12 ms·

Darktable 4.0

321 points by aendruk 4y ago

2bitencryption 4y ago
Really glad there's advanced open-source tools like darktable and RawTherapee. I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable for a few years now. I prefer the UI and workflow or RT, but dt has better performance on my machine. And RT has this strange longstanding bug where the image is extremely blurry during editing, and only becomes clear after exporting. According to a github issue, a workaround is to disable lens correction (and anything else in the "transform" tab) but this didn't work for me, prompting my most recent switch to dt. current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.
- moelf 4y ago
  I wish the effort is united between dt and rt (and maybe digiKam for management), then we'd have a Blender-level competitor against LightRoom maybe
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now digikam won’t open! This is with the latest app image, and there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a bug report for the same error message that came up on a different program, and it seems app image isn’t as self contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this bug preventing me from opening digiKam!
    - Elv13 4y ago
      AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries, anything that depends on system libraries needs to be compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or libvdpau for hardware media decoding. You can't just bundle those, you have to use the system ones. Using any system library forces you to use glibc (AppImage don't work on Alpine). OpenSSL and a few other a libs you usually want to use the system one and have a built-in fallback because of security concerns. Making perfect AppImages is often possible, but the automated tooling isn't smart enough. A proper AppImage (this one is by me) look like this: https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-editorbuilder/Dockerfile https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-edito... . Obviously this doesn't scale very well to projects with 300 dependencies like Digikam. My NeoVIM appimage linked above "really, really" bundles all dependency and compile your NeoVIM config to luajit bytecode. It's 3.9mb compared to the upstream one which is 15mb without any config. Note than 0.7mb of that 3.9 is the spellcheck dictionary, 0.4 my enormous config, 0.5 the AppImage overhead and 0.7 all the legacy plugins still written in vimscript.
      - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
        Interesting. Yeah it seems like the solution for digikam on my solution was something like unpack the app image and recompile something and I’ve not had the time to mess with it. I hope the maintainer can release a fixed image at some point. I really like that app!
        account42 4y ago
        Wouldn't another option be to use the system package [0] or is the version too old? Or use the Flatpak [1] (or NIH-flatpak [2]), which is probably a better fit than AppImage for GUI programs that sit on top of a heavy toolkit. [0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam [1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam [2] https://snapcraft.io/digikam https://snapcraft.io/digikam
  - spaetzleesser 4y ago
    A merger between digiKam and darktable would be my dream.
  - Derbasti 4y ago
    They collaborate a lot, actually. Many algorithms are ported from one to the other, if they work well and fit.
- thg 4y ago
  > current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet. You can make them bigger through some CSS tweaks: https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/preferences-settings/general/ https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/prefere...
  - sneak 4y ago
    It's open source, you can change anything. The UI shouldn't be so annoying and hostile out of the box regardless. I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested by users with developers silently watching.
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Most projects have an issue tracker where one proposes changes or reports bugs. The IRC channel is labeled "Support channel for darktable" rather than "Tell the developer how they ought to better serve me for free" People have a finite slice of their life to give you for nothing. Putting specific suggestions on the issue tracker seems more respectful of their time.
      - iasay 4y ago
        I raised a ticket on an open source project about a defect. It was open for 6 months with no comment. So I fixed it and did a PR. The PR was still sitting there open after 6 months. More interesting PRs to the developers have been merged. Attention and stewardship are not universal.
        rglullis 4y ago
        What I usually do when I see promising projects and slow devs. 1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?" 2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues. 3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.
- jseliger 4y ago
  I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS. I believe I somehow imported my entire /pictures folder at some point, producing many thousands of images in a film roll; I just downloaded 4.0.0 and have spent some time trying to figure out how to reset the film roll, or darktable altogether. Or how to create a new library. There's no typical top toolbar on MacOS. In clicking around, I've selected "add to library," and darktable is now beachballed. CaptureOne will continue to be my default. (Before someone points this out, let me acknowledge that the apparent problems with darktable are undoubtedly my fault in some capacity and that I'm Using It Wrong, or that I can't properly read the manual, or that I should watch more videos on how to use darktable.)
  - brudgers 4y ago
    To reset Darktable’s databases, delete the two databases (files ending in “.db”) in the equivalent to ~/.config/darktable on your Mac. One contains your custom configurations like presets, the other contains info about file locations, ratings, film rolls, etc. Deleting and reimport takes time when a lot of files are involved, but is my preferred way of handling the changes of large scale file operations. But film rolls might not be the best way to manage files. After six years, I found searching the database using tags and Exif data such as camera and date ranges with the collection tool works better for me. What also helps me is never deleting or moving an image file. That way the database stays current and I avoid the busy work of file and folder manager. To put it another way, for me flat search is better than hierarchy navigation.
  - Normille 4y ago
