5 ms·

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 fo

by 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)
- Aaargh20318 4y ago
  > For some reason I don't understand, video folks have always had much better tools for handling color, dynamic ranges etc, I suspect this is because photos usually stand on their own. You edit a photo to something that pleases you and that is it. With video, you have multiple pieces of footage recorded at different times, in different circumstances and locations that need to match in their look to make a video feel like a consistent whole. Getting the color right is much more critical for video.

by deanc 4y ago

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)
Aaargh20318 4y ago
> For some reason I don't understand, video folks have always had much better tools for handling color, dynamic ranges etc, I suspect this is because photos usually stand on their own. You edit a photo to something that pleases you and that is it. With video, you have multiple pieces of footage recorded at different times, in different circumstances and locations that need to match in their look to make a video feel like a consistent whole. Getting the color right is much more critical for video.