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Darktable: Crashing into the wall in slow-motion
- baz00 3y agoOh fragmentation fun. I use RawTherapee. Seems to be less of a shit show. And I'm not giving Adobe my money.
- hef19898 3y agoI don't care about developer beef at open spurce peojects. I don't care neither about the techical finesse behind software or tools I use. What I care about is the results from using said tools. And so far, darktable doesn't disappoint. ansel propably won't neither.
- baz00 3y agoI do care because I've seen a few projects burn through politics.
- trop 3y agoWhat we're seeing here is one embittered ex-developer spending time/effort saying toxic things about their former collaborators in a public forum. At the same time the former developer is making a claim to such radical competence that they can somehow keep an open source project of considerable scope together -- one which until now was coded by generally at least half a dozen committed authors at any given time. The darktable project was originated by some quite bright folks. Others have cycled in/out over the years. Generally without too much drama. It's too bad to be giving so much attention to divisive claims.
- Pomfers 3y agoMy choice as well. I like the colors my camera puts out mostly, so I only really need to make a few adjustments here and there. DarkTable doesn't even conform the RAW to the preview JPEG, so I end up wasting a bunch of time just getting the RAW to look normal in the first place. RawTherapee also seemed far more intuitive to figure out.
- akho 3y agoRawTherapee has ART.
- Jedd 3y agoI suspect this comes out of: Ansel.photos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38390914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38390914 from two days ago.
- qup 3y agoWell, it's dated to February, so maybe not.
- dang 3y agoIt's definitely a follow-up submission and we tend to downweight those, since HN is more interesting when it isn't repetitive. Note that this isn't a comment on the article itself—followupness is an issue of timing, not content. Usually the best place for follow-up links is in the comments of the original thread. Once enough time has gone by to flush the hivemind caches, then the other article can be posted in its own right. Past explanations here if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- sneak 3y agoI am excited that someone with this level of competence and attention to detail has forked the project. I tried to use Darktable a half dozen years ago and found its UI to work in bad and difficult and unpredictable ways. I reported it as a bug on IRC and got flamed by the developers; I deleted the app and never looked back (I now reluctantly pirate Lightroom because I refuse to pay for subscriptionware). Hopefully this fork will drag it into useful territory.
- yunohn 3y ago> I refuse to pay for subscriptionware I believe this blog post is a great example of why subscriptionware keeps winning - it’s absolutely impossible to support indefinite development of such a large project with one-time payments.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoYou can charge for updates. But reaching into my machine and disabling a working app is absolutely unacceptable.
- sneak 3y agoSubscriptionware wins because people psychologically reason that $5/mo in perpetuity is less than $100 once (and the barrier to entry is lower because 5 < 100). It’s a dark pattern, same as casino comps or ending prices in .99 or “buy one get one free”. Nobody actually wants it. It’s just another way of turning your customers into a harvestable resource and raising prices instead of dealing fairly. I don’t want maintenance and updates; I want the software once, today. I don’t want to be automatically opted in to the annual upgrade treadmill because I bought version 2023. Software is not, by default, a service. It’s a product. Pretending it is a service means purchasers pay more money for the same utility. The average TCO of software has gone up substantially for no benefit to users. This is why vendors do it: increased revenue for the same amount of work. It’s a rentseeking scam, same as a hard-to-cancel gym membership or newspaper subscription.
- yunohn 3y ago
- Euphorbium 3y agoSeems like the only good open source projects are made by a single person.
- MattRix 3y agoThere are lots that are good and made by many people. An obvious example is Blender.
- ReleaseCandidat 3y agoYes, but many of them have - like Blender or Linux (the kernel) - a team of professional "core" developers.
- dagw 3y agoThey also both have a single person that has been leading the project from day 0 up until today.
- MattRix 3y agothat is a vastly different thing from “made by a single person”
- forgetfulness 3y agoYeah but the context of the discussion is this caustic essay against what the author claims is the product of design-by-committee, having a single or small core leadership isn't a recipe for success, but Darktable doesn't seem to be doing too well in its absence.
- MattRix 3y agoNot sure how that’s relevant? It’s still not a single person.
- RobotToaster 3y agoMy experience of darktable consists of: seeing my RAWs looking completely wrong Googling wtf is wrong Seeing a bunch of reddit/forum threads of devs telling people that it's a feature not a bug. Going back to pirating lightroom
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hef19898 3y agoHow exactly does a RAW file look wrong? Before editing, I assume.
