10 ms·

Darktable 2.2.0 released

208 points by geppetto 10y ago

geppetto 10y ago
IMHO it's the best FOSS photo application out there. It's cross platform, fast, stable and manages the whole photo workflow (RAW developing, photo management, non destructive editing). Thanks darktable folks!
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  > It's cross platform Are there Windows builds? There was a guy that did but he stopped at 2.0.
  - geppetto 10y ago
    Oops! You're right there's no official Windows port. I've run it on Mac and Linux only.
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      I've been able to run it on the Linux Subsystem for Windows with an X server, but there was still a few quirks I believe.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    There's been renewed work on a clean Windows port in recent months: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327 https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      Interesting! They almost lynched the guy at the beginning but seems that there's progress.
      - exception_e 10y ago
        It is very interesting. I don't want to intrude on their thread, but if others here vouch for this technique I'll politely ask them to look into the following: - https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk... - http://boot2docker.io/ http://boot2docker.io/ ...has anyone here ever used this approach with nix apps that need to run on Windows "natively"? Writing a powershell script to silently install boot2docker with this special docker image wouldn't be too difficult. The DarkTable folks don't seem interesting in maintaining Win builds so this may be the perfect workaround. NOTE: I realize that `File > Open Image` may be non-trivial, but surely there's a way to mount a host<->guest folder (e.g.: When using the application, the workspace is located in `C:\Users\$whoami\Documents\DarkTable\.jpg`)
        sz4kerto 10y ago
        Boot2Docker is not for this purpose. Silently installing a VM on a Windows PC is a very bad idea. If the user is not proficient enough to know about and configure the VM, then what happens if - B2D installs a Virtualbox instance, but Hyper-V is on. VBox can't run besides Hyper-V. - How do you configure the resource usage for the VM?Something like Darktable requires a lot of resources - How do you manage shared folders? VBox shared folder performance is really bad compared to native - Do you install an X server as well? Anyway -- it's just a bad idea.
        exception_e 10y ago
        Thanks sz4kerto. I'm glad I got some thoughts here before posting that in their PR (I obviously won't post it now because of the points you brought up). I guess a user that would be comfortable with b2d or vbox would just have those running anyways! Note: for you question about X, please check out https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
      - vvanders 10y ago
        Wow you weren't kidding. > It may be better to go help out some other free software project that already had the misfortune of working on that platform... I understand their points about maintenance, but telling someone to go work on something else rather than keeping an experimental branch around, sheesh. As someone who appreciates open source and works primarily on Windows I really wish they had a better attitude. Take a look at Rust or Elixir, fantastic communities and the software is better for it. I'm sure that Darktable has some interesting things but based on what I saw in that thread I think I'll be sticking to Lightroom.
  - snarfy 10y ago
    It works in Windows 10 using the Linux for Windows feature, and then using a suitable windows X server. http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png
- cs702 10y ago
  Agree. I would add three more qualities to your list: * Fully programmable, via a nicely document Lua interface: http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php -- you can automate all kinds of workflows. * Truly innovative, with clever new features unavailable in other applications, including Lightroom. For example, five years ago they added a powerful new "equalizer" module: http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ (google "darktable equazlier" for usage examples). * Always improving: I've been using it for years and the developers keep finding ways to make it better all the time. Congratulations on another great release!
- uniclaude 10y ago
  Definitely agree! I make a substantial part of my income (just enough to pay rent) selling photography, and I recently dropped ps and lightroom in favor of Darktable. The change didn't happen in a day, but Darktable is so good I don't think I'll ever need to come back to Adobe. Notable plus, I can now spend most of my time on Linux, no more need to use my Macbook for photo work. The interface is not really good for smaller displays and resolutions (adobe stuff was better on my 11 inch mba), but on anything with more than 1280 x 960 px, it's great. Congratulations to the Darktable team for this 2.2 release!
  - pkaye 10y ago
    Any experience using RawTherapee also? Just an hobbyist myself and moving away from the Mac platform so figuring out the best alternatives.
    - uniclaude 10y ago
      Never tried RawTherapee, won't be able to help here sorry!
    - stevekemp 10y ago
