am genuinely curious of what a good solution would be to this problem, because I love Photos on Mac but its not perfect either, one key thing Photos does insanely well is face grouping.

I use Digikam on a 3 TiB collection and it works great.

What database are you using and did you slowly build it up or what?

The Digikam DB is SQLite on a fast NVMe drive. The photos are on a 4 TB SSD. I have been using Digikam for maybe a decads, so the collection has been growing with me, but no issues so far.

Photos also stuffs everything into a proprietary database... a blunder made by far too many photo applications.

What would be the alternative to easily search through meta data of thousands of photos? Is there a non-proprietary database (engine or schema?), or other format that is scalable enough? I doubt that storing everything as a sidecar would be fast enough.

Valid question. How fast does it need to be, though?

I see a lot of performance complains from people with 75k+ image libraries, so performance should be considered when storing image (meta)data.

Just for info, just did a quick test: the digikam 'proprietary' database is a normal sqlite database that you can easily open and query in standard tools like duckdb. So pretty accessible, much better than some proprietary binary file, or using exif tools on 1000s of photos.

Look at Immich

Pretty much the same, here, with digikam used to aggregate collections of images taken and edited by other, specialized, software. I don't hate that set-up: IMO, the requirements for processing RAWs and managing a collection are different enough to warrant separate tools, and I find digikam really pleasant to work with. What would you like to see improved?

  What would you like to see improved?

Last time I tried digikam it crashed on startup (macos). This was back in September. I'm sure it's not a hugely popular opinion in open source circles, but IMO neither digikam nor darktable are good enough to warrant the hassle of dealing with separate applications.

Lightroom is a bit of jack of all trades, but it's good enough as a DAM that I'm not wanting for a separate app.

I don't have stability issues with digikam while using it on fedora. It's well maintained and sees frequent releases so if I were you and had some spare time, I wouldn't shy away from opening issues and reaching out to developers.

And yeah, sure, if the "do it all" approach works for you, and the tool you desire already exists, I'm not there to turn you away from it! Since digikam can open any lot of images in a side application for edition, I'm not sure what kind of improvements a "kitchen sink" application would do to my workflows and I was curious about that :-)

  I don't have stability issues with digikam while using it on fedora

Right, I'm not switching to Linux just for digikam.

  Since digikam can open any lot of images in a side application for edition

If I'm going to open a photo in Lightroom anyways, why not use it for asset management? I'm not wedded to an all-in-one solution, but neither digikam nor darktable/rawtherapee offer enough of an improvement over the respective modules within Lightroom to warrant usage.

I absolutely detest this whole "library" business. Why can't just I open a file? Or just browse a folder, click some files and edit them? WTF is a "library"? A "film roll"? Keep it real.

I also wish they had a better color calibration workflow. Everything looks like trash with the new color calibration and filmic RGB nonsense. Especially DJI-shot raw files. Lightroom opens them fine.

Same here. It all began with itunes and having duplicates of my mp3s. I always been more of a winamp user myself ! On my mac I use Photomator and appreciate how it allows me to browse my ssd and use my very own file tree

The main problem I see with "just files in folders" is thumbnails. You need some thumbnail cache, ideally pregenerated, for speedy browsing. And once you've got that, you've lost the simplicity of "just files" anyhow.

And you might not want them, but things like facial recognition, search by metadata, and object detection really only work with a central database/index of all the photos you have.

Just store the thumbnails in a cache or in a dotfile subdirectory. This can be transparent to the user. If the user is going linearly down or up the list you can also use a Kalman filter to predict what files and directories the user might browse next and preroad thumbnails for those directories in advance. Don't wait till the user actually scrolls to something to start working on thumbnail generation. UI Design 101.

Also, many consumer cameras embed thumbnails in metadata that can be extracted almost instantaneously. For those there is no image resizing work to do. But you can still load the thumbnails into memory in advance to make it even snappier.

Just don't make me add the folder to a "roll" or "library" just to browse it for 5 seconds.

You've more or less outlined what programs like Lightroom, DigiKam, and Darktable do. The integration with e.g. LR or DT gets you thumbnails rendered with whatever processing needs to be applied.