- baq 3y agoI’m not sure it makes sense to say that RAW files look good or bad at all. They’re mostly sensor data dumps. The point is darktable has terrible defaults and terrible usability to allow a novice user to convert the dump to a usable image. Images loaded into darktable are less immediately usable than default camera settings. This might be ok for experienced users, but it’s absolutely disastrous for newbs.
- hef19898 3y agoFair enough, quite often I use the camera generated jpgs as well.
- Pomfers 3y agoYes, before editing. All the other RAW editors I've seen, including the other FOSS editor RawTherapee, will automatically adjust the sliders to match the embedded preview JPEG. DarkTable doesn't do this, all my RAWs load in looking really strange.
- hef19898 3y agoYou can set presets, I don't. Because the jpeg version doesn't have to be the "right" version of the photo (there actually is no such thing as right, hence my preference to start from a pure raw file).
- jamiedumont 3y agoI salute the developer for taking on such a mammoth challenge as (re)building a RAW editor. Sounds like he has the chops for it though! Sitting on the other of the table (professional developer turned professional photographer) I wish someone like Blackmagic would disrupt the big players (Capture One and Photoshop in the stills space) because Resolve looks (and is!) so much more sophisticated with a much healthier attitude towards its users/customers.
- franzkappa 3y agoIt would be a dream!
- morsch 3y agoI love darktable. Incredibly powerful and fun to play around with. I like the interface much better than the other floss raw editors. I didn't mind the learning curve. The documentation is extensive, but I rarely needed it. They've kept adding more features over the years and it never broke anything.
- akdor1154 3y agoAnyone have experience getting product involved in a community led open source project? Working with great product managers is the best bit of software engineering, but i can think of a billion ways that could go tits up if applied to a FOSS project.
- maccard 3y agoLots of projects have product "teams" that will say yay or nay to features. Most commercial open core products will expect justification for feature development. The problem (that I foresee at least) is that if a traditional product role stepped in and said "no" to a feature (e.g. a midi device) and that another feature should be prioritised (tablet support), the developers will just... leave (or fork).
- jorvi 3y agoWe have an apt saying in Dutch that applies to a lot of open source: “kikkers in kruiwagens” (“frogs in wheelbarrows”) It’s impossible to put anything but a small amount of frogs in one wheelbarrow, because whenever you try to keep or put back in one set of frogs, another few will get startled and jump out.
- didibus 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- haunter 3y agoIf only there was a way to run the old Aperture on Windows and/or Linux
- watmough 3y agoExcellent rant! I don't use DarkTable but ... I've been there.
- ReleaseCandidat 3y agoThere have been "813 pull requests merged" in the 6 months between 12.2022 and 06.2023? Yes, there is more than one maintainer and many of these weren't "code changes", but nevertheless: almost 4.5 _successfull_ PRs every day?!
- trop 3y agoFWIW, here is the recent merged pull requests from darktable: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Amerged https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i... At the moment, this is about a week's work by eight authors. Others cycle/in out, of course -- this is a spot sample. They range from bugfixes to performance improvements to documentation to translation work. All what one would hope for in a software project headed to its bi-annual release next month. There are many ways to develop, and it may be a bit cruel to compare a one-man show to a long-term international collaboration. But here are the recently merged pull requests from the software which is posted about in the blog post: https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Amerged https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i... On the first page, I see about five authors offering PR's over the course of all of 2023 -- a much slower pace of community development. It appears that Ansel is being developed more by direct commits from its main author. So let's compare the recent commits: https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/commits/master https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/commits/master Page 1 of Ansel commits is by its mono-author from the last week. Page 2 takes us back to August. Page 3 back to June. I totally understand that good developers need to work carefully and sit on things, then release them in due time. Here goes for darktable commits: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/commits/master https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/commits/master If we take a moment to page back to page 3, one can note that we're back to two weeks ago (rather than June). Steady work by a committed community matters. The log of work done is may be quite worth looking at, rather than incendiary blog posts.
- kamranjon 3y agoThe post is about how that type of organizational structure creates chaos. In this case less commits is likely better. Quality over quantity and all that. I have used Darktable because it was really the only game in town for editing raw photos on Linux - and I have to agree that if anything, it needs less features, and more work standardizing and simplifying its UI. You see this all the time, where basically there is no coherent organization, you just get a huge grab-bag of random features slapped together haphazardly. This is exactly what happened to Gimp and actually started to happen to Blender but then they pulled their shit together and it’s kind of a masterpiece now. So I definitely support their effort, understand their frustration, and while a little more tact might be in order - it’s usually the people with passion about something that end up bringing it to another level.