      I don't make a living via photography, but I do receive income from taking pictures of escorts, and pets. (Strange how you find your niche!) I've been using RawTherapee, on Linux, for the past few years. For my needs of marking images, doing post-processing, and mass-operations, it works perfectly. I'm always reluctant to allow a tool to manage the layout/tagging of my images. So for that I have a strictly sorted hierarchy: ~/Images/ ~/Images/2016 ~/Images/2016/12/04-Hannah ~/Images/2016/12/12-Tiffany Inside each "event"-folder I store: RAW/ JPG/ JPG/thumbs/ Teasers/ Teasers/thumbs/ Then I write out a meta-data file, ".meta", with detail such as: Location=Studio|MyPlace|Their Hotel|Whatever Contact-Details=+44... Tags=lingerie,nude,shillouette,monochrome .. It works well, and allows me to find files years later via a simple `grep`.
    - brudgers 10y ago
      I am also a hobbyist and I use Darktable. I've experimented with RawTherapee. I like RawTherapee's editing controls and love that its sidecar files are somewhat human readable (Darktable's are not). What Rawtherapee lacks is the 'light table' feature for handling bulk photographs. I'll often shoot several hundred images in a day (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes). Darktable lets me triage those photos and filter them for processing without managing a file system... well now that my workflow uses RapidPhotoDownloader on the front end. It reads off the memory card and renames files and directories to a standard format. A few months ago, I brought many years worth of sorted directories of images into Darktable and went to bed and when I woke up it had added everything to the database and I could sort by name and remove duplicates and look at thumbnails and remove junk that had been saved alongside stuff I wanted during bulk operations. Anyway, since Darktable runs on Mac, there's not a drop dead reason not to give it a spin alongside whatever you're currently using.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I regret that I haven't really had the opportunity to explore Darktable very thoroughly. Every time I would try to point it at my library folder it would choke to death. Perhaps I should re-organize around Darktable, but right now I have other components of my workflow that are hard to imagine replacing, primarily DxO -- this was the main driver that got me to switch to a Windows host running a Linux VM and doing all my real work over SSH to the local VM, after years of struggling through painfully slow editing in a Windows VM on a Linux host. I resent that Windows's bad, less flexible behavior has forced me to make it my host OS. :'( At the moment I don't have a good library app, I just browse the directory structure. I've tried Lightroom but it too struggles with my library folder, although unlike Darktable, it is marginally usable. I've tried Digikam, and while it's the only one that seems to handle the library in a semi-respectable fashion (with the experimental, now-deprecated MySQL backend enabled, which iirc took some manual massaging to even make compile anymore), it's hard to get the components I really wanted to work reliably (it's very important the my camera's GPS tags can be mapped and sorted; this is my main interest in a library manager and as of now, all such programs are too overloaded to do this competently or half-broken like Digikam's integration, and when I need GPS-based information I guess I will have to try to write a script that reads the coords out manually with exiftool instead of trying out Yet Another Library Manager). Adobe is absolutely that 1k lb gorilla in the room that everyone is afraid to compete with. Add to that that photography programs are very difficult and complex work and it makes the field, particularly the field of volunteer developers who make contributions to a FOSS project, pretty limited. For the record, the current size of my library: [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.CR2" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 97,596 [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.JPG" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 177,785 [me@my_host photos]$ du -sh --exclude=./.snapshots 2.8T . .snapshots being the btrfs snapshot tree, which makes these numbers about 16x higher, but is a relatively recent addition (around the time I moved to a Windows host) so isn't the reason everything has choked historically. Hopefully stuff like Lightroom isn't trying to parse these directories as well. I guess I could blacklist them from sharing in Samba to try to get around it. Open to any tips others may have.
  - fbleagh 10y ago
    http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ or On1 Browse are good fast raw viewers on windows. I use them to 'manage' my library as I use a mix of raw processors and don't want to be tied to them for my workflow.
polskibus 10y ago
Can anyone compare DarkTable to RawTherapee ? http://rawtherapee.com/ http://rawtherapee.com/
- LinuxFreedom 10y ago
  RT has no real workflow, more a set of tools that you might apply somehow, GUI reflects that, seems unorganized. DT seems to have more advanced algorithms and tools. Both are excellent. Does not hurt to have both in your toolbelt.
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    RT has more controls for finetuning (some of which is very necessary for Fujifilm RAF files still) while DT has never crashed on me. CLUT support is nice, I play with it when I happen to develop from raw data. I should probably participate in DT's tracker and try to get the few shortcomings fixed... that should do for a new year's resolution: more participation in OS communities. :)
    - geppetto 10y ago
      Can you expand on that? I'm a Fuji and Darktable user. What am I missing?
      - pvdebbe 10y ago
