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Darktable
- actionfromafar 2mo agohttps://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
- junaru 2mo ago> Meet Chantal, your image processing AI librarian Instant pass. Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.
- sejje 2mo agoI can't find that on the page. Edit: I finally found a reference. It's a separate project that has nothing to do with the photography stuff. Right? It's a way to search the docs?
- junaru 2mo agoIt's on https://ansel.photos https://ansel.photos
- aurelienpierre 2mo agoYou make a software, people want tutorials. You make tutorials, people want docs. You make docs, people won't read them and their questions end up in your mailbox. So Chantal is the missing link in all that, it lets users be autonomous while researching their questions while aggregating various sources of knowledge on photography software, color science, bugs and docs. It's Ansel docs and much more (ICC, CIE, academic journals, forums, etc.)
- orbital-decay 2mo agoIt's just an ordinary search engine for the specialized topic. Aurelien Pierre is being overly dramatic here, it's in his character.
- aurelienpierre 2mo agoYou dumb or what ? Under Chantal, there use to be Word2Vec, now replaced by FastText. Aka a shallow neural network building a language model that understand synonyms and some EN/FR translations, by embedding words as vectors in a vector space built so cosine distance represent semantic distance. It was called AI when Google published Word2Vec and Facebook FastText, I didn't made it up. I mean, I wrote 2 articles on the topic explaining how it's built. Each page in the index is represented by the centroid of all the word vectors it contains, then it computes the cosine distance between the centroids of the pages and the centroid of the request and returns the closest matches. Aka not your regular grep. Overly dramatic yourself, Internet minion. All opinions and zero substance.
- orbital-decay 2mo agoPlease calm down, I had no intention of offending you! I agree, of course that's AI, just a pretty... commoditized? kind in 2026 and a long-winded explanation of word2vec or even mention of it is probably not necessary. What I meant it's not the sort of model anti-AI people would oppose, in response to an "instant pass" knee-jerk reaction.
- lukah 2mo agoI haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?
- cmrdporcupine 2mo agoThere's also RawTherapee, which I found more usable than Darktable for reasons I don't recall.
- hack1312 2mo agoIf you’re looking specifically for an Aperture replacement, Nitro[0] was created by the person who led the Aperture, iPhoto, RAW Camera and Core Image engineering teams, as well as the imaging team for the Mac version of Photos. No subscription cost either. [0] https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/ https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/
- CharlesW 2mo agoNitro is wonderul. On macOS it also integrates perfectly with Photos, which I find to be an ideal "combination pro/consumer surface" for my library.
- actionfromafar 2mo agoI don't know, but it's interesting to see a bunch of people stop developing features and fix bugs straight for 4 years. https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/issues https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/issues
- jillesvangurp 2mo agoThe history is that Aurelien Pierre was leading some big changes in Darktable around the time the filmic module was introduced and the bigger switch from rethinking the internal architecture and processing pipeline to be happening in the right color spaces before things get crammed down into the RGB display color space. There's a lot of subtlety to that. But it boils down to a lot less rounding errors and loss of information for basic edits related to color correction, tone mapping, etc. Aurelien Pierre was the main developer of filmic and several related modules and a key driver of that whole transition. A few versions ago there were some other developers that forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX. He argued against that and people ignored him and he basically decided to do it properly with Ansel and strip away all the stuff he never liked as well as beat some sense into especially the lightroom part of Darktable which is where you organize your photos. IMHO he did a great job on that from what I've seen so far. Since the fork, a lot of stuff happened of course and there are now several competing alternatives to filmic in Darktable (Sigmoid and Agx). They each have their pros and cons and the differences can be very subtle; especially if you are new to the topic. There's a lot of complexity here. Which is why UX matters. And a point of criticism with especially Filmic is that it is a very complex module. But I'm still on Darktable and Ansel is actually not compatible with the newer Darktable versions.
- ezst 2mo agoIs the last release on GitHub from 2022 or is it me?
- Infernal 2mo agoNot just you - from ansel.photos: >Ansel has not published a stable release yet and there is no ETA for one : a new release is published when the list of all bugs have been cleared, so we know the software and stable. So far, Ansel only publishes revisions, which are intermediate states of the sourcecode.
- vjvjvjvjghv 2mo agoI am always amazed at how much Aurelian Pierre is able to produce. But I think he is too smart for his own good and also too opinionated to be a good leader of an open source community. Makes me admire Linus Thorvalds even more. He is super smart, opinionated by also was able to keep a huge community on track for decades.
