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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

> Only Darktable seemed to push the technical capabilities of photo editing forward (AgX, parametric masks, tone equalizer, etc)

As a casual photographer, I wanted to love darktable and I'm sure it's extremely capable. But the UI is just so hard to get to grips with. I've put a few hours into it, tried following some tutorials etc. but I have no idea what I'm doing there.

I do have a fairly decent grasp of color science from working in 3d graphics so it's not that I'm lacking there. I guess it's like blender of yore. It could become mainstream but it would require a full UI overhaul and in the meantime it's for experts only, or determined people with a lot more time on their hands than I have.

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There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps.

Once you care only about editing and not cataloging then RawTherapee ends up being better editor for mr.

> There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps.

AFAIK, the reasons Ansel exists are:

1. To yank out darktable internals for code purity reasons.

2. Its (talented) developer worked better by himself than in group.

He was vehemently opposed to any idea containing the words "intuitive" or "UX".

You are right. I don't know really. I thought that because i find Ansel a bit easier to operate.

Yeah, the UI in darktable is not good enough to go through a large shoot. When I've tried to use it I always end up doing all my selection in PhotoMechanic and then in darktable I just do editing. But even that UI/UX is terrible.

PM's performance on Mac has gone through the floor, to me. It shouldn't take 8 seconds to quit on a M2 Ultra. Raw rendering is slow too. I ended up moving to FastRawViewer.

I did the same journey, felt quite tragic after so many years in PM but FastRawViewer has been brilliant for me - highly recommend

The Blender metaphor is spot on. I am a software engineer, I spent 2 years living in 3ds max in my teens, writing tutorials for it, and I am unable to make a basic scene in Blender, it’s like alien made software.

The GP refered to "blender of yore". Blender went through major UI overhauls and recent versions are very intuitive.

Still, Blender and 3ds Max are pretty much on two different ends of some spectrum, not sure which yet, but they seems to more or less follow two very different axioms when it comes to UI and UX philosophy. I've spent most of my 3D-ing time in 3ds Max, but Blender is more intuitive to me, but I also know others in the same position favoring 3ds Max.

Something can be intuitive to new users and yet a complete mystery to a pro experienced with a different UI paradigm.

It really is bizarre. It's like a dive bar that has the bathroom doors as men's on one door with an arrow pointing right and women's on the right with an arrow pointing left. It's a case study in how not to design a UI.

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