        The pixel readout is frankly poor on both apps: false color here and there. Probably both apps use the same library behind the scenes. On RT I can crank up the demosaic algorithms to reduce the effect. DT has no similar filter available. DT also used to not do a good job on lens corrections (I have an X100T). Perhaps this new version does better since there was a mention in the changelog about lens data. The best pictures are still the SOOC JPEGs -- too bad if I want to adjust the shadows or highlights.
        Lio 10y ago
vr46 10y ago
I am going to tentatively give this a go after ten years or so of Lightroom. The major problem apart from learning a new application is of course dealing with ten years of Lightroom catalogues and the metadata they contain. Further updates as events unfold ;)
- geppetto 10y ago
  Maybe that could work: "Allow to import/export tags from Lightroom keyword files" (Release notes)
  - abricot 10y ago
    Then we just need "Full support for DNG files"
  - vr46 10y ago
    Tags should be simple to transfer, but actual image corrections do not move over. That's the real issue, a decade of corrections being lost :)
- StavrosK 10y ago
  It's really not that bad, you open your photo and it has a list of plugins you can use. Lightroom isn't the most complicated in the world either, I guess, so it's not going to be a very steep learning curve.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Darktable stores 'catalogs' in SQLite tables. When I poked around for fun with sqlite3, the schemas seemed relatively straightforward. If the catalog data from lightroom can be wrangled into a reasonable format, it may be possible to convert it (famous last words).
  - kawera 10y ago
    Lightroom catalogs are SQLite tables too, although using convoluted schemas.
alfanick 10y ago
Can someone compare it to Adobe Lightroom? Is it truly usable, is it quick enough? I am stuck on classic dilemma "apple fucked up, what should I do", so I am planning moving back to Linux, but Lightroom is the only application keeping me back (however, I thought of OSX in VM on Linux for running just LR).
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  I agree with you - Lightroom is the sizzle. But if you happen to convert Fujifilm RAF files on a regular basis, then there are image quality issues with ACP that might make the switchover decision easier for you.
  - NovaS1X 10y ago
    The Fuji issue has mostly been solved. I used to use Irident Developer for my RAFs but since switching to the X-T2 and the latest LR updates the old issues are gone. I've compared IR to LR a few times and there's no real difference if you know how to use the sharpening tool in LR properly. The older sensors still exhibit the issue a bit though.
    - pvdebbe 10y ago
      Glad to hear. Naturally Lightroom doesn't fit my Linux workhorse very well but it has the best workflow. Nice to hear it has improved -- many attributed Fujifilm's poor image detail to how ACP made the conversions early on.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  It is very usable for editing photos. When I used to use it (a few versions ago), there were a few issues with library management, so I switched to Lightroom. Lightroom's workflow seems more "integrated", but I think Darktable has more photo-editing features. I would definitely recommend taking it for a spin.
- wjvdhoek 10y ago
  Since I moved to Linux as my daily driver, I've been using Darktable as prefered editor. I do have to say that I'm not a high demanding user, so you'll have to take my experience with a grain of salt. Coming from Lightroom there's a slight learning curve and it's not as refined as Lightroom. But once you get the hang of things, it's really a great editor. Definitely quick but also really usable. The interface can sometimes be somewhat confusing, I can recall several occasions at which I didn't really know how to use a tool or preset. Luckily I'm better at googling than photography. I don't miss Lightroom at all and as of yet have not encountered any missing features.
baq 10y ago
does it have a lens profile database? these are tedious to do manually.
- trop 10y ago
  It uses lensfun. See http://www.darktable.org/2015/02/on-lens-detection-and-correction/ http://www.darktable.org/2015/02/on-lens-detection-and-corre... and http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04s04.html.php#lens_correction http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04s04.html.php#lens....
kislotnik 10y ago
It's a pity most compare it to Lightroom, whereas there are more sound competitors - take a look at RawTherapee, Capture One, ON1 Photo RAW or SilkyPix. All of them have ups and downs, Rawtherapee is fast bug buggy as hell and has no adjustment layers, Capture One is marvellous but has political problems with supporting files from the medium-format Pentax, ON1 Photo RAW is a freshly released piece of software and it managed to crash on my images.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  > It's a pity most compare it to Lightroom I don't think I can agree that it's a pity. Lightroom is the standard for photographers right now for pretty much everything but fashion photography (Capture One) and perhaps architecture photography (DXO Optics Pro). Everything, including the competitors you mentioned, is compared to Lightroom. I think these applications (including DarkTable) need to be compared to Lightroom because the point at which they're competitive with Lightroom is the point at which they become seriously viable to many photographers (the kind that don't necessarily hang out on HN).