    >I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS Same here. I just downloaded V4 to see if there was any improvement from last time I tried to use it * Open app, Select 'Add to Library' --> spinning beachball of doom delete the ~/.config/darktable directory, to give me a clean start... * Open app. App opens in a weird window the full width of my screen but only half the depth. I try to resize the window. It won't rezise, even though I get resize arrows when hovering over the corner. Finally manage to make it usable by hitting the fullscreen widget. * Try 'Add to Library' again. This time it allows me to select my photos archive folder. I see there's a tickbox marked 'Recursive' so I click on that as I have subfolders in my photos archive. I can't select the box. Then the spinning beachball of doom starts again... * Force quit * Delete app. Life's just too short to mess about with an app that hangs twice, requiring a force quit, before I've even managed to do a single thing with it.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Darktable is great! This year I restarted photography, ina serious manner, after quite some time. Serious as in I try to get beautiful pictures I could hang on a wall. I also started to do proper post processing, and darktable is quite handy. My dad used to be a pro photographer, now retired, and gave me crash course in RAW processing. Besides some handling differences between lightroom and photoshop he nothing negative to say about darktable. And neither do I, it's not darktables fault that my photo library is a mess.
  - humanlion87 4y ago
    Does your dad have any suggestion on resources/books that others can use to learn the same crash course he gave you? :)
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Hevcertainly does, in fact besides years of experience he has quite a number of books at home. All in German so... If that's ok I can ask!
      - humanlion87 4y ago
        Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately I don't know German, so don't want to trouble you.
        hef19898 4y ago
        Ah, a pity... If you don't know yet, photography life . com has some good resources to get started!
- Derbasti 4y ago
  There are also shortcuts for the arrow panels. Ctrl-Shift-{T,B,L,R}, IIRC (top, bottom, left, right).
mikae1 4y ago
darktable has a pretty steep learning curve and it introduces concepts from cinema (the scene referred workflow) that may be known to video editors and colorists, but that are surely alien even to seasoned still image editors and retouchers. For anyone that wants to learn darktable I wholeheartedly recommended the forum at https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 The darktable developers frequent this forum and it's an indispensable resource.
- thg 4y ago
  I'd additionally add Bruce Williams' "Understanding Darktable" series to that list: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlYWvzmJQTrRq7JrYdD7k3-8-v-uHnhK_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlYWvzmJQTrRq7JrYdD7k...
  - mikae1 4y ago
    If I need to pick a favorite: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbDlOwmmQnkRmcb2_5WERg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbDlOwmmQnkRmcb2_5WERg
taopenIDE 4y ago
The name 'Darktable' reminded me of an IDE that was being plugged on HN a lot around the year 2012 -ish. It had a lot of momentum at the time as it was plugged a lot on HN, it was open source and had a similar feel to Atom. But I have not heard of it since and I'm finding it hard to recall the name. Weird.
- doctoboggan 4y ago
  You are probably thinking of Lightable, which IIRC has ceased development. It never really lived up to the initial hype.
- whitepoplar 4y ago
  http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/ ?
- trombonechamp 4y ago
  The name "Darktable" is a play on Adobe Lightroom, since "lightroom" is a combination of "light table" and "darkroom", both concepts from film photography.
jacooper 4y ago
Let's see if this changed anything. But my previous experience with editing Sony RAWs on Rawtherappe and Darktable wasn't good. The color science is missed up in Darktable and in Raw therappe, I just couldn't get something decent out. I would be editing for an hour and end up with a weird looking image, while in lightroom I would be done in 10 minutes. People might say that I'm just used to lightroom but I'm not, I was using Capture one, then didn't shoot anything for multiple years, then just went pack to Lightroom and could edit photos without major frustrations and get decent results quickly. Creative apps in general are a very weak point of the Linux desktop, and when they exist, that have many weird requests and problems that just using them on windows is easier(Davinci resolve requiring the crappy closed source AMD drivers)
- morsch 4y ago
  First time I'm hearing this. I think Sony owners make up a sizable portion of the user base. I never had an issue with the RAWs from an a6300 and another entry level Sony mirrorless. Though I never used anything other than dt, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.
- Youden 4y ago
  I shoot Sony and use Darktable exclusively. I think your problem might be the base curve module and its default "Sony" preset, which looks like garbage. Try setting it to "neutral", it should look a lot better (presets are under the little arrow next to the "base curve" header). The base curve presets, if I understand correctly, aim to make the photo look similar to the out of camera JPEGs. In my opinion, they look like garbage. But these days I use Filmic for everything. My process is basically switch off base curve, switch on Filmic, adjust exposure so that mid exposure looks reasonable, adjust white and black exposure in Filmic to taste and done. The important thing to me is that this works for every photo, not just the easy ones. ETTR photos of high dynamic range scenes work just the same. I'll occasionally run the photo through DXO and export a DNG with DXO's noise reduction for further work in Darktable too. Makes the shadows noise-free no matter how hard you push them.
  - code_biologist 4y ago
mywacaday 4y ago
What's the reason behind this "As always, please don’t use the autogenerated tarball provided by github, but only our tar.xz file. The checksums are:"
- Normille 4y ago
  The wording is a bit vague, but I presumed they meant to use the tar.xz if you intended to checksum the file.
- hnaccount141 4y ago
  Maybe referring to the source tarball github generates for releases?
- cozzyd 4y ago
  No idea what the build system is, but for some you want users to download the prebootstrapped version
vanderZwan 4y ago