- konart 3y agoTried Darktable and RawTherapy both of them have terrible performance and UI\UX. With all respect to the authors and contributors I can't imagine working with either instead if Affinity Photo.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- genman 3y agoI am getting really bad vibes from this rant. It looks like some wannabee dictator who wants to define what is good/right and then force it upon others. It kind of correlates with the chosen name - Ansel Adams actively discriminated against photographers with different style than his to the level of not including important photographic works in his photography history book.
- antoineMoPa 3y agoYeah on one hand, a lot of successful & high quality software projects are the result of one very dedicated brain, so maybe it's a valid tradeoff to have an arrogant dictator. On the other hand, that does not feel so nice as a contribution environment, it creates a software design bottleneck on one person, increasing shipping time and creating a dangerous bus factor. It's not a really scalable way do software design. Overall that attitude is pretty detrimental to community as he basically complains about all previous contributors. Maybe I'd suggest him to: - Work on his attitude, respect other contributors & stop calling them names. - Spend less time developing and more time educating other people who work on the project. - Come up with a set of design principles that the rest of the project can follow. But yeah that's open source, he's free to fork a project. Probably his project will be successful anyway despite the negativity.
- antoineMoPa 3y agoThis being said, that while loop of death is pretty terrifying indeed.
- mardifoufs 3y agoI thought so too until I looked at the code. It's truly horrible and not in a "clean code absolutist" way, but more in a "digging a giant hole that will make the entire thing untouchable". And going by the stats he provides that's exactly what's going on. FWIW, this article is originally written in french. And while the French version is definitely still abrasive, it sounds more normal. The writing style does not map to English as well for sure.
- 3y ago
- v1ne 3y agoLooking at the examples given, it seems like Darktable becomes more and more unusable due to a lack of good defaults and easy configurability. I agree with the author that opinion and good defaults help to keep software simple. Yet, I also value having a way to opt out of this and customize it. Take Visual Studio, for example: There are multiple sets of decent keyboard shortcuts and a sensible default layout, plus a menu option to restore it. As a user, you're still free to create your own task-specific layouts. When I worked at a big music software company, I also valued the strong opinions that kept the UI simple. Because the software was already so packed with functionality that it would overwhelm users easily if it would be exposed too openly.
- Derbasti 3y ago> it seems like Darktable becomes more and more unusable due to a lack of good defaults and easy configurability. The funny thing is, in my personal experience, Darktable defaults and configurability have actually markedly improved in the last few years. Usability even more so. Frankly the worst instance of bad defaults and parameters were in the author's own filmic module, which were truly terrible in the beginning. They improved after a few years/versions, but it's still quite the hypocrisy to then complain about this very fact in the rest of the software.
- radiowave 3y agoI know what you mean about the filmic module, and while I'm inclined to think that it doesn't necessarily invalidate his criticisms of Darktable, it does make me wonder whether he's the right person to fix these things.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 3y ago>> Except that a significant part of the programmer-users revolving around the project on Github and on the dev mailing-list stay convinced that there is no good or bad workflow, only personal preferences, In which case, it's OK for a developer to ignore YOUR personal preferences and go with something less flexible. You can ruin a project by trying to accommodate multiple workflows. Let me emphasis that - RUIN A PROJECT. In solvespace, tool use consists of selecting sketch entities and then applying a tool - example: select lines and apply a constraint (parallel, perpendicular, equal), or what I call "noun - verb". Some people want to use "verb - noun" which would mean selecting the operation (verb) first and then the thing to apply it to (nouns) and then some kind of "go" or "ok" to actually do it. Some have even submitted PRs trying to implement the later as an option. We will not have it. The disruption to the code is too much. Verb-noun introduces state where there was none, which is a maintenance burbern (small but not zero). It requires the extra step to apply the operation. It does not offer additional capability to users. At some point you end up "refactoring" and "building an API" to enable all this flexibility. And that's maybe OK for commercial software where people are paid to waste countless hours pandering to the whims of large customers. Architecture astronauts like that kind of stuff for its own sake. Keep them away. Refactor when it's necessary to bring new functionality, not when it's just a user preference. Make an application, not a toolkit for making applications.
- koiueo 3y agoAll great software for artists is very opinionated. Lightroom has very specific order. Capture One has it. OP is absolutely right, that the order of modules must be fixed. Arbitrary modules order is an unnecessary complication for artists, and there are strong technical reasons why the order should not be arbitrary.
- dantondwa 3y agoTo change modules order in Darktable, you have to know what to do. By default, the module order is correctly arranged and no intervention is required. Changing the order is an option that you can use only if you want to. No user will ever change a module's order by mistake (and in the remote case that one did, fixing that is a click away). We have Lightroom, we have Capture One. Let one software for more technically-inclined photographers exist, where you have options and power over the pipeline. Darktable does not aim to be a Lightroom replacement.