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    It's a shame that most software can't seem to keep a focus. Lightroom became a RAW development platform as well as a photo manager, etc. I'd really like just a fast, inobtrusive, and performant photo manager to help index my photos. I haven't found anything worthwhile yet. I use DxO for all of my photography. Because Lightroom slows to a crawl on my imports, I haven't really tried it for RAW development. I guess I should give it a go. However, at this juncture I fully believe that DxO is miracle software. I've gotten far better results with it than I have with anything else. DxO can take a trash shot and make it 80% and it can take a good shot and make it 500%. Far more impressed with it than ufraw and the other RAW development suites I've tinkered with in the past.
    - slantyyz 10y ago
      Let me chime in with another vote for DxO. The entry cost is reasonable for the base version (discounted every year around Xmas) and it's not a subscription model like Adobe. The lens/sensor RAW optimizations are fantastic (provided your camera has a bayer type sensor -- sorry, Fuji X users) and it can definitely make your photos punch above their weight. Depending on what you do, it might be worth spending more on the Elite edition -- most people don't need it, IMO. There are paid upgrades yearly, but if you don't need the new features, you can choose to skip a version (or two). There are a couple of sister products, DxO Viewpoint for perspective fixes and DxO Filmpack (filters). IMO, Filmpack isn't worth paying for, but if you do a lot of architectural/wide angle work, Viewpoint is pretty good. Also worth looking at is Affinity Photo - it's half the price of DxO. I bought it as a cheap alternative to PS for PSD editing, but it does RAW processing too.
akeck 10y ago
I use Darktable daily since switching from iPhotos/Photos. Re-organizing my Darktable library has been difficult, though, because it purposely doesn't manage files. This user's python script that updates file locations in the SQLite catalogue has helped (https://chrigl.de/posts/2011/12/28/moving-around-darktable-managed-photos.html https://chrigl.de/posts/2011/12/28/moving-around-darktable-m...).
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Would be nice to add state of the art AI for auto tagging people, places, objects, etc. And just to dream: Multimaster database exists local, cloud, other machines, etc. Optional auto cloud sync, or partial, or just proxies.
archildress 10y ago
I'm a huge fan - congrats on 2.2! Here's a tutorial I wrote up on trying out Darktable recently: https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-get-started-with-darktable-lightroom-alternative--cms-27702 https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-get-starte...
djsumdog 10y ago
I tried Darktable but the lack of basic undo functionality kept me on Lightroom. Looks like this release has basic undo functionality. I'll give this one another try.
- privong 10y ago
  > I tried Darktable but the lack of basic undo functionality kept me on Lightroom. Looks like this release has basic undo functionality. I'll give this one another try. It's had undo functionality (on an individual-image basis) for a long time, albeit perhaps not in an obvious fashion. In the "darkroom" view, on the left sidebar there's a "History" widget. If you click on earlier numbers, it reverts the image to those, undoing whatever previous edits you've done.
acjohnson55 10y ago
I'm not too familiar with Darktable, but one of my biggest Lightroom complaints is that it's not readily usable with generic cloud storage providers. Does Darktable have a good answer for this? I'd very much like to be liberated from buying ever larger hard disks.
- wtallis 10y ago
  As far as I can tell, file management is mostly beyond the scope of Darktable. You point it at a folder of photos, it stores the metadata in that same folder, and you export the edited photos somewhere else (another folder, or upload to services like flickr). Darktable doesn't do anything to take ownership of the original photos: no renaming or relocating.
mnutt 10y ago
I'm looking into moving up from Photos.app to Darktable. One of the nice features of Photos.app is that through iCloud I can run Photos.app on my MBP which doesn't have space for my whole library and it will automatically pull down and cache the parts of my library I'm using at the moment. Are there any sort of storage hooks in Darktable that would allow for building something like that with a homegrown photos server?
- brudgers 10y ago
  If the storage is recognized at the operating system level then Darktable should be fine with it. Because it maintains a database, Darktable doesn't need a constant connection. On the other hand, it won't mount a network drive all on its own since it doesn't expect to be running as root. Or to put it another way, if there's a photo server on your network and the machine running Darktable knows about it, then it shouldn't be a problem.
aorth 10y ago
I use Darktable to do basic edits to RAW files from my Nikon D3100 and it's incredibly satisfying to understand and adjust exposure, lens correction, perspective, and a few other things. Darktable has module presets for many cameras, which helps. I still don't understand levels, color correction, and other more advanced modules, but there are many great videos on YouTube, and my final JPEGs often end up looking better than the camera's (I shoot in RAW+JPEG just in case).