> This gamut sanitization is the third and last to be added to darktable, which now has a fully-sanitized color pipeline from input (color calibration), through artistic changes (color balance rgb) to output (filmic v6). Users can now color-grade pictures safely in the knowledge that invalid input colors can be recovered in the least destructive fashion possible early in the pipeline, and valid colors can’t be pushed out of gamut along the pipeline. Oh my goodness this sounds amazing
jetrink 4y ago
Does anyone use darktable for inverting color film? I currently use a plugin for Lightroom and while I love the plugin, it would be great to be able to get rid of the Lightroom subscription.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  I don’t but here’s some documentation https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/module-reference/processing-modules/negadoctor/ https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/module-reference/p...
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  If you want a quick-and-dirty inversion, you can take a tone curve tool, set it to the XYZ color space and make it go top-left to bottom-right instead of the normal bottom-left to top-right. That should work afaik.
- tmjwid 4y ago
  For B&W negadoctor is very easy, nothing major with it other than setting white balance, then setting the film base colour and then adjusting D-MIN/D-MAX to the exposure you want. You can then leave it there or go crazy. Colour is a bit more hands on and with negadoctor you really can get a nice starting base but it's much more manual. You need to make sure colour profiles and white balance match your scaner/dslr scan. The you need to set up the shadow casts and highlight colours. Much more manual just to then get a rather flat image with correct colours to your liking. Then it's more regular raw workflow so altering contrast and saturation but it's nothing too hard still. But it's 100% more hands on the using NLP (this is what I'm assuming you are using. Check YouTube see what you think.
preya2k 4y ago
Building an open source software with a GUI and announcing that said GUI has been reworked in this release, and then not attaching screenshots of said changes :(
nuclx 4y ago
I gave Darktable a try (never used Lightroom), and as an amateur, it is still kind of hard for me to achieve something better than the "out of camera" JPGs when post-processing RAW photos from my rather old Canon DSLR camera. I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture. Saturation is maxed in OOC-JPGs anyways leading to clipping if it's increased more for the overall image. And what I almost forgot, lense correction and rotating towards drawable vertical or horizontal lines are great features. So what it does for me is basically barely noticably adjusting the saturation/contrast values, fixing the horizon and applying lense correction.
- blockarchitech 4y ago
  Lightroom user here. It's over hyped. Yeah, it's cool and all but anything else would do the same thing. The only thing that I actually found is better in Lightroom is the AI detection features. Same can go with Photoshop and paint.net (or gimp if you're into that kinda thing.)
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  Keep in mind that darktable really insists on doing things from the ground up, and pretty much requires you to understand the underlying pipeline and what you want to achieve. If you are just experimenting with random sliders, you aren't likely to get good results. It mostly sticks to standard industrial and scientific definitions instead of marketable names, and contains very little "magic" that is common to commercial photography software (such as saturation intentionally not being actual saturation, hidden curves, and so on). So you can use any good book on photography/videography and color science, and directly apply it to most of the stuff it has. Additionally, the developers spend a lot of their time explaining their reasoning and writing about the theory in general, for example: https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos - this channel is consistently great for both basic and non-obvious things https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 - main darktable forums, has very good discussions and explanations https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ Dr. Rant of darktable. Primarily technical stuff.
deanc 4y ago
I love DarkTable, it's an amazingly powerful tool, but for 99% of people the terms they use to describe editing are entirely alien. I take photos on my X100F for fun, want to do little edits here and there and filmic rgb etc. are completely foreign concepts. I'd like to see far more work on the UX. I can imagine a scenario where you load it for the first time and you're presented with a choice for beginner or advanced UI. Beginner UI would drop you into a Lightroom-esque filtered set of modules, and take you through a tutorial of the UI.
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  The alien terms are actually familiar to videographers, colorists, and people who understand color theory in general. For some reason I don't understand, video folks have always had much better tools for handling color, dynamic ranges etc, and also the much saner pipeline than photographers.
  - warning26 4y ago
    Sure, but that doesn't mean the UX is good. "This is meaningful to videographers and colorists" is a not a great defense of UX for an app that is targeted towards photographers, not videographers or colorists. Lightroom and Capture One (and heck, even Affinity Photo), make common photography tasks like highlight recovery easily accessed with a single slider. Sure, the Darktable UI may be "meaningful to colorists", but that doesn't necessarily result in a good UX for the main people that are likely to want to use it.
    - orbital-decay 4y ago
      I think UX and terminology are two different points actually - I agree UI/UX can be clunky overall. > "This is meaningful to videographers and colorists" is a not a great defense of UX for an app that is targeted towards photographers, not videographers or colorists. I think you underestimate the amount of photographers who know the fundamentals, as well as those who are familiar with related fields. After getting better in painting, I now resent tools like Lightroom which obscure everything behind some magic. I almost always see what I want from the photo, and I need a specific result. Photography tools are generally inconsistent, and most are light years behind video tools in getting predictable results. I want pastel colors in Lightroom and I know exactly what makes them; it's a single operation. Yet in Lightroom and Photoshop it needs multiple tweaks which feel like a workaround. The saturation in photo software can mean arbitrary things except being an actual axis in the color space. It can use several intermediate curves without telling you, making you fiddle with the sliders yet still not get the result you want. And so on. I mean, I tried Luminar AI recently, and it has a slider called Punch; what the hell does it do exactly?! There's a reason people are using things like Firegrade for Photoshop. Software like RT/ART and Darktable also does what it says on the tin and nothing more, this is a niche they fill, and I'm glad they exist. (although I'll admit RT still looks like an explosion of sliders to me, despite the fact I know what they are for)
