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I just today moved from windows and lightroom to debian and darktable for photography. To be fair I’ve been using linux for programming for years and have tried

I just today moved from windows and lightroom to debian and darktable for photography. To be fair I’ve been using linux for programming for years and have tried darktable for a few days now. There are many challenges but its so worth it for me.

ygra 2y ago
I moved to Ansel after the author's blog post on Dark table's development and project management issues was on here and while it's still v0.0.0 it works fine for the most part and does a number of things better than LR. But it still takes a while to figure out what to fiddle with since many things are (as typical of open source projects) just algorithms implemented from papers with expressive parameters names like k and sigma without much thought towards a product and what the end user wants to use. But changing a workflow you're used to for almost a decade is never fun.
inferiorhuman 2y ago
Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography. Or as one of the (former) devs put it, darktable is: a Vim editor for image processing, truly usable only from (broken) keyboard shortcuts known only by the hardcore geeks that made them One of the stated goals for his fork (Ansel) is: to make the general UI nicer to people who don't have a master's in computer science and more efficient to use for people actually interested in photography. The catch is, of course, Aurélien ripped a bunch of stuff out in Ansel that you may actually want like styles/presets or macos support. If Aurélien can keep up the momentum I think Ansel could be quite promising for photo processing on Linux. OTOH with the way that the devs condescend to its users darktable looks doomed to be a basket case. Seriously. Try clicking on or scrolling over whitespace and watch as you send random widgets off into a tizzy.
- grecy 2y ago
  > Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography. You nailed it. Every time I tried it as a daily driver I found Linux is great for people that want to screw around with config files and the command line and not just use the computer.
- PetitPrince 2y ago
  To illustrate this: In the equivalent of the develop panel, on the left you have a "history" box with a list of operation. For every picture you open its comes pre-populated with entries that sorted in reverse order (operation 0 comes last). Why is that ? That's because it's not a "history of action that the user has done" like in almost every software in existence, but a "history of the operation done to the image". They should really rename this to "operations pipeline" or something similar. I took me a long time understand this and by the time I get it I already moved on to CaptureOne.
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  There's an interesting parallel to Blender of 10 years ago, which was absolutely hostile to user onboarding. Could only be operated by memorising lists of keyboard shortcuts, and the forums were just a wall of "git gud"... Then around Blender 2.8 they finally re-designed the entire UI, and ever since then it's been steadily gaining adoption among 3D artists.
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    Yeah. But the Blender folks were willing to own up to their interface being not good. The darktable folks? Not so much. If/when that changes then yeah darktable stands a chance at being a reasonable replacement for Lightroom. The technical issues though. Ugh.

ygra 2y ago

I moved to Ansel after the author's blog post on Dark table's development and project management issues was on here and while it's still v0.0.0 it works fine for the most part and does a number of things better than LR. But it still takes a while to figure out what to fiddle with since many things are (as typical of open source projects) just algorithms implemented from papers with expressive parameters names like k and sigma without much thought towards a product and what the end user wants to use. But changing a workflow you're used to for almost a decade is never fun.

inferiorhuman 2y ago

Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography. Or as one of the (former) devs put it, darktable is: a Vim editor for image processing, truly usable only from (broken) keyboard shortcuts known only by the hardcore geeks that made them One of the stated goals for his fork (Ansel) is: to make the general UI nicer to people who don't have a master's in computer science and more efficient to use for people actually interested in photography. The catch is, of course, Aurélien ripped a bunch of stuff out in Ansel that you may actually want like styles/presets or macos support. If Aurélien can keep up the momentum I think Ansel could be quite promising for photo processing on Linux. OTOH with the way that the devs condescend to its users darktable looks doomed to be a basket case. Seriously. Try clicking on or scrolling over whitespace and watch as you send random widgets off into a tizzy.

grecy 2y ago
> Darktable is great for people who want to screw around with code and not photography. You nailed it. Every time I tried it as a daily driver I found Linux is great for people that want to screw around with config files and the command line and not just use the computer.
PetitPrince 2y ago
To illustrate this: In the equivalent of the develop panel, on the left you have a "history" box with a list of operation. For every picture you open its comes pre-populated with entries that sorted in reverse order (operation 0 comes last). Why is that ? That's because it's not a "history of action that the user has done" like in almost every software in existence, but a "history of the operation done to the image". They should really rename this to "operations pipeline" or something similar. I took me a long time understand this and by the time I get it I already moved on to CaptureOne.
swiftcoder 2y ago
There's an interesting parallel to Blender of 10 years ago, which was absolutely hostile to user onboarding. Could only be operated by memorising lists of keyboard shortcuts, and the forums were just a wall of "git gud"... Then around Blender 2.8 they finally re-designed the entire UI, and ever since then it's been steadily gaining adoption among 3D artists.
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  Yeah. But the Blender folks were willing to own up to their interface being not good. The darktable folks? Not so much. If/when that changes then yeah darktable stands a chance at being a reasonable replacement for Lightroom. The technical issues though. Ugh.