208 points by geppetto 10y ago

IMHO it's the best FOSS photo application out there. It's cross platform, fast, stable and manages the whole photo workflow (RAW developing, photo management, non destructive editing). Thanks darktable folks!

JorgeGT 10y ago
> It's cross platform Are there Windows builds? There was a guy that did but he stopped at 2.0.
- geppetto 10y ago
  Oops! You're right there's no official Windows port. I've run it on Mac and Linux only.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    I've been able to run it on the Linux Subsystem for Windows with an X server, but there was still a few quirks I believe.
- wtallis 10y ago
  There's been renewed work on a clean Windows port in recent months: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327 https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    Interesting! They almost lynched the guy at the beginning but seems that there's progress.
    - exception_e 10y ago
      It is very interesting. I don't want to intrude on their thread, but if others here vouch for this technique I'll politely ask them to look into the following: - https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk... - http://boot2docker.io/ http://boot2docker.io/ ...has anyone here ever used this approach with nix apps that need to run on Windows "natively"? Writing a powershell script to silently install boot2docker with this special docker image wouldn't be too difficult. The DarkTable folks don't seem interesting in maintaining Win builds so this may be the perfect workaround. NOTE: I realize that `File > Open Image` may be non-trivial, but surely there's a way to mount a host<->guest folder (e.g.: When using the application, the workspace is located in `C:\Users\$whoami\Documents\DarkTable\.jpg`)
      - sz4kerto 10y ago
        Boot2Docker is not for this purpose. Silently installing a VM on a Windows PC is a very bad idea. If the user is not proficient enough to know about and configure the VM, then what happens if - B2D installs a Virtualbox instance, but Hyper-V is on. VBox can't run besides Hyper-V. - How do you configure the resource usage for the VM?Something like Darktable requires a lot of resources - How do you manage shared folders? VBox shared folder performance is really bad compared to native - Do you install an X server as well? Anyway -- it's just a bad idea.
      - exception_e 10y ago
        Thanks sz4kerto. I'm glad I got some thoughts here before posting that in their PR (I obviously won't post it now because of the points you brought up). I guess a user that would be comfortable with b2d or vbox would just have those running anyways! Note: for you question about X, please check out https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
    - vvanders 10y ago
      Wow you weren't kidding. > It may be better to go help out some other free software project that already had the misfortune of working on that platform... I understand their points about maintenance, but telling someone to go work on something else rather than keeping an experimental branch around, sheesh. As someone who appreciates open source and works primarily on Windows I really wish they had a better attitude. Take a look at Rust or Elixir, fantastic communities and the software is better for it. I'm sure that Darktable has some interesting things but based on what I saw in that thread I think I'll be sticking to Lightroom.
- snarfy 10y ago
  It works in Windows 10 using the Linux for Windows feature, and then using a suitable windows X server. http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png
cs702 10y ago
Agree. I would add three more qualities to your list: * Fully programmable, via a nicely document Lua interface: http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php -- you can automate all kinds of workflows. * Truly innovative, with clever new features unavailable in other applications, including Lightroom. For example, five years ago they added a powerful new "equalizer" module: http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ (google "darktable equazlier" for usage examples). * Always improving: I've been using it for years and the developers keep finding ways to make it better all the time. Congratulations on another great release!
uniclaude 10y ago
Definitely agree! I make a substantial part of my income (just enough to pay rent) selling photography, and I recently dropped ps and lightroom in favor of Darktable. The change didn't happen in a day, but Darktable is so good I don't think I'll ever need to come back to Adobe. Notable plus, I can now spend most of my time on Linux, no more need to use my Macbook for photo work. The interface is not really good for smaller displays and resolutions (adobe stuff was better on my 11 inch mba), but on anything with more than 1280 x 960 px, it's great. Congratulations to the Darktable team for this 2.2 release!
- pkaye 10y ago
  Any experience using RawTherapee also? Just an hobbyist myself and moving away from the Mac platform so figuring out the best alternatives.