dang 4y ago
Related: Darktable 3.8.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672729 - Dec 2021 (2 comments) Darktable: An open source photography workflow application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281775 - Aug 2021 (36 comments) Darktable 3.6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27720908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27720908 - July 2021 (73 comments) Darktable 3.2.1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156113 - Aug 2020 (47 comments) Darktable 3.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874528 - Dec 2019 (120 comments) Darktable 2.4.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 - Dec 2017 (74 comments) Darktable 2.2.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 - Dec 2016 (82 comments) Darktable 2.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 - Dec 2015 (44 comments) A look at Darktable 2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 - Nov 2015 (10 comments) Why there are no darktable builds for Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883018 - July 2015 (1 comment)
pkd 4y ago
One of the contributors to the project had not very nice things to say about the changes in this version. Ranty, but worth listening: https://youtu.be/56e5Yc-IQ84 https://youtu.be/56e5Yc-IQ84
- morsch 4y ago
  Oh and he forked the project. Does he still maintain Filmic, or has someone else taken over?
  - Derbasti 4y ago
    He is still contributing and collaborating on the technical stuff. His fork is exclusively about the UI, and claims to be 100% compatible with image editing. That video is a text book case of burnout, it looks like.
    - pkd 4y ago
      I think he makes some good points about the UI changes - albeit in an angry way.
BuildTheRobots 4y ago
I had an issue with RAW decoding when the dji mini 2 came out. Dec's were extremely responsive and helpful, and the software is free and extremely powerful to boot.
FpUser 4y ago
Thank you people for your amazing work. I use Darktable all the time. It is very good editor.
shaggie76 4y ago
About once a year I try DT but always bounce off of it pretty hard for one very simple reason: my Canon raw images in DT don't look anything like what they do in-camera. I did a studio shoot on Monday: clean strobe light, a tame white background, all settings manual (so no auto-lighting-optimizer), and fired up my raws in 4.0 on my calibrated monitor. I loaded the roll into Light Table and things look fine (because, I suspect, that the CR3 file has an embedded JPEG with Canon's recipe cooked in). Then I double clicked to bring it into Darkroom and it goes crazy: the backdrop goes a crazy purple hue, the exposure is wrong by about a third of a stop, and the skin is zombified. It's utterly incomprehensible to me. Every year I check and every year I'm baffled at how dreadful it is. Cya next year I guess.
- auxym 4y ago
  I understand why this turns you off, but I wanted to note that what you want: some default magic settings that make the photo look like Canon's in camera processing, is an explicit non-goal for the DT devs. Don't get your hopes up. What you are looking at when entering the darkroom is an "undeveloped" raw. Darktable's philosophy is that developing this raw photo should be 100% the user's responsibility and that whatever the camera maker's JPEG engine does is irrelevant. I still use DT because it is very powerful, but I do agree that it has a very steep learning curve, and therefore is frustrating for anyone who isnt fully committed to learning about digital color science, etc, myself included.
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. Both Lightroom and Photo Lab do exactly this. If Darktable cannot support reading that information and importing it as a preset, that's fine, but pretending it is an artist choice seems to misunderstand what is going on here. To get specific Picture Control settings (e.g. sharpness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc), High ISO noise reduction, White balance, and color space are typically important as defaults or presets.
scalablenotions 4y ago
NGL I was expecting some kind of database designed for operating on tor
digital79 4y ago
Very thankful for tools like darktable. Been a long time user and love supporting true OSS
Kab1r 4y ago
Darktable replaced Lightroom in my workflow and I haven't looked back since. It is definitely one of my favorite pieces of open source software. I don't know how it's written but it would be awesome to have a browser version without the remote desktop rdp stuff; I might take a look to see how hard it would be to implement when I have the time.
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  How do you do file managment. The thought of going back to doing it manually fills me with dread. My other issue is that I have filters (custom applied adjustments) that I an loathed give us and can't be bothered trying to replicate.
aliswe 4y ago
> 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.
saturn5k 4y ago
On several ocassions I've tried switching to Darktable or RawTherapee, but they never seemed to offer the practicality and ease of workflow that Lightroom has. They have tons of features and kudos for that, but when it comes to editing hundreds of photos, LR is the only choice for me.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  Agree. To manage tousands pictures, LRC wins. DT and RT are full of features that are mostly pointless for professional use. It has that linux philosophy - from nerds to nerds. But not for practical use unfortunatelly. No Fuji profiles, not many lens correction profiles, wired demosaic for X-Trans, not consistent UI, no native folder sync, no AI clone tool...
kqr 4y ago
Darktable is amazing. It takes some getting used to after Lightroom -- it doesn't hold your hand as much -- but once you get past that, the tools surpass LR in the power they give the user. Parametric masks, LAB curves, wavelet decomposition are very powerful ways to work with the raw stuff of images.