- ruined 3y agodarktable is so bad that when i became a photographer, and finally needed more than glimpse had to offer, i started paying for software. for the first time in my life.
- snapetom 3y agoSame here. So many people are attacking ad hominem. Author may have a history, author may be difficult, but Darktable is hardly a professional’s tool. I tried everything to stay away from the Adobe tax. I used Retroactive with Aperture 3 until it became too unstable. I tried RawTherapee but found the default tools were just bad, and speed was terrible. Darktable’s performance was a bit better but wow that UI. And not in a good way. I don’t want to pick from five different algorithms (almost all the time you can’t tell the difference anyway) to apply a filter. I eventually just paid for On1 and it’s great.
- internetter 3y agoI hope Affinity begins seriously competing with lightroom. Wonderful products with a wonderful pricing structure (first software I've bought) (and only software I've bought in the creative field (I use blender, kicad, and resolve))
- e12e 3y agoHadn't heard of on1 before. Looks like it runs on Mac and Windows, and is currently discounted due to black Friday: https://www.on1.com/landing/early-black-friday-2023/ https://www.on1.com/landing/early-black-friday-2023/ Edit: fwiw capture one also on sale: https://www.captureone.com/en/pricing/capture-one-pro https://www.captureone.com/en/pricing/capture-one-pro
- dantondwa 3y agoThe author, while having contributed greatly to Darktable in the past and being without any doubt skilled, has severe communication issues. When he was in the darktable team, he was abrasive and offensive. There is a limit to how much offensive you can be to others, parlrticulaly when you are all volunteers. So, I'd take his words with a grain of salt and take into account the background of all this: a skilled person with a very little ability to speak to others starting a feud with another opensource project to which he contributed in the past.
- andai 3y agoOk... but is he wrong? Agreed that being too harsh/blunt can be counterproductive, but at the same time, the way a message is delivered does not make the points any less valid. (It just makes the relevant people less likely to listen? Though at this point it seems that hope is long gone anyway?)
- dantondwa 3y agoIn general, I do think that Darktable's UI could be better, and most likely it could be more efficient. His points are not wrong, but they are also not as fundamentally disastrous as the author makes them to be. I feel the damage that the author caused with his behavior is potentially worse for Darktable than the problems themselves. In a collaborative project run by volunteers, the way one argues and the point one makes are united. Darktable is possible only if there is a group of people working on it. I've seen the author insulting fellow contributors in public forums, I've seen him using the most offensive possible language against people who were being polite to him, just because they disagreed. This is not how you steer an opensource project in the right direction. It is also useless to come and shit everywhere after the changes are done. It is the opensource equivalent of seagull management [1]. I think in a collaborative project, the way you state your point is as important as the value of the point you're making. If you're unable to state your point clearly and effectively, then you should work alone, as the author has now correctly decided to do. Continuing the shitstorm even after his collaboration with Darktable has terminated seems, to me, to be just the continuation of a useless feud. I say all this as a happy Darktable user, and not a contributor at all. I also loved the author's contribution, and found his Youtube channel to be really informative and a fantastic learning source. Still, Darktable has continued after his departure, and the new release, which will come for Christmas, is really promising, with the inclusion of per-channel curves in the sigmoid module, similarly to Blender's AgX. Many other improvements are coming, and I don't feel the project is "crashing into the wall in slow-motion". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_management
- s800 3y agoHad me until he used middle-aged as a pejorative.
- wrs 3y agoNormally it’s us middle-aged folks complaining about the young-uns running with scissors and messing everything up. It’s funny to see the opposite.
- rollcat 3y agoSoftware is perfect not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing to take away. Patches are easy to reject; try to refuse implementing a feature someone offers you money for. Notice how the most consistent design and the highest quality usually comes from people who are heavily opinionated. The real problem is that there seem to be a lot more people with strong opinions than there are good designs. I'm not a photographer, so I can't judge Ansel vs Darktable based on the merits of their UI design, but I can empathize with Aurélien based on his version of the story. The number of times I've ripped out 100k lines of code to replace them with a hundred is too damn high. Was there a good reason for these 100k lines to exist? Perhaps, once upon a time, but I do feel relief when I rip them out.
- diekhans 3y agoDarktable is an interesting project and an impressive effort. However, serious photographers tend to use Lightroom. It is just eons beyond Darktable. Sometimes even those of us who love programing want to use software rather than develop it.
- graphe 3y agoI disagree. Capture one is always used and only amateurs who watch YouTube for premade settings use LR.