  - uniclaude 10y ago
    Never tried RawTherapee, won't be able to help here sorry!
  - stevekemp 10y ago
    I don't make a living via photography, but I do receive income from taking pictures of escorts, and pets. (Strange how you find your niche!) I've been using RawTherapee, on Linux, for the past few years. For my needs of marking images, doing post-processing, and mass-operations, it works perfectly. I'm always reluctant to allow a tool to manage the layout/tagging of my images. So for that I have a strictly sorted hierarchy: ~/Images/ ~/Images/2016 ~/Images/2016/12/04-Hannah ~/Images/2016/12/12-Tiffany Inside each "event"-folder I store: RAW/ JPG/ JPG/thumbs/ Teasers/ Teasers/thumbs/ Then I write out a meta-data file, ".meta", with detail such as: Location=Studio|MyPlace|Their Hotel|Whatever Contact-Details=+44... Tags=lingerie,nude,shillouette,monochrome .. It works well, and allows me to find files years later via a simple `grep`.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    I am also a hobbyist and I use Darktable. I've experimented with RawTherapee. I like RawTherapee's editing controls and love that its sidecar files are somewhat human readable (Darktable's are not). What Rawtherapee lacks is the 'light table' feature for handling bulk photographs. I'll often shoot several hundred images in a day (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes). Darktable lets me triage those photos and filter them for processing without managing a file system... well now that my workflow uses RapidPhotoDownloader on the front end. It reads off the memory card and renames files and directories to a standard format. A few months ago, I brought many years worth of sorted directories of images into Darktable and went to bed and when I woke up it had added everything to the database and I could sort by name and remove duplicates and look at thumbnails and remove junk that had been saved alongside stuff I wanted during bulk operations. Anyway, since Darktable runs on Mac, there's not a drop dead reason not to give it a spin alongside whatever you're currently using.
cookiecaper 10y ago
I regret that I haven't really had the opportunity to explore Darktable very thoroughly. Every time I would try to point it at my library folder it would choke to death. Perhaps I should re-organize around Darktable, but right now I have other components of my workflow that are hard to imagine replacing, primarily DxO -- this was the main driver that got me to switch to a Windows host running a Linux VM and doing all my real work over SSH to the local VM, after years of struggling through painfully slow editing in a Windows VM on a Linux host. I resent that Windows's bad, less flexible behavior has forced me to make it my host OS. :'( At the moment I don't have a good library app, I just browse the directory structure. I've tried Lightroom but it too struggles with my library folder, although unlike Darktable, it is marginally usable. I've tried Digikam, and while it's the only one that seems to handle the library in a semi-respectable fashion (with the experimental, now-deprecated MySQL backend enabled, which iirc took some manual massaging to even make compile anymore), it's hard to get the components I really wanted to work reliably (it's very important the my camera's GPS tags can be mapped and sorted; this is my main interest in a library manager and as of now, all such programs are too overloaded to do this competently or half-broken like Digikam's integration, and when I need GPS-based information I guess I will have to try to write a script that reads the coords out manually with exiftool instead of trying out Yet Another Library Manager). Adobe is absolutely that 1k lb gorilla in the room that everyone is afraid to compete with. Add to that that photography programs are very difficult and complex work and it makes the field, particularly the field of volunteer developers who make contributions to a FOSS project, pretty limited. For the record, the current size of my library: [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.CR2" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 97,596 [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.JPG" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n" 177,785 [me@my_host photos]$ du -sh --exclude=./.snapshots 2.8T . .snapshots being the btrfs snapshot tree, which makes these numbers about 16x higher, but is a relatively recent addition (around the time I moved to a Windows host) so isn't the reason everything has choked historically. Hopefully stuff like Lightroom isn't trying to parse these directories as well. I guess I could blacklist them from sharing in Samba to try to get around it. Open to any tips others may have.
- fbleagh 10y ago
  http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ or On1 Browse are good fast raw viewers on windows. I use them to 'manage' my library as I use a mix of raw processors and don't want to be tied to them for my workflow.