321 points by aendruk 4y ago

Really glad there's advanced open-source tools like darktable and RawTherapee. I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable for a few years now. I prefer the UI and workflow or RT, but dt has better performance on my machine. And RT has this strange longstanding bug where the image is extremely blurry during editing, and only becomes clear after exporting. According to a github issue, a workaround is to disable lens correction (and anything else in the "transform" tab) but this didn't work for me, prompting my most recent switch to dt. current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.

moelf 4y ago
I wish the effort is united between dt and rt (and maybe digiKam for management), then we'd have a Blender-level competitor against LightRoom maybe
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now digikam won’t open! This is with the latest app image, and there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a bug report for the same error message that came up on a different program, and it seems app image isn’t as self contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this bug preventing me from opening digiKam!
  - Elv13 4y ago
    AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries, anything that depends on system libraries needs to be compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or libvdpau for hardware media decoding. You can't just bundle those, you have to use the system ones. Using any system library forces you to use glibc (AppImage don't work on Alpine). OpenSSL and a few other a libs you usually want to use the system one and have a built-in fallback because of security concerns. Making perfect AppImages is often possible, but the automated tooling isn't smart enough. A proper AppImage (this one is by me) look like this: https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-editorbuilder/Dockerfile https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-edito... . Obviously this doesn't scale very well to projects with 300 dependencies like Digikam. My NeoVIM appimage linked above "really, really" bundles all dependency and compile your NeoVIM config to luajit bytecode. It's 3.9mb compared to the upstream one which is 15mb without any config. Note than 0.7mb of that 3.9 is the spellcheck dictionary, 0.4 my enormous config, 0.5 the AppImage overhead and 0.7 all the legacy plugins still written in vimscript.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      Interesting. Yeah it seems like the solution for digikam on my solution was something like unpack the app image and recompile something and I’ve not had the time to mess with it. I hope the maintainer can release a fixed image at some point. I really like that app!
      - account42 4y ago
        Wouldn't another option be to use the system package [0] or is the version too old? Or use the Flatpak [1] (or NIH-flatpak [2]), which is probably a better fit than AppImage for GUI programs that sit on top of a heavy toolkit. [0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=digikam [1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.digikam [2] https://snapcraft.io/digikam https://snapcraft.io/digikam
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  A merger between digiKam and darktable would be my dream.
- Derbasti 4y ago
  They collaborate a lot, actually. Many algorithms are ported from one to the other, if they work well and fit.
thg 4y ago
> current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet. You can make them bigger through some CSS tweaks: https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/preferences-settings/general/ https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/development/en/prefere...
- sneak 4y ago
  It's open source, you can change anything. The UI shouldn't be so annoying and hostile out of the box regardless. I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested by users with developers silently watching.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    Most projects have an issue tracker where one proposes changes or reports bugs. The IRC channel is labeled "Support channel for darktable" rather than "Tell the developer how they ought to better serve me for free" People have a finite slice of their life to give you for nothing. Putting specific suggestions on the issue tracker seems more respectful of their time.
    - iasay 4y ago
      I raised a ticket on an open source project about a defect. It was open for 6 months with no comment. So I fixed it and did a PR. The PR was still sitting there open after 6 months. More interesting PRs to the developers have been merged. Attention and stewardship are not universal.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        What I usually do when I see promising projects and slow devs. 1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?" 2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues. 3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.
jseliger 4y ago
I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS. I believe I somehow imported my entire /pictures folder at some point, producing many thousands of images in a film roll; I just downloaded 4.0.0 and have spent some time trying to figure out how to reset the film roll, or darktable altogether. Or how to create a new library. There's no typical top toolbar on MacOS. In clicking around, I've selected "add to library," and darktable is now beachballed. CaptureOne will continue to be my default. (Before someone points this out, let me acknowledge that the apparent problems with darktable are undoubtedly my fault in some capacity and that I'm Using It Wrong, or that I can't properly read the manual, or that I should watch more videos on how to use darktable.)
- brudgers 4y ago
  To reset Darktable’s databases, delete the two databases (files ending in “.db”) in the equivalent to ~/.config/darktable on your Mac. One contains your custom configurations like presets, the other contains info about file locations, ratings, film rolls, etc. Deleting and reimport takes time when a lot of files are involved, but is my preferred way of handling the changes of large scale file operations. But film rolls might not be the best way to manage files. After six years, I found searching the database using tags and Exif data such as camera and date ranges with the collection tool works better for me. What also helps me is never deleting or moving an image file. That way the database stays current and I avoid the busy work of file and folder manager. To put it another way, for me flat search is better than hierarchy navigation.
- Normille 4y ago
  >I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS Same here. I just downloaded V4 to see if there was any improvement from last time I tried to use it * Open app, Select 'Add to Library' --> spinning beachball of doom delete the ~/.config/darktable directory, to give me a clean start... * Open app. App opens in a weird window the full width of my screen but only half the depth. I try to resize the window. It won't rezise, even though I get resize arrows when hovering over the corner. Finally manage to make it usable by hitting the fullscreen widget. * Try 'Add to Library' again. This time it allows me to select my photos archive folder. I see there's a tickbox marked 'Recursive' so I click on that as I have subfolders in my photos archive. I can't select the box. Then the spinning beachball of doom starts again... * Force quit * Delete app. Life's just too short to mess about with an app that hangs twice, requiring a force quit, before I've even managed to do a single thing with it.
hef19898 4y ago
Darktable is great! This year I restarted photography, ina serious manner, after quite some time. Serious as in I try to get beautiful pictures I could hang on a wall. I also started to do proper post processing, and darktable is quite handy. My dad used to be a pro photographer, now retired, and gave me crash course in RAW processing. Besides some handling differences between lightroom and photoshop he nothing negative to say about darktable. And neither do I, it's not darktables fault that my photo library is a mess.
- humanlion87 4y ago
  Does your dad have any suggestion on resources/books that others can use to learn the same crash course he gave you? :)
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Hevcertainly does, in fact besides years of experience he has quite a number of books at home. All in German so... If that's ok I can ask!
    - humanlion87 4y ago
      Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately I don't know German, so don't want to trouble you.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Ah, a pity... If you don't know yet, photography life . com has some good resources to get started!
Derbasti 4y ago
There are also shortcuts for the arrow panels. Ctrl-Shift-{T,B,L,R}, IIRC (top, bottom, left, right).

