[HN Gopher] Darktable 4.0 ___________________________________________________________________ Darktable 4.0 Author : aendruk Score : 176 points Date : 2022-07-02 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.darktable.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.darktable.org) | 2bitencryption wrote: | 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. | jseliger wrote: | 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.) | Normille wrote: | >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. | morsch wrote: | It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is | an afterthought. You guys have to deal with Adobe, or use a | less advanced alternative. | brudgers wrote: | 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. | hef19898 wrote: | 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 wrote: | Does your dad have any suggestion on resources/books that | others can use to learn the same crash course he gave you? :) | moelf wrote: | 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 | spaetzleesser wrote: | A merger between digiKam and darktable would be my dream. | TaylorAlexander wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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- | 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. | thg wrote: | > 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/prefere... | sneak wrote: | 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. | deanc wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | mywacaday wrote: | 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:" | hnaccount141 wrote: | Maybe referring to the source tarball github generates for | releases? | Normille wrote: | The wording is a bit vague, but I presumed they meant to use | the tar.xz if you intended to checksum the file. | jacooper wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | mikae1 wrote: | _> The color science is missed up in Darktable [...], I just | couldn 't get something decent out._ | | If you want help you need to explain what you did or tried. Did | you work in display referred or scene referred? I can recommend | submitting one of your raw files to a Play Raw[0]. People will | edit your raw file and send back an .xmp file with the edit | metadata so that you can see what they did. [0] | https://discuss.pixls.us/c/processing/playraw/30 | H_L wrote: | Took a quick look at some posts there and this stood out: | https://discuss.pixls.us/t/extreme-highlight-recovery-in- | dar... | | In my opinion, the Lightroom edit in the OP is the best. Many | of the replies with Darktable edits look extremely bad. Some | have extreme color artifacts. | orbital-decay wrote: | Highlight reconstruction was a major and well-known | shortcoming in versions they were using. Better highlight | reconstruction for large blown-out areas was finally added | in darktable 4.0. | mikae1 wrote: | 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 | | The darktable developers frequent this forum and it's an | indispensable resource. | thg wrote: | I'd additionally add Bruce Williams' "Understanding Darktable" | series to that list: | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlYWvzmJQTrRq7JrYdD7k... | mikae1 wrote: | If I need to pick a favorite: | | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbDlOwmmQnkRmcb2_5WERg | FpUser wrote: | Thank you people for your amazing work. I use Darktable all the | time. It is very good editor. | pkd wrote: | 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 | nuclx wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 - this channel is | consistently great for both basic and non-obvious things | | https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 - main | darktable forums, has very good discussions and explanations | | https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ Dr. Rant of darktable. | Primarily technical stuff. | vanderZwan wrote: | > _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 | taopenIDE wrote: | 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. | trombonechamp wrote: | The name "Darktable" is a play on Adobe Lightroom, since | "lightroom" is a combination of "light table" and "darkroom", | both concepts from film photography. | doctoboggan wrote: | You are probably thinking of Lightable, which IIRC has ceased | development. It never really lived up to the initial hype. | whitepoplar wrote: | http://lighttable.com/ ? | jetrink wrote: | 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. | tmjwid wrote: | 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. | wlesieutre wrote: | I don't but here's some documentation https://darktable- | org.github.io/dtdocs/en/module-reference/p... | vanderZwan wrote: | 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. | preya2k wrote: | 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 :( | BuildTheRobots wrote: | 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. | dang wrote: | Related: | | _Darktable 3.8.0 Released_ - | 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 - Aug 2021 (36 | comments) | | _Darktable 3.6_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27720908 | - July 2021 (73 comments) | | _Darktable 3.2.1_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156113 - Aug 2020 (47 | comments) | | _Darktable 3.0_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874528 | - Dec 2019 (120 comments) | | _Darktable 2.4.0 released_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 - Dec 2017 (74 | comments) | | _Darktable 2.2.0 released_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 - Dec 2016 (82 | comments) | | _Darktable 2.0 released_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 - Dec 2015 (44 | comments) | | _A look at Darktable 2.0_ - | 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 - July 2015 (1 | comment) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-02 23:00 UTC)