- randomstate 2mo agoDitched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.
- ghostly_s 2mo agoDon't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ: >Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common. What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.
- Mashimo 2mo agoWhen I still used it, I only ever opened the folder with the files I wanted to edit. I had folders based on dates YYYY.MM.DD - Eventname. No need for cli. I still do the same now for CaptureOne to be honest.
- Arainach 2mo agoThat's not library management, and it's not a replacement for Lightroom/C1. "If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.
- Mashimo 2mo agoWell not if you use the library management, it's not no. People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available. I still would say Firefox can be a chrome replacement.
- e12e 2mo agoSee also: https://ansel.photos/en/ https://ansel.photos/en/
- TheqO 2mo agoAnsel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep . Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare. They got beef!
- lukah 2mo agoRight?! And the rest of the README continues like that. Must be some juicy history here
- Mashimo 2mo agoAnd I think this was a few years back. Imagine still having that in your readme.
- esafak 2mo agoI'm digging their Sentry charts. That's the kind of discipline we need more of. Stability is a feature.
- e12e 2mo agoThere's a lot of well reasoned, but pretty caustic, developer blog notes for the project. Refreshing breath of honest air, imnho. I don't agree with the author in all things, but I enjoy how well and directly they express their viewpoints.
- GordonS 2mo agoLooks interesting - does it have better library management than DarkTable?
- lolc 2mo ago
- guohaochuan 2mo agodigiKam(https://www.digikam.org/ https://www.digikam.org/) is also very good.
- vividfrier 2mo agoI tried. Just way too many bugs for even the simplest of things to be reliable. I have very simple needs. I'm a hobby photographer who now has a bunch of kids. I want to shoot JPEG, I want to cull photos and maybe touch the exposure meter, and then upload my selected photos to Google Photos (aiming to replace this with Immich but not there yet). And I want to do it on Linux. I can't believe this workflow is so wild that there simply isn't a single reliable option... (Fwiw, digikam would allow me to import the photos and I could locate them via Finder. But through Digikam they never showed up - only the folders containing the photos. No filters were applied)
- kkukshtel 2mo agoI highly recommend people try out Capture One. After using Lightroom for years, switching to Capture One a few years ago felt like someone turned the lights on. Far and away the best photo and media mangement software I've ever used by at least two orders of magnitude, and reasonalbe license cost and generous free tier.
- wmfiv 2mo agoNot getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.
- Hamuko 2mo agoLightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €. Lightroom is the more expensive one if you plan on using the software more than 2 years and 2 months.
- throw0101d 2mo ago> Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €. Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)
- dylan604 2mo ago> AIUI, they don't backport things like that. Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.
- weezing 2mo ago391 euro for a piece of software seems kinda crazy.
- erksa 2mo agoDarktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE. If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming. Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at. Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
- BeetleB 2mo ago> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE. And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.
- roblh 2mo agoYou’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything. Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.
- Mashimo 2mo agoHow are you organizing your photos? For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.
- BeetleB 2mo agoI felt that way because my prior RAW editing tool did photo organization/collections. But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it. I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/* (So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*). In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.
- mangogogo 2mo agothis was my main way of managing and processing my RAWs for years until i started using DxO PhotoLab. darktable is an excellent way to learn how to start editing IMO because it simplifies settings a bit less than other tools, is free, and from my experience has better denoise/tone mapping modules out of the box than RawTherapee. for my needs the library/lightroom was also very intuitive and lightweight.
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoTo me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same. The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline. How do the FOSS alternatives handle this? If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pipeline in the metadata for each file such that it could be reproduced reliably across software versions and even forks. Like a sequence of shaders.
- akersten 2mo agoFoss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoRight, but do these incremental upgrades preserve the look of the image? Or do they just keep the library accessible? For example, increasing exposure in poorly lit adds noise, so you might counteract with a noise removal filter. Later on, the developers come up with a better exposure boosting algorithms that takes more sensor characteristics into account, and produces less noise. Ideally, you’ll get this new algorithm on all new photos, but not the old ones. It’s unreasonable to expect you to go through all images you already processed and decrease the effects of the noise removal filters. Or maybe you liked the noise on those pictures, and now it’s gone, and you need to add it back. It’s a very reasonable to expect your photos to look the same long term.
- orbital-decay 2mo ago
- arikrahman 2mo agoHow does it compare to RapidRaw?