mikae1 4y ago

darktable has a pretty steep learning curve and it introduces concepts from cinema (the scene referred workflow) that may be known to video editors and colorists, but that are surely alien even to seasoned still image editors and retouchers. For anyone that wants to learn darktable I wholeheartedly recommended the forum at https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 The darktable developers frequent this forum and it's an indispensable resource.

thg 4y ago
I'd additionally add Bruce Williams' "Understanding Darktable" series to that list: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlYWvzmJQTrRq7JrYdD7k3-8-v-uHnhK_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlYWvzmJQTrRq7JrYdD7k...
- mikae1 4y ago
  If I need to pick a favorite: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbDlOwmmQnkRmcb2_5WERg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbDlOwmmQnkRmcb2_5WERg

taopenIDE 4y ago

The name 'Darktable' reminded me of an IDE that was being plugged on HN a lot around the year 2012 -ish. It had a lot of momentum at the time as it was plugged a lot on HN, it was open source and had a similar feel to Atom. But I have not heard of it since and I'm finding it hard to recall the name. Weird.

doctoboggan 4y ago
You are probably thinking of Lightable, which IIRC has ceased development. It never really lived up to the initial hype.
whitepoplar 4y ago
http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/ ?
trombonechamp 4y ago
The name "Darktable" is a play on Adobe Lightroom, since "lightroom" is a combination of "light table" and "darkroom", both concepts from film photography.

jacooper 4y ago

Let's see if this changed anything. But my previous experience with editing Sony RAWs on Rawtherappe and Darktable wasn't good. The color science is missed up in Darktable and in Raw therappe, I just couldn't get something decent out. I would be editing for an hour and end up with a weird looking image, while in lightroom I would be done in 10 minutes. People might say that I'm just used to lightroom but I'm not, I was using Capture one, then didn't shoot anything for multiple years, then just went pack to Lightroom and could edit photos without major frustrations and get decent results quickly. Creative apps in general are a very weak point of the Linux desktop, and when they exist, that have many weird requests and problems that just using them on windows is easier(Davinci resolve requiring the crappy closed source AMD drivers)

morsch 4y ago
First time I'm hearing this. I think Sony owners make up a sizable portion of the user base. I never had an issue with the RAWs from an a6300 and another entry level Sony mirrorless. Though I never used anything other than dt, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.
Youden 4y ago
I shoot Sony and use Darktable exclusively. I think your problem might be the base curve module and its default "Sony" preset, which looks like garbage. Try setting it to "neutral", it should look a lot better (presets are under the little arrow next to the "base curve" header). The base curve presets, if I understand correctly, aim to make the photo look similar to the out of camera JPEGs. In my opinion, they look like garbage. But these days I use Filmic for everything. My process is basically switch off base curve, switch on Filmic, adjust exposure so that mid exposure looks reasonable, adjust white and black exposure in Filmic to taste and done. The important thing to me is that this works for every photo, not just the easy ones. ETTR photos of high dynamic range scenes work just the same. I'll occasionally run the photo through DXO and export a DNG with DXO's noise reduction for further work in Darktable too. Makes the shadows noise-free no matter how hard you push them.
- code_biologist 4y ago

mywacaday 4y ago

What's the reason behind this "As always, please don’t use the autogenerated tarball provided by github, but only our tar.xz file. The checksums are:"

Normille 4y ago
The wording is a bit vague, but I presumed they meant to use the tar.xz if you intended to checksum the file.
hnaccount141 4y ago
Maybe referring to the source tarball github generates for releases?
cozzyd 4y ago
No idea what the build system is, but for some you want users to download the prebootstrapped version

vanderZwan 4y ago

> This gamut sanitization is the third and last to be added to darktable, which now has a fully-sanitized color pipeline from input (color calibration), through artistic changes (color balance rgb) to output (filmic v6). Users can now color-grade pictures safely in the knowledge that invalid input colors can be recovered in the least destructive fashion possible early in the pipeline, and valid colors can’t be pushed out of gamut along the pipeline. Oh my goodness this sounds amazing

jetrink 4y ago

Does anyone use darktable for inverting color film? I currently use a plugin for Lightroom and while I love the plugin, it would be great to be able to get rid of the Lightroom subscription.