polskibus 10y ago

Can anyone compare DarkTable to RawTherapee ? http://rawtherapee.com/ http://rawtherapee.com/

LinuxFreedom 10y ago
RT has no real workflow, more a set of tools that you might apply somehow, GUI reflects that, seems unorganized. DT seems to have more advanced algorithms and tools. Both are excellent. Does not hurt to have both in your toolbelt.
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  RT has more controls for finetuning (some of which is very necessary for Fujifilm RAF files still) while DT has never crashed on me. CLUT support is nice, I play with it when I happen to develop from raw data. I should probably participate in DT's tracker and try to get the few shortcomings fixed... that should do for a new year's resolution: more participation in OS communities. :)
  - geppetto 10y ago
    Can you expand on that? I'm a Fuji and Darktable user. What am I missing?
    - pvdebbe 10y ago
      The pixel readout is frankly poor on both apps: false color here and there. Probably both apps use the same library behind the scenes. On RT I can crank up the demosaic algorithms to reduce the effect. DT has no similar filter available. DT also used to not do a good job on lens corrections (I have an X100T). Perhaps this new version does better since there was a mention in the changelog about lens data. The best pictures are still the SOOC JPEGs -- too bad if I want to adjust the shadows or highlights.
      - Lio 10y ago

vr46 10y ago

I am going to tentatively give this a go after ten years or so of Lightroom. The major problem apart from learning a new application is of course dealing with ten years of Lightroom catalogues and the metadata they contain. Further updates as events unfold ;)

geppetto 10y ago
Maybe that could work: "Allow to import/export tags from Lightroom keyword files" (Release notes)
- abricot 10y ago
  Then we just need "Full support for DNG files"
- vr46 10y ago
  Tags should be simple to transfer, but actual image corrections do not move over. That's the real issue, a decade of corrections being lost :)
StavrosK 10y ago
It's really not that bad, you open your photo and it has a list of plugins you can use. Lightroom isn't the most complicated in the world either, I guess, so it's not going to be a very steep learning curve.
brudgers 10y ago
Darktable stores 'catalogs' in SQLite tables. When I poked around for fun with sqlite3, the schemas seemed relatively straightforward. If the catalog data from lightroom can be wrangled into a reasonable format, it may be possible to convert it (famous last words).
- kawera 10y ago
  Lightroom catalogs are SQLite tables too, although using convoluted schemas.

alfanick 10y ago

Can someone compare it to Adobe Lightroom? Is it truly usable, is it quick enough? I am stuck on classic dilemma "apple fucked up, what should I do", so I am planning moving back to Linux, but Lightroom is the only application keeping me back (however, I thought of OSX in VM on Linux for running just LR).

pvdebbe 10y ago
I agree with you - Lightroom is the sizzle. But if you happen to convert Fujifilm RAF files on a regular basis, then there are image quality issues with ACP that might make the switchover decision easier for you.
- NovaS1X 10y ago
  The Fuji issue has mostly been solved. I used to use Irident Developer for my RAFs but since switching to the X-T2 and the latest LR updates the old issues are gone. I've compared IR to LR a few times and there's no real difference if you know how to use the sharpening tool in LR properly. The older sensors still exhibit the issue a bit though.
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    Glad to hear. Naturally Lightroom doesn't fit my Linux workhorse very well but it has the best workflow. Nice to hear it has improved -- many attributed Fujifilm's poor image detail to how ACP made the conversions early on.
StavrosK 10y ago
It is very usable for editing photos. When I used to use it (a few versions ago), there were a few issues with library management, so I switched to Lightroom. Lightroom's workflow seems more "integrated", but I think Darktable has more photo-editing features. I would definitely recommend taking it for a spin.
wjvdhoek 10y ago
Since I moved to Linux as my daily driver, I've been using Darktable as prefered editor. I do have to say that I'm not a high demanding user, so you'll have to take my experience with a grain of salt. Coming from Lightroom there's a slight learning curve and it's not as refined as Lightroom. But once you get the hang of things, it's really a great editor. Definitely quick but also really usable. The interface can sometimes be somewhat confusing, I can recall several occasions at which I didn't really know how to use a tool or preset. Luckily I'm better at googling than photography. I don't miss Lightroom at all and as of yet have not encountered any missing features.

baq 10y ago

does it have a lens profile database? these are tedious to do manually.

trop 10y ago
It uses lensfun. See http://www.darktable.org/2015/02/on-lens-detection-and-correction/ http://www.darktable.org/2015/02/on-lens-detection-and-corre... and http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04s04.html.php#lens_correction http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04s04.html.php#lens....

kislotnik 10y ago

It's a pity most compare it to Lightroom, whereas there are more sound competitors - take a look at RawTherapee, Capture One, ON1 Photo RAW or SilkyPix. All of them have ups and downs, Rawtherapee is fast bug buggy as hell and has no adjustment layers, Capture One is marvellous but has political problems with supporting files from the medium-format Pentax, ON1 Photo RAW is a freshly released piece of software and it managed to crash on my images.

