[HN Gopher] Ansel
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Ansel
Author : sts153
Score : 141 points
Date : 2023-11-23 09:10 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ansel.photos)
(TXT) w3m dump (ansel.photos)
| sts153 wrote:
| Photo-Editor beased on darktable
| chpatrick wrote:
| Ansel makes me think of Nvidia Ansel.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Ansel Adams. Famous photographer
| chpatrick wrote:
| And well-known existing product name.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I never heard of it. After looking it up, I don't get the
| appeal. Not sure why someone would want to take fancy
| screenshots of video games unless they're marketing a game.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Nothing gets my blood boiling like a Steam/App Store game
| listing that only has these "in-engine but not the actual
| gameplay" screenshots. If it's a FPS, show me the screen
| with the gun and the crosshairs. Show me the HUD in a
| driving game, the position of the camera in a 3rd person
| RPG. I don't care how some random NPC or a building looks
| from a position I'll never get the camera to when playing
| the game.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Definitely not a well known product name, as someone who
| plays PC games and also does some CUDA development, I've
| never heard of this product from Nvidia.
| Banditoz wrote:
| > I have given 4 years of my life to the Darktable project, only
| to see it destroyed by clueless geeks playing code stashing on
| their spare time, everyone pushing his own agenda with no sense
| of design, in a project where nobody is responsible for anything
| and where we work too fast on everything at the same time.
|
| Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project? I've only
| used it a few times, but it seems nice for someone who knows how
| to use it (which isn't me!) but curious what drama happened.
| mrkeen wrote:
| I just assumed it was what people used. I tried but couldn't
| get the hang of it. Couldn't flatten or remove things from the
| history.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| It's not your fault. It has the worst UX of anything I've
| used. Be careful if you use the mousewheel anywhere, you
| don't know what unexpected action it's going to perform.
| Drawing vector shapes for masks is wildly frustrating too. It
| does have a lot of powerful modules though... and it's free.
| camtarn wrote:
| There's a switch in preferences to make it just scroll by
| default. Definitely a bad UI decision indeed.
| nurple wrote:
| That's kind of the nature of non-destructive editing. While I
| do think the operation stack could be smarter about
| collapsing edits that are commutative, once I got a workflow
| order down I haven't really worried about this much.
|
| The documentation actually has a pretty good example workflow
| that flows through mutations in an order that makes sense for
| most cases. Though it's not really that simple, and so you'll
| find yourself trying to relearn each time if it's something
| you do only on occasion.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project?
|
| Are you referring to the fact of there being no releases in the
| last year or so?
| morsch wrote:
| 4.2 dropped in December 2022.
|
| 4.4 was released in June 2023:
| https://www.darktable.org/2023/06/darktable-4.4.0-released/
|
| 4.6 is slated for December 2023:
| https://github.com/darktable-
| org/darktable/blob/master/RELEA...
|
| Their release schedule has been remarkably consistent.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| What is code stashing.
| okl wrote:
| I guess it means keeping improvements/changes to yourself
| instead of contributing them to the project.
| nas wrote:
| darktable is still being developed. There are pretty regular
| releases. I use it as my main photo processing software (raw-
| based workflow).
|
| As I said in my other comment, Aurelien has strong opinions. He
| felt he could not effectively work with the other darktable
| devs and decided to fork the project.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| The author is the "Dr. Rant" (his own words) of Darktable, so a
| lot of what he says is probably exaggerated. A lot of it isn't,
| though - Darktable does indeed lack focus and direction lately,
| leading to unnecessary bloat and unresolved issues. In other
| words, typical FOSS problems that sometimes lead to a fork.
| okl wrote:
| Author has a blog post here,
| https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-
| ralent..., which exhibits some example code, for example,
| this: https://github.com/darktable-
| org/darktable/blob/darktable-4....
|
| That's a far cry from what I'd find acceptable in any
| project.
| nurple wrote:
| When I switched to Linux full time about a year ago, darktable
| was a godsend. I currently have it pointed at a NAS share with
| ~8k raw images and it works pretty flawlessly and I can barely
| tell that the images are offhost.
|
| Personally, I really like a number of the features that this
| fork removed (like the timeline). The software does have a bit
| more of a learning curve than the commercial variants out
| there, but darktable is impressively capable and I personally
| jive more with its theory-based approach.
|
| I _do_ agree that deprecating the display-referred mutations is
| a good thing, but the darktable documentation is already pretty
| adamant about scene-referred being the future; though there's
| no way people are going to go through their entire library and
| update their past tweaks from display to scene-referred, so I
| don't know that those modules can ever be removed.