- patrakov 2mo agoRapidRaw is too much AI-focused, with the typical drawback that you cannot tell the AI that it is wrong. You want to remove something from the photo by inpainting something else over it, and the only way to do it in RapidRaw is to brush over what you want to remove and pray that the object is removed cleanly by AI. But often, the AI leaves even worse artifacts, and the low-tech solution, that is, manually selecting what you want to copy over, is not available. Another issue is that the overblown highlight reconstruction is much worse than in DarkTable.
- mcdonje 2mo agoDarktable is great. You can easily do pro-level photo editing. Anything you need for editing RAW files, you can do. The modules are powerful. The UI is good. There is a learning curve, but there are also learning curves for the paid software options.
- lionkor 2mo agoI've been using darktable for a while to edit my RAW photos. The amount of features, viable workflows, and in general the quality of the software is baffling for a free product. I would happily pay 200 bucks or something per year to use this, it makes all other RAW editing software obsolete. I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines. Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well. I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial. With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it. I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
- cryo32 2mo agoAnother +1 for this. I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
- mcdonje 2mo agoI'm on Debian, which is of course behind. I tried installing the flatpak, which is up to date, but the packager removed the AI parts. The only option I have (short of moving to Arch or similar) is AppImage, which doesn't integrate well with the DE. I get being against AI, but Darktable is very responsible about it according to their release notes. Local only, opt-in only, no nagging. It's not like Adobe trying to push AI on you when you don't want it.
- bix6 2mo agoI am switching soon. I hear a lot of people complain about the catalog management. What solutions have you found?
- Mashimo 2mo ago> What solutions have you found? * Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name. * over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.
- vjvjvjvjghv 2mo agoSame for me. Managing images in Darktable alone is terrible but with Digikam it’s quite doable.
- selfawareMammal 2mo agoIs this better than Lightroom?
- Mashimo 2mo agoDepends on what feature of Lightroom you use. Give it a try and see for yourself.
- vjvjvjvjghv 2mo agoBetter in some areas but also very frustrating in others.
- donatzsky 2mo agoBetter is subjective, but the editing is much more powerful. However, it's also a completely different editing paradigm (largely on-rails vs. layers/nodes), so some acclimatisation is required.
- Mashimo 2mo agoDarktable is one of the few Apps that I loved and advocated for, only to land back on a pirated copy of CaptureOne. Which is I think the only pirated software that I still have installed. I was super into darktable and had fun using it. The UI and UX was not an issue for me. Loved the masks. But over time it got harder and harder for me to get decent color grading from it. I don't know what changed. When I tried to communicate that on forum and git I got rather harsh responses. Maybe I should try it again.
- Itoldmyselfso 2mo agoPirated copies seem like a blackbox of potential malware, even if virus scans fail to find any problems (and they often give 10-30% false positives on most keygens/cracks). Even if the code is hosted in github, there has been plenty of cases of malware/viruses being hosted there too.
- Mashimo 2mo agoYuuup. Got it from an invite only torrent side, but yes, there is still a risk. But I don't want to pay 390 EUR (and not get any updates)
- jlarocco 2mo agoIt's kind of shitty to pirate Capture One. The full, non-subscription price is only $350, which is less than most cameras, and not a bad price for "pro level" software. I agree that it's a lot better than Darktable and RawTherapee, but if you don't want to pay for it you should settle for one of the open source tools. They're not so bad they're unusable, and editing RAW photos isn't exactly something you need to do. Extra shame if you're using it commercially.
- Mashimo 2mo agoIt's 390 EUR / 450 USD for a software without updates that I use a couple of times privately per year. I'm not proud of it. But I'm also not really ashamed.
- vjvjvjvjghv 2mo agoI have tried to get used to Darktable for more than 2 years but finally gave up and went back to Lightroom. For some reason it never clicked with me and made me almost lose interest in photography . And the AI stuff like masking in the latest Lightroom versions is crazy good. I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
- weezing 2mo agoI found Darktable to have very steep learning curve while RAWtherapee felt perfect immediately. Never used other software like that before besides some Photoshop.
- thatxliner 2mo agoI've been told that Darktable is more powerful than RAWtherapee and thus the learning curve is worth it, so I switched from Rawtherapee to Darktable. I've been liking Darktable
- tristor 2mo agoI have tried to switch to Darktable multiple times over the years, it never has worked for me properly in my workflows. I'm still solidly on Lightroom Classic + DxO Photo Lab + Photomatix/Zerene Stacker (for stacking/HDR/bracketing)
- andyjohnson0 2mo agoLast time I tried it the UI was atrocious, and I ended-up buying a Capture One Pro licence. Has it improved?