wlesieutre 4y ago
I don’t but here’s some documentation https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/module-reference/processing-modules/negadoctor/ https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/module-reference/p...
vanderZwan 4y ago
If you want a quick-and-dirty inversion, you can take a tone curve tool, set it to the XYZ color space and make it go top-left to bottom-right instead of the normal bottom-left to top-right. That should work afaik.
tmjwid 4y ago
For B&W negadoctor is very easy, nothing major with it other than setting white balance, then setting the film base colour and then adjusting D-MIN/D-MAX to the exposure you want. You can then leave it there or go crazy. Colour is a bit more hands on and with negadoctor you really can get a nice starting base but it's much more manual. You need to make sure colour profiles and white balance match your scaner/dslr scan. The you need to set up the shadow casts and highlight colours. Much more manual just to then get a rather flat image with correct colours to your liking. Then it's more regular raw workflow so altering contrast and saturation but it's nothing too hard still. But it's 100% more hands on the using NLP (this is what I'm assuming you are using. Check YouTube see what you think.

preya2k 4y ago

Building an open source software with a GUI and announcing that said GUI has been reworked in this release, and then not attaching screenshots of said changes :(

nuclx 4y ago

I gave Darktable a try (never used Lightroom), and as an amateur, it is still kind of hard for me to achieve something better than the "out of camera" JPGs when post-processing RAW photos from my rather old Canon DSLR camera. I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture. Saturation is maxed in OOC-JPGs anyways leading to clipping if it's increased more for the overall image. And what I almost forgot, lense correction and rotating towards drawable vertical or horizontal lines are great features. So what it does for me is basically barely noticably adjusting the saturation/contrast values, fixing the horizon and applying lense correction.

blockarchitech 4y ago
Lightroom user here. It's over hyped. Yeah, it's cool and all but anything else would do the same thing. The only thing that I actually found is better in Lightroom is the AI detection features. Same can go with Photoshop and paint.net (or gimp if you're into that kinda thing.)
orbital-decay 4y ago
Keep in mind that darktable really insists on doing things from the ground up, and pretty much requires you to understand the underlying pipeline and what you want to achieve. If you are just experimenting with random sliders, you aren't likely to get good results. It mostly sticks to standard industrial and scientific definitions instead of marketable names, and contains very little "magic" that is common to commercial photography software (such as saturation intentionally not being actual saturation, hidden curves, and so on). So you can use any good book on photography/videography and color science, and directly apply it to most of the stuff it has. Additionally, the developers spend a lot of their time explaining their reasoning and writing about the theory in general, for example: https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos - this channel is consistently great for both basic and non-obvious things https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 - main darktable forums, has very good discussions and explanations https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ Dr. Rant of darktable. Primarily technical stuff.

deanc 4y ago

I love DarkTable, it's an amazingly powerful tool, but for 99% of people the terms they use to describe editing are entirely alien. I take photos on my X100F for fun, want to do little edits here and there and filmic rgb etc. are completely foreign concepts. I'd like to see far more work on the UX. I can imagine a scenario where you load it for the first time and you're presented with a choice for beginner or advanced UI. Beginner UI would drop you into a Lightroom-esque filtered set of modules, and take you through a tutorial of the UI.

orbital-decay 4y ago
The alien terms are actually familiar to videographers, colorists, and people who understand color theory in general. For some reason I don't understand, video folks have always had much better tools for handling color, dynamic ranges etc, and also the much saner pipeline than photographers.
- warning26 4y ago
  Sure, but that doesn't mean the UX is good. "This is meaningful to videographers and colorists" is a not a great defense of UX for an app that is targeted towards photographers, not videographers or colorists. Lightroom and Capture One (and heck, even Affinity Photo), make common photography tasks like highlight recovery easily accessed with a single slider. Sure, the Darktable UI may be "meaningful to colorists", but that doesn't necessarily result in a good UX for the main people that are likely to want to use it.
  - orbital-decay 4y ago
    I think UX and terminology are two different points actually - I agree UI/UX can be clunky overall. > "This is meaningful to videographers and colorists" is a not a great defense of UX for an app that is targeted towards photographers, not videographers or colorists. I think you underestimate the amount of photographers who know the fundamentals, as well as those who are familiar with related fields. After getting better in painting, I now resent tools like Lightroom which obscure everything behind some magic. I almost always see what I want from the photo, and I need a specific result. Photography tools are generally inconsistent, and most are light years behind video tools in getting predictable results. I want pastel colors in Lightroom and I know exactly what makes them; it's a single operation. Yet in Lightroom and Photoshop it needs multiple tweaks which feel like a workaround. The saturation in photo software can mean arbitrary things except being an actual axis in the color space. It can use several intermediate curves without telling you, making you fiddle with the sliders yet still not get the result you want. And so on. I mean, I tried Luminar AI recently, and it has a slider called Punch; what the hell does it do exactly?! There's a reason people are using things like Firegrade for Photoshop. Software like RT/ART and Darktable also does what it says on the tin and nothing more, this is a niche they fill, and I'm glad they exist. (although I'll admit RT still looks like an explosion of sliders to me, despite the fact I know what they are for)