As I'm typically using whatever to copy images off of a phone or an external memory dongle I don't mind adding things to a catalog. The import process copies the files memory dongle and into folders organized by capture date. Certainly (for me) it's easier to hit a couple buttons in LR than it is to copy everything over manually. You can also set LR to automatically import pictures.

If you really are just allergic to importing photos, in the proprietary world Adobe Bridge can be used to go through your photos in a manner you've described. You can also quite a bit of management from the import screen in LR without having to actually import photos into a collection.

FastRawViewer (only Win/Mac, paid software) shows true RAW decoding (not embedded JPEG previews!) faster than 90% of other software shows cached previews.

Also, Adobe Bridge works with folders without any formal "collection" or "import" concepts. It cache meta and previews in user's home directory, but it is transparent to the user.

You might be happy organizing your own folders but 99.9% of people are happier to dump their photos into a software and have the software manage the files and folders behind a database and make cloud sync and sharing go brr.

I edit with Darktable, but organize with DigiKam. Not that Darktable is bad, but I prefer to organize my rendered JPEGs, not my RAWs.

You may want to have a look to a software called tonphotos if you just want to sort and filter pictures. If I remember well it doesn't allow image edition though.

For the moment pay for lightroom just for my needs but the bills are starting to sting... To stay on windows, the best alternatives I found are zoner photo studio X and Mylio photo but the first one doesn't do face recognition and the second one doesn't handle a camera I used several years ago.

Digikam would be good I guess but I can't stand the UI.

Start the cancel plan wizard on Adobe's site. I have to go on there once a year or so and talk to an agent from the cancel page and they usually cut my rate in half for another year.

wow thanks for the info !

The problem is the seemingly endless parade of photo software that forces you to add everything to a "database," instead of simply a directory structure. It's tedious as hell, and must be manually kept up to date all the time instead of simply picking up any files added to the structure.

And then you open the app and it says I gotta delete the database cause it’s corrupted

Congratulations to the Darktable team on their latest release.

I tried and tried with Darktable, but found the UI and features extremely frustrating. This [1] post, about a year ago, convinced me to stop inflicting pain on myself and move on. I use Capture One Pro now and am happy with the decision.

But I'm glad that DT exists as a FOSS solution for those who want that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38412582

I am in the same boat. Lightroom just works and is significantly faster to do the same basic things as DT. What got me to switch was the transition from Legacy to V3 module order and the absolute mess that created for no discernible reason: my photos that were developed using an older version of DT suddenly looked straight up broken and anything new I imported defaulted to Legacy even though I said to always default to V3 to the point where each photo had to be switched individually to V3, a process that on a reasonably powerful computer took about 1.5 seconds.

Moreover the churn of modules that are available but you aren’t supposed to use got old fast. I really do wish I could keep using a FOSS solution but Lightroom has taken my time to edit a batch of photos from many hours to under an hour with better results and virtually no learning curve. Sadly DT has managed to sell me an Adobe product.

Same for me. I tried DT for 2 years but never got comfortable with it. Lightroom just works for me from editing to keywording and geotagging. And the AI masking stuff in Lightroom is really good.

I really wish someone would fork Darktable to build “Darktable but with a UX that isn’t horrible.”

One day!

Isn't this exactly what ansel tried to do?

Not only that. I'd like to have AI masking, effective clone tools, lens corrections and please... actually working defaults! You import RAWs (compressed RAFs) and it render horrible results!

Its bloated with useless functions, it's slow, UI is ugly... Why not focus on important? Stop developing another demosaic method and make it more user friendly, less nerdy piece of tool.

I've used Darktable for quite a few years now, casually, because seriously I'm not paying 100+ euros a year as a casual to edit my photographs in lightroom. Darktable's flaw has _always_ been its UX as well as performance (at least on MacOS it was pretty laggy on maxed out Intel 2019 Macbook back in the day, but it runs like butter on Apple Silicone macs). They really should consider adding a beginner mode with the most common filters and hide everything else. The learning curve can be quite steep having to learn about things that are par for the course in Darktable such as Filmic RGB etc.