- donatzsky 2mo agoAtrocious in what way? But no, it hasn't changed in any significant ways since 2019.
- jedimastert 2mo agoI can also recommend Raw Therapee as an open source raw editor.
- thatxliner 2mo agoI found Darktable absolutely amazing, although the learning curve is incredibly steep. Some ex-maintainers hated the direction of Darktable and thus made their own fork, namely https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
- dllu 2mo agoOriginal founder of darktable, hanatos, went and made vkdt which fixes a bunch of my pet peeves with darktable: https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt https://jo.dreggn.org/vkdt/ https://jo.dreggn.org/vkdt/ * Vulkan instead of OpenCL has way better performance. * Graph-based editing akin to Blender. This fixes the issue of it being annoying and weird to reorder modules in darktable It is, of course, still early on in its development and way less mature and featureful than Darktable.
- mikece 2mo agoI've kept an eye on Darktable for a while. I do high volume photography for high school sports so while Lightroom Classic (LrC) is the final editing tool before exporting the images that go to the clients a more critical app for me is Photo Mechanic (PM) to cull down from 6,000 images to the 300 keepers from an event (a process that only takes about ten minutes on PM). The last time I tried to run Photo Mechanic on Linux (using Wine) I was able to get it to load but it crashed hard every time I tried to actually use it. If there's a capable competitor to Photo Mechanic for Linux I might take a serious look again at switching. Then again, the speed from the Apple Silicon CPU+RAM+GPU processors means that even if I could get comparable hardware for Linux it wouldn't be any less expensive than a new MacBook Pro M5 Max. Definitely keeping an eye on this space but it's not where I need it to be for my workflow.
- jdubs1984 2mo ago> It is forked on Darktable 4.0, and is compatible with editing histories produced with Darktable 4.0 and earlier. It is not compatible with Darktable 4.2 and later and will not be, since 4.2 introduces irresponsible choices that will be the burden of those who commited them to maintain, and 4.4 will be even worse. lol
- popPopBoom 2mo agoI cant beleive its a free product; you will do very well going to market with this. Thanks for the work
- dllu 2mo agoI use Darktable a lot for 10 years. It has improved vastly over the years. I love the new additions like AgX! However I tried out the new AI denoise and it still isn't great. I also wish there was a way to manually correct barrel distortion (eg for vintage lenses) -- currently it only supports embedded metadata or lensfun profiles. I also find the OpenCL implementation to be rather slow. It would be better if it were something more modern like Vulkan.
- LightsOutWorks 2mo ago[dead]
- evolve2k 2mo agoI want a workflow where i can plug in my SD card, open Dadkroom, click a button or two and all photos are pulled onto my computer and then once definitely there the SD card is deleted. I struggled a little to get this import workflow setup nicely, any tips on settings and config to achieve nice import workflow? Once I’m dealing with duplicates I start to wigg out!
- jitl 2mo agoThis seems like table stakes for photo library software. Apple Photos does this perfectly on Mac and iPhone. i want more powerful capabilities but I'm not willing to sacrifice UX ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cbarnes99 2mo agoDarktable should already basically do all of this with their existing copy and import function. The only thing it won't do is erase the SD card for you, and generally I would recommend you just format it on the camera.
- redmaple892 2mo agoI don't edit RAW too often so haven't invested the time and effort into Darktable. I have been very impressed by digiKam for organization and catalog management though. I refuse to be sucked into another proprietary database (e.g. Lightroom) and utilities like osxphotos made it easy to turn Apple photos into regular files that digiKam serves up nicely. My goal is to have access to the entire 'archive' on my NAS. I do miss macOS system controls like zooming in and out via touchpad. In general though, I'm not doing a ton of editing and for my large library, digiKam is working nicely. I tried capture1 for editing but it was more than I needed. I'm glad Darktable exists for folks needing raw editing. I wonder if it produces the Fujifilm specific colors as well as C1?
- olooney 2mo agoI've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization use case? Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it. [1]: https://www.refern.app/ https://www.refern.app/ [2]: https://www.digikam.org/ https://www.digikam.org/ [3]: https://github.com/olooney/image-tagger https://github.com/olooney/image-tagger [4]: https://www.oranlooney.com/books/ https://www.oranlooney.com/books/
- redmaple892 2mo agoInteresting - I have no experience with refern.app but my couple month impression of digiKam is that it's quite flexible in terms of tagging and organization. It's also quite fast for my ~20GB collection of photos. It is definitely geared towards photography so many of the utilities (geotagging, camera metadata) might be useless for you.