- busyant 3y ago> Capture one is always used and only amateurs who watch YouTube for premade settings use LR. I use C1 (in fact, I just purchased the yearly subscription today for 50% off) and my personal impression is that my images look better in C1 than with LR. But I was always under the impression that many many many "pros" use LR simply because it has a lot of bells and whistles (including that somewhat recent "AI" content fill). Also, C1's layer adjustment paradigm makes the most sense to me compared to everything else I've tried. I'm not a pro by the way.
- graphe 3y agoThose bells and whistles are for amateurs that can't take a good photo and are pushing it to make it look good. Professionals often have worst equipment than amateurs in photography.
- koiueo 3y agoMy fascination with Darktable (I used to use it actively) ended after I tried creating a selective mask, an ellipse, to darken the moon on a picture. While the mask was positioned perfectly when zoomed in 400%, it would jump up or down on different zoom levels, and would end up somewhere else when exported (Aurelien Pierre, the OP, mentions screen vs raw coordinates in his post, I guess I’ve seen the manifestation of that). At that point I decided, enough is enough. Darktable is painfully slow, it takes over 1s to see the result of very basic brightness adjustments, the interface is laggy (OP mentions that as well, a simple mouse hover issues over a dozen of SQL requests)… So for now I’m paying for Lightroom mobile. It is lightning fast, has AI masks, comes with 100GiB of cloud storage and works on any decent tablet or phone. I enjoyed Darktable’s instruments, and I like how my images ended up looking. But when even very basic features do not work, the advanced ones become less relevant. I tried Ansel, and unfortunately, although, it fixes some of the issues, it doesn’t fix all of them (and some are absolute productivity killers). And at that point I wonder, why didn’t OP fork some earlier version, like 3.6, without that MIDI revolution and all the regressions. Later in his post, the OP mentions, that dtvk is the future. So why don’t invest the effort there instead? I’m no stranger to donating to open-source projects, but I don’t feel like investing any time or money into something, that has no future (even the OP admits that).
- pkulak 3y agoI wonder if that’s the way to be a modern Linux user. Use old Think Pads for mostly everything, but an iPad for Lightroom and DRM content. Problem for me is that I like DxO way more than Lightroom…
- koiueo 3y agoYeah, it’s a sad world. I’d be happy to use Capture One, but it’s only for Win/Mac, and my PC has been strictly Linux for the last 15 years (and I don’t want to deal with another OS just for one application, at least the tablet I use for other purposes). But even with the tablet there are limitation. I’d gladly use Android, but Affinity is only available for iPad OS, and Lightroom mobile doesn’t yet offer all the needed features (bracketing/stacking for example).
- solatic 3y ago> the while loop of death (source: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/blob/darktable-4.2.x/src/gui/accelerators.c#L2898-L2918 https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/blob/darktable-4....) shudder Yeah, I too wouldn't want to volunteer to contribute to a project which is OK with this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andyjohnson0 3y agoLast year I migrated off Lightroom because my intermittent use made it increasingly hard to justify the monthy fee. I looked at Darktable as a replacement and, while it seemed superficially capable, I soon realised that actually doing anything with it required more patience and resistance to pain than I possess. I wish I could have liked it, but the recent posts here finally make me realise why I didn't. So I'd be interested in the hive mind's recommendations for an LR replacement. I have my LR edits exported as xmp sidecars, I'd prefer a one-off purchase rather than a subscription and I'm an average punter with more enthusiasm than skill. I shoot mostly jpeg with some raw. What should I be looking at to replace LR?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ukd1 3y agoditto. I'll try Ansel, but don't have high hopes. I've realized moving 30k+ photos from Lightroom is not likely a thing. I wish I'd not gotten a cloud version.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago> I've realized moving 30k+ photos from Lightroom is not likely a thing. If it helps, I built this [1] to extract xmp sidecars from the LR database. [1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/XmpLibeRator https://github.com/andyjohnson0/XmpLibeRator
- bdcravens 3y agoThe opening paragraph would imply the issues are the product of non-professional developers, and by implication, that professional developers create software that doesn't have those issues. Spend enough time working on several projects with several teams and you'll quickly discover that just isn't true. Things like "the while loop of death" seem relatively tame to what you'll regularly see in the wild.
- justin66 3y ago> By the way, I can no longer bare the attempt of being different for the sake of it by writing “Darktable”, proper noun, without initial capital. It’s childish, it’s neither funny or disruptive, and it makes a mess of freedesktop.org menus where the capital is anyway added to follow the standard. Losing some cred with all the aspiring teenage poets.