While you're definitely right about it having a steep learning curve, it's also true that not many RAW editors do what Darktable does. Darktable aims at serving advanced, tecnically-minded users. It's complicated, but in a way, it's nice it is, for those who need it.

> It's complicated, but in a way, it's nice it is, for those who need it.

Same argument for linux :) Darktable can do so much more than Lightroom (minus the AI stuff), so why not make it more accessible under a beginner mode. You'd have more people using the software, benchmarking features, logging crashes etc. You might even attract a few interested developers also at the same time or donators.

Hell, I'd even call it Lightroom mode.

There's an important difference between powerful and difficult to use. Darktable lands solidly in the latter camp. This mythical power being used as an excuse is doubly frustrating as:

- Network effects mean competitors will struggle to gain traction

- Darktable shamelessly apes the Lightroom UI which gives a superficial impression that it'll be similarly intuitive. It's not.

My favorite interface behavior is that in Darktable clicking on empty space (accidentally or in an attempt to unfocus a widget) will usually send an event to a nearby widget. That's not power, that's just sloppy design. Oh and sliders give no indication of how to input an exact value.

Or there's color balance. There are two competing modules. One presents a complex and unintuitive interface, the other offers to mimic camera settings but triggers warnings if you dare touch it. In the way that Tesla makes cars for people who love gadgets but hate cars, Darktable is a product for folks who love monkeying with code but hate photography.

Ansel solves much of this, but brings its own shortcomings to the table.

> While you're definitely right about it having a steep learning curve, it's also true that not many RAW editors do what Darktable does.

If a Darktable developer happens to read this, I'd suggest looking at Nitro¹ for inspiration. I use it with Photos, and although Nitro doesn't need Photos (i.e. it can work directly with the filesystem), it's a good way to experience both "easy" and user-friendly "expert" paths.

¹https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/, the spiritual successor to Aperature by the former lead of Aperture, Photos, and related digital imaging technologies.

I want to use this program, but the lack of support for RAW formats that are at this point 3+ years old (RW2 and ORF) is a bummer.

I don't know where the gap is (DT, or the libraries, or some licensing problem) but the end result is that this app doesn't support the RAW formats I use, and I don't think I'm using anything particularly exotic.

I'll keep checking in on each new release though..

I'm a darktable user (which fascinates my photography friends, because I'm the only semi-serious photographer they know who uses it), and think it's time to switch to something better. What non-adobe tools are other people using?

Capture One or DxO. These are the only ones as good as Lightroom in their rendering. I'm afraid they are both much more expensive.

ON1, ACDSee, Luminar, Zoner, Silkypix, Radiant, RAW Power, Photomator are other options, but IMO have rather significant flaws that make them less good.

Have a look at AfterShot Pro. Very fast, powerful, and easy to use.

Also, thoroughly abandoned for half a decade. No recent camera support whatsoever, no feature updates.

I use DxO PhotoLab, which came with perpetual license. I paid ~$100 for PhotoLab 1 and ~$70 for an upgrade to PhotoLab 4, and haven't upgraded since. I thought it was well worth it.

(I plan to upgrade to a newer version eventually, but thought I would upgrade my computer first)

I switched from Lightroom to Nitro (macOS, iOS, iPadOS), by the former Apple lead for Aperture, Photo, and other digital imaging technologies. Two years later, I'm very happy with that choice. https://www.gentlemencoders.com/about/

Unrelated, but wondering if anyone here could recommend a Darktable-ish web-based photo organization app, less focused on editing but supporting tagging, starring, etc.?

Look through this, there is no one perfect solution

https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

Photoprism

Something like immich? https://immich.app

Nextcloud memories (which is a third-party app, not to be mixed with the photos one, bundled with NC) is pretty decent IMO.

immich, photoprism, librephotos

Darktable may make you better understand the technicalities of editing, but I don't think most photographers want to spend their time learning the minutiae of what specific image processing algorithms get used to achieve their desired effect.

It's already available on flathub; https://flathub.org/apps/org.darktable.Darktable

I only use Darktable because of Negadoctor. I don't want to pay for Negative Lab Pro, so does anyone have any suggestions?