- amennox 2mo ago[dead]
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoThe internal precision of controls (up to 0.0001 for many parameters) and the wonderful right-click fine tune popup UI alone were enough for me to forget Lightroom as a coarse axe of a RAW developer, and embrace Darktable.
- anfractuosity 2mo agoReally like Darktable, was playing printing a few photos at weekend from it, on my large-ish dye-sub printer - DNP DS80, works very nicely under Linux with cups (once I figured out how to make it print in colour). I switched to it from Lightroom and made a little Python script to copy photos based on their exif data, into the same file structure as Lightroom.
- tychota 2mo agoI'm a long time user of raw therapee, that i found both awesome and complex. Awesome because if you set the right debayering algorithm and fine tune ondelette, you can get way better result than anything else, especially in rought situation. Complex because if i don't practice often (like have a kid) i end up watching niche tutorial and reading the wiki for VNG4 vs AMAZE which is a bit frightning. It make me want to test dark table or one of the clone
- kyrofa 2mo agoMy wife is a professional photographer and Darktable is a critical part of her editing workflow. It's a truly outstanding piece of software.
- datadrivenangel 2mo agoDarktable is great. Very powerful for editing RAWs. A few places where you have to learn plugins to do things that lightroom makes a little easier, but not paying hundreds of dollars a year for abusive cloud upsells is great.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- donatzsky 2mo agoI'll take this opportunity to shamelessly plug my darktable beginner guide, which aggregates advice and the currently best tutorials: https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with-darktable-2026-edition https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with... If you're coming from the likes of Lightroom or Capture One you will have to learn a very different way of working, but in return you get a lot of control over the edit.
- andyjohnson0 2mo agoA rather less positive view of Darktable than msny of the opinions in this thread: https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralenti/ https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
- sbarre 2mo agoSome needed context is that article is over 3 years old.
- andyjohnson0 2mo agoHas anything changed in those three years? Certainly not the ux, which is as poor as ever.
- IgorPartola 2mo agoI guess I am in the minority but I did not have a good time with Darktable. I used it for a few years and then had to hold my nose and transition to Lightroom. On decent hardware (MacBook Pro that was only a few years old) it was dog slow. But the worst part was transitioning from their version 2 to version 3 of the workflow or whatever they called it. None of my old photos would render correctly after that and half of the modules I learned to use to edit my photos were not obsolete. The documentation for it is dense. It’s like you need to know the inner workings of the software to be able to do things like basic color correction. And even basic masking was just awkward as hell. When I quit it did not have smart object detection either so removing things from the background required editing the photo in external software. Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast, it is intuitive, and it does not expose modules that the documentation says to never use. I really wish I could use open source software for this. But I have yet to find a good alternative that lets me do what I want (which is fairly basic, I don’t go crazy with my editing) that doesn’t require me to get a Masters degree in its usage.
- MoonWalk 2mo agoYou are in good company. I went into Darktable enthusiastically and with willingness to learn its workflow. What I found was crippling bugs and a piss-poor UI. I've even gone back to it after a few years to see if I'd soften my stance, but nope: It blows. Part of my beef with it is discussed below; people are acknowledging that it sucks at organizing (and, I submit, browsing). But it purports to do it, so you waste time wrestling with its ineptitude.
- epihelix 2mo agoThe lack of easy browsing is an issue, but Darktable has never purported to provide an image browser / organizer. Quite the contrary, the devs have always been crystal clear that they hate the concept with a fiery passion.
- MoonWalk 2mo agoDid they specify why? The lack of good open-source image browsers has, oddly enough, become a major problem. Only recently did someone float a pretty good one for Mac (FlowVision). I don't know what options there are on other OSes at the moment.
- MoonWalk 2mo agoIs what?
- fooblaster 2mo agoDo any of the tools other than Lightroom produce hdr photo formats, like jpeg or avif with hdr gain maps
- hegdeezy 2mo agoI've submitted a PR to darktable in the past. I think my main qualm with the software is that tinkering with the software gets in the way of me tinkering with actually shooting photos
- potato-peeler 2mo agoIs the learning curve steep to use this software?
- alfirous 2mo agoVery steep, at least in my experience. Even compared to Cinema 4D and Blender which I grasp the basic just in 1-3 days. Darktable doesn't use industry standard UI/UX so you need learning from zero.
- potato-peeler 2mo agoAny other software which has simple to moderate effort to use it?