Veratyr 10y ago
> It's a pity most compare it to Lightroom I don't think I can agree that it's a pity. Lightroom is the standard for photographers right now for pretty much everything but fashion photography (Capture One) and perhaps architecture photography (DXO Optics Pro). Everything, including the competitors you mentioned, is compared to Lightroom. I think these applications (including DarkTable) need to be compared to Lightroom because the point at which they're competitive with Lightroom is the point at which they become seriously viable to many photographers (the kind that don't necessarily hang out on HN).
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  It's a shame that most software can't seem to keep a focus. Lightroom became a RAW development platform as well as a photo manager, etc. I'd really like just a fast, inobtrusive, and performant photo manager to help index my photos. I haven't found anything worthwhile yet. I use DxO for all of my photography. Because Lightroom slows to a crawl on my imports, I haven't really tried it for RAW development. I guess I should give it a go. However, at this juncture I fully believe that DxO is miracle software. I've gotten far better results with it than I have with anything else. DxO can take a trash shot and make it 80% and it can take a good shot and make it 500%. Far more impressed with it than ufraw and the other RAW development suites I've tinkered with in the past.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    Let me chime in with another vote for DxO. The entry cost is reasonable for the base version (discounted every year around Xmas) and it's not a subscription model like Adobe. The lens/sensor RAW optimizations are fantastic (provided your camera has a bayer type sensor -- sorry, Fuji X users) and it can definitely make your photos punch above their weight. Depending on what you do, it might be worth spending more on the Elite edition -- most people don't need it, IMO. There are paid upgrades yearly, but if you don't need the new features, you can choose to skip a version (or two). There are a couple of sister products, DxO Viewpoint for perspective fixes and DxO Filmpack (filters). IMO, Filmpack isn't worth paying for, but if you do a lot of architectural/wide angle work, Viewpoint is pretty good. Also worth looking at is Affinity Photo - it's half the price of DxO. I bought it as a cheap alternative to PS for PSD editing, but it does RAW processing too.

akeck 10y ago

I use Darktable daily since switching from iPhotos/Photos. Re-organizing my Darktable library has been difficult, though, because it purposely doesn't manage files. This user's python script that updates file locations in the SQLite catalogue has helped (https://chrigl.de/posts/2011/12/28/moving-around-darktable-managed-photos.html https://chrigl.de/posts/2011/12/28/moving-around-darktable-m...).

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Would be nice to add state of the art AI for auto tagging people, places, objects, etc. And just to dream: Multimaster database exists local, cloud, other machines, etc. Optional auto cloud sync, or partial, or just proxies.

archildress 10y ago

I'm a huge fan - congrats on 2.2! Here's a tutorial I wrote up on trying out Darktable recently: https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-get-started-with-darktable-lightroom-alternative--cms-27702 https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-get-starte...

djsumdog 10y ago

I tried Darktable but the lack of basic undo functionality kept me on Lightroom. Looks like this release has basic undo functionality. I'll give this one another try.

privong 10y ago
> I tried Darktable but the lack of basic undo functionality kept me on Lightroom. Looks like this release has basic undo functionality. I'll give this one another try. It's had undo functionality (on an individual-image basis) for a long time, albeit perhaps not in an obvious fashion. In the "darkroom" view, on the left sidebar there's a "History" widget. If you click on earlier numbers, it reverts the image to those, undoing whatever previous edits you've done.

acjohnson55 10y ago

I'm not too familiar with Darktable, but one of my biggest Lightroom complaints is that it's not readily usable with generic cloud storage providers. Does Darktable have a good answer for this? I'd very much like to be liberated from buying ever larger hard disks.

wtallis 10y ago
As far as I can tell, file management is mostly beyond the scope of Darktable. You point it at a folder of photos, it stores the metadata in that same folder, and you export the edited photos somewhere else (another folder, or upload to services like flickr). Darktable doesn't do anything to take ownership of the original photos: no renaming or relocating.

mnutt 10y ago

I'm looking into moving up from Photos.app to Darktable. One of the nice features of Photos.app is that through iCloud I can run Photos.app on my MBP which doesn't have space for my whole library and it will automatically pull down and cache the parts of my library I'm using at the moment. Are there any sort of storage hooks in Darktable that would allow for building something like that with a homegrown photos server?

brudgers 10y ago
If the storage is recognized at the operating system level then Darktable should be fine with it. Because it maintains a database, Darktable doesn't need a constant connection. On the other hand, it won't mount a network drive all on its own since it doesn't expect to be running as root. Or to put it another way, if there's a photo server on your network and the machine running Darktable knows about it, then it shouldn't be a problem.

aorth 10y ago

I use Darktable to do basic edits to RAW files from my Nikon D3100 and it's incredibly satisfying to understand and adjust exposure, lens correction, perspective, and a few other things. Darktable has module presets for many cameras, which helps. I still don't understand levels, color correction, and other more advanced modules, but there are many great videos on YouTube, and my final JPEGs often end up looking better than the camera's (I shoot in RAW+JPEG just in case).