I’ve just recently started with a real camera and editing raw files. Darktable has so many modules and options it’s quite intimidating. After a month of tinkering and trying it out I still don’t really have a solid handle of what module i need for the outcome I want which I think maybe just comes to experience?

I still don’t fully grok what filmic is supposed to do, it seems like several things in one.

Just stick to a few modules, you really don't need much if all you want is to get a lot out of your photos.

Here's a tutorial with a suggested list: https://luxagraf.net/essay/craft/darktable-getting-started

    Exposure (lighten or darken an image)
    Filmic RGB (control how light the whites and how dark the blacks)
    Color Calibration (set the white balance)
    Color Balance RGB (enhance colors and color contrasts)
    RGB Primaries (rarely, but color correction)
    Diffuse or Sharpen (Sharpen)
    Crop
    Tone Equalizer (raise shadows)
    Retouch (fix spots)
    Rotate and Perspective
    Len Correction (fix distortion in wide angle lenses)

For the most part, I don't even touch most of these. But I'd add profiled denoise, though it's probably auto applied and you don't need to touch it (like lens correction).

I'm very interested in DarkTable, but I have years on photography in Adobe Lightroom. I'm growing tired of LightRoom, but I feel like I'm now locked into that ecosystem. Is there some kind of migration to move my LightRoom edits out of there and into something like DarkTable?

No, it's simply not possible. You can migrate some information using sidecar files but Lightroom's edit details are proprietary and so cannot be migrated.

https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/overview/sidecar-f...

I’ve been using Digikam for 20 years, and although it’s pretty good now, it has been a rough 20 years in some respects. Nevertheless I’d do it all again rather than suffer the trap of putting data into a system designed to prevent you getting it out.

Edits are essentially impossible to transfer between RAW development software, and even between major versions of the same software. It's not specific to Lightroom, Digikam, or Darktable. You would have to replicate everything, from the color science to quirks and bugs. Adobe literally ships previous versions of Lightroom's processing code in each new Lightroom version, to avoid messing anything up. As does Darktable (it still contains the previous code for compatibility) and any other software.

I wrote this [1] when I moved from LR to DT. Its my best attempt to batch-create xmp sidecars (which DT can^Wclaims to read) from the LR catalog. Despite the terrible name it was adequate for my purposes, but I only ahoot jpeg not RAW.

[1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/XmpLibeRator

Is there any open source software that has stable diffusion-based denoising for RAW files?

I remember there is also the ansel.photos project, which is a fork of Darktable, aiming to remove architectural debt. I wonder how they're doing.

can anyone recommend a tutorial for some of the basic features that that is more for the engineer audience? There are many videos on YouTube but many are very out of date.

From the landing page:

    darktable is (...) a virtual lighttable and darkroom

Quite an interesting way to say that is a Lightroom alternative :)

Quite literally on the github home page it says that "darktable is not a free Adobe® Lightroom® replacement."

That doesn't mean it's not an alternative to Lightroom. That was put in for reasons discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27722258

The feature list, description and thumbnail of the UI begs to differ.

Don’t forget the name!

I don't like descriptions mentioning what they're trying to replace. I don't know what Lightroom is and what it's used for. A project description should be stand-alone and should tell me why I need it without riding on some other projects' name recognition.

No offense, but "lightable" and "darkroom" are well established photography terms.

A lighttable is literally a table with a light source under the table body and was used to easily and quickly "see" your developed film strips or frames to pick what you want "printed" on paper. There is also the term "loupe", which derives from the magnifying tool used to see details on the otherwise quite small negatives.

Darkroom is a dark room where you can print your negatives on photo sensitive paper, you need the room to be dark, so ambient light doesn't affect the print process.

These two terms have nothing to do with Adobe.

I know what a dark room room is, I've used one in school. I don't know of the application Lightroom. Why would I take offense?

"This is a vacuum" > "This is a Hoover alternative".

Describing what the tool is for usually is better than referencing a brand name that not everyone would be as familiar with.

Snark like this, on the basis of ones own lack of knowledge, is one of those things that make you wonder how we ever got anywhere.

Both of these are film terms.

> 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.

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