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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel

I am always amazed at how much Aurelian Pierre is able to produce. But I think he is too smart for his own good and also too opinionated to be a good leader of an open source community.

Makes me admire Linus Thorvalds even more. He is super smart, opinionated by also was able to keep a huge community on track for decades.

I haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?

There's also RawTherapee, which I found more usable than Darktable for reasons I don't recall.

If you’re looking specifically for an Aperture replacement, Nitro[0] was created by the person who led the Aperture, iPhoto, RAW Camera and Core Image engineering teams, as well as the imaging team for the Mac version of Photos.

No subscription cost either.

[0] https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/

Nitro is wonderul. On macOS it also integrates perfectly with Photos, which I find to be an ideal "combination pro/consumer surface" for my library.

I don't know, but it's interesting to see a bunch of people stop developing features and fix bugs straight for 4 years.

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/issues

The history is that Aurelien Pierre was leading some big changes in Darktable around the time the filmic module was introduced and the bigger switch from rethinking the internal architecture and processing pipeline to be happening in the right color spaces before things get crammed down into the RGB display color space. There's a lot of subtlety to that. But it boils down to a lot less rounding errors and loss of information for basic edits related to color correction, tone mapping, etc.

Aurelien Pierre was the main developer of filmic and several related modules and a key driver of that whole transition. A few versions ago there were some other developers that forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX. He argued against that and people ignored him and he basically decided to do it properly with Ansel and strip away all the stuff he never liked as well as beat some sense into especially the lightroom part of Darktable which is where you organize your photos. IMHO he did a great job on that from what I've seen so far.

Since the fork, a lot of stuff happened of course and there are now several competing alternatives to filmic in Darktable (Sigmoid and Agx). They each have their pros and cons and the differences can be very subtle; especially if you are new to the topic. There's a lot of complexity here. Which is why UX matters. And a point of criticism with especially Filmic is that it is a very complex module. But I'm still on Darktable and Ansel is actually not compatible with the newer Darktable versions.

Thanks for the detail - it's really interesting to hear

I've tried filmic and AgX, as well as the default scene-referred, and I have to say filmic really is easy to misuse. AgX makes misuse much harder, though its still very unclear to me which of the 15 ways I should be using to get where I want the photo to be, even after reading all the documentation.

Is the last release on GitHub from 2022 or is it me?

Not just you - from ansel.photos:

>Ansel has not published a stable release yet and there is no ETA for one : a new release is published when the list of all bugs have been cleared, so we know the software and stable. So far, Ansel only publishes revisions, which are intermediate states of the sourcecode.

> Meet Chantal, your image processing AI librarian

Instant pass.

Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.

I can't find that on the page.

Edit: I finally found a reference. It's a separate project that has nothing to do with the photography stuff. Right?

It's a way to search the docs?

It's on https://ansel.photos

You make a software, people want tutorials. You make tutorials, people want docs. You make docs, people won't read them and their questions end up in your mailbox.

So Chantal is the missing link in all that, it lets users be autonomous while researching their questions while aggregating various sources of knowledge on photography software, color science, bugs and docs. It's Ansel docs and much more (ICC, CIE, academic journals, forums, etc.)

It's just an ordinary search engine for the specialized topic. Aurelien Pierre is being overly dramatic here, it's in his character.

You dumb or what ?

Under Chantal, there use to be Word2Vec, now replaced by FastText. Aka a shallow neural network building a language model that understand synonyms and some EN/FR translations, by embedding words as vectors in a vector space built so cosine distance represent semantic distance. It was called AI when Google published Word2Vec and Facebook FastText, I didn't made it up.

I mean, I wrote 2 articles on the topic explaining how it's built. Each page in the index is represented by the centroid of all the word vectors it contains, then it computes the cosine distance between the centroids of the pages and the centroid of the request and returns the closest matches. Aka not your regular grep.

Overly dramatic yourself, Internet minion. All opinions and zero substance.

Please calm down, I had no intention of offending you! I agree, of course that's AI, just a pretty... commoditized? kind in 2026 and a long-winded explanation of word2vec or even mention of it is probably not necessary. What I meant it's not the sort of model anti-AI people would oppose, in response to an "instant pass" knee-jerk reaction.

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