dang 4y ago

Related: Darktable 3.8.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672729 - Dec 2021 (2 comments) Darktable: An open source photography workflow application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281775 - Aug 2021 (36 comments) Darktable 3.6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27720908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27720908 - July 2021 (73 comments) Darktable 3.2.1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156113 - Aug 2020 (47 comments) Darktable 3.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874528 - Dec 2019 (120 comments) Darktable 2.4.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 - Dec 2017 (74 comments) Darktable 2.2.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 - Dec 2016 (82 comments) Darktable 2.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 - Dec 2015 (44 comments) A look at Darktable 2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 - Nov 2015 (10 comments) Why there are no darktable builds for Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883018 - July 2015 (1 comment)

pkd 4y ago

One of the contributors to the project had not very nice things to say about the changes in this version. Ranty, but worth listening: https://youtu.be/56e5Yc-IQ84 https://youtu.be/56e5Yc-IQ84

morsch 4y ago
Oh and he forked the project. Does he still maintain Filmic, or has someone else taken over?
- Derbasti 4y ago
  He is still contributing and collaborating on the technical stuff. His fork is exclusively about the UI, and claims to be 100% compatible with image editing. That video is a text book case of burnout, it looks like.
  - pkd 4y ago
    I think he makes some good points about the UI changes - albeit in an angry way.

BuildTheRobots 4y ago

I had an issue with RAW decoding when the dji mini 2 came out. Dec's were extremely responsive and helpful, and the software is free and extremely powerful to boot.

FpUser 4y ago

Thank you people for your amazing work. I use Darktable all the time. It is very good editor.

shaggie76 4y ago

About once a year I try DT but always bounce off of it pretty hard for one very simple reason: my Canon raw images in DT don't look anything like what they do in-camera. I did a studio shoot on Monday: clean strobe light, a tame white background, all settings manual (so no auto-lighting-optimizer), and fired up my raws in 4.0 on my calibrated monitor. I loaded the roll into Light Table and things look fine (because, I suspect, that the CR3 file has an embedded JPEG with Canon's recipe cooked in). Then I double clicked to bring it into Darkroom and it goes crazy: the backdrop goes a crazy purple hue, the exposure is wrong by about a third of a stop, and the skin is zombified. It's utterly incomprehensible to me. Every year I check and every year I'm baffled at how dreadful it is. Cya next year I guess.

auxym 4y ago
I understand why this turns you off, but I wanted to note that what you want: some default magic settings that make the photo look like Canon's in camera processing, is an explicit non-goal for the DT devs. Don't get your hopes up. What you are looking at when entering the darkroom is an "undeveloped" raw. Darktable's philosophy is that developing this raw photo should be 100% the user's responsibility and that whatever the camera maker's JPEG engine does is irrelevant. I still use DT because it is very powerful, but I do agree that it has a very steep learning curve, and therefore is frustrating for anyone who isnt fully committed to learning about digital color science, etc, myself included.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. Both Lightroom and Photo Lab do exactly this. If Darktable cannot support reading that information and importing it as a preset, that's fine, but pretending it is an artist choice seems to misunderstand what is going on here. To get specific Picture Control settings (e.g. sharpness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc), High ISO noise reduction, White balance, and color space are typically important as defaults or presets.

scalablenotions 4y ago

NGL I was expecting some kind of database designed for operating on tor

digital79 4y ago

Very thankful for tools like darktable. Been a long time user and love supporting true OSS

Kab1r 4y ago

Darktable replaced Lightroom in my workflow and I haven't looked back since. It is definitely one of my favorite pieces of open source software. I don't know how it's written but it would be awesome to have a browser version without the remote desktop rdp stuff; I might take a look to see how hard it would be to implement when I have the time.

teruakohatu 4y ago
How do you do file managment. The thought of going back to doing it manually fills me with dread. My other issue is that I have filters (custom applied adjustments) that I an loathed give us and can't be bothered trying to replicate.

aliswe 4y ago

> 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.

saturn5k 4y ago

On several ocassions I've tried switching to Darktable or RawTherapee, but they never seemed to offer the practicality and ease of workflow that Lightroom has. They have tons of features and kudos for that, but when it comes to editing hundreds of photos, LR is the only choice for me.

t0bia_s 4y ago
Agree. To manage tousands pictures, LRC wins. DT and RT are full of features that are mostly pointless for professional use. It has that linux philosophy - from nerds to nerds. But not for practical use unfortunatelly. No Fuji profiles, not many lens correction profiles, wired demosaic for X-Trans, not consistent UI, no native folder sync, no AI clone tool...

kqr 4y ago

Darktable is amazing. It takes some getting used to after Lightroom -- it doesn't hold your hand as much -- but once you get past that, the tools surpass LR in the power they give the user. Parametric masks, LAB curves, wavelet decomposition are very powerful ways to work with the raw stuff of images.