|
| I guess if I was going to be as petty as the author of this
| fork, I'd say that the Ansel logo looks awful.
| nas wrote:
| This is the work of a former "darktable" developer (Aurelien
| Pierre) who decided to fork the codebase and go it alone. He has
| strong opinions about the correct way to do things. I like some
| of the cleanup on the UI that he has done. For now, Ansel and
| darktable are compatible in terms of the underlying database. So
| you can easily switch back and forth between them. If the fork
| diverges significantly, it would be more difficult to maintain
| the compatibility.
|
| darktable has seen some major changes in the past few years,
| moving away from a "display-referred" to a "scene-referred"
| workflow. Aurelien contributed a lot of code to make that work,
| most significantly, the Filmic module. darktable is not as user
| friendly and as polished as other commercial tools (Lightroom,
| Affinity, Capture One) but it is capable if you take the time to
| learn it.
| photoGrant wrote:
| The DB is compatible with Darktable v4.0 and below only
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Aurelian's youtube channel is pretty insightful. He explains a
| lot of what is behind the scene referred modules. And as you
| say, he has been driving a lot of that work. I've been using
| Darktable for many years for all my photo editing and it has
| improved massively in the last few years. He does a great job
| explaining how raw file processing works (in any raw photo
| processing tool) and how Darktable does it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@AurelienPIERREphoto/videos
|
| I had no idea he was working on this.
|
| Having come across his rants on Darktable last year, I think he
| does have a point on the UX front. A lot of the filtering in
| the light table (where you organize your photos) is a bit of a
| mess of confusing buttons, options, and weird convoluted
| abstractions. I never liked that part of the software. I can
| work with it but years in, it remains counter intuitive how you
| get your files in there and manage them. It's just convoluted
| and weird all over. A lot of bad ideas layered on top of each
| other. Aurelian kind of freaked out when last year some pretty
| major changes were just pushed through without much debate. And
| I agree with him, it didn't really improve much things.
|
| Anyway the magic is in the darkroom part, which is the part
| where you edit photos. There is a wide variety of modules aimed
| at different expertise levels. Scene referred mode is basically
| a big upgrade over what a lot of other packages do, which is to
| blindly apply pre-defined curves for cameras without much
| regard for the actual pixels in the raw image. Filmic and other
| modules do this a bit more intelligently by actually looking at
| the pixels, using some heuristics and working from the lowest
| levels of the pipeline all the way up to do the right things.
| It adds up to a lot less work when editing photos for me
| compared to earlier versions. Mostly photos come out pretty OK
| without much tweaking. I might tweak perceptive saturation a
| bit, add some contrast in filmic, etc.
|
| Basically, the workflow is roughly: 1) tweak the exposure as
| needed for the gray point. Filmic adapts with sane settings for
| black and white points and you typically don't have to tweak
| that. 2) add some contrast in filmic 3) maybe add some local
| contrast 4) in the color balance module fiddle with perceptive
| saturation. Done. There are a few more things I do for
| sharpening, profiled denoise (as needed), etc. But that's
| pretty much it. One nice thing is being able to apply defaults
| based on rules to photos.
|
| I might play with Ansel a bit if I can find some time over
| Christmas. Kind of curious to see what he's done to lighttable
| and the rest.
| codeptualize wrote:
| > "Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if its
| developers were not so busy turning it into an usability
| nightmare. Ansel is a Darktable 4.0 variant where 30.000 lines
| of poorly-written code and half-broken features have been
| removed, and 11.000 lines rewritten : it runs faster, smoother,
| uses less power and requires less configuration. Enjoy an app
| focusing on getting work done and stability."
|
| Shots fired!
| brudgers wrote:
| [delayed]
| camtarn wrote:
| Oof. Looking at the "Transitioning from Darktable" page (
| https://ansel.photos/en/doc/special-topics/from-darktable/ ), the
| author is extremely disparaging about Darktable developers. Very
| off-putting, even if some of the changes seem sensible.
|
| [edit] Make that quite a lot of the changes, actually, including
| getting rid of some really dangerously bad bits of UI design.
| Still dislike the guy's attitude but I've got to admit he has a
| point.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| This guy basically changed darktable from a shitty Lightroom
| clone to something truly unique very recently, and his approach
| is highly divisive among the users.
| camtarn wrote:
| Yeah, having read the article linked above [1] I see his
| point - it definitely looks like he's put in an enormous
| amount of work for the project, and I can see where his
| frustration comes from!
|
| To me, Darktable has a 'feel' of a highly technical editor
| for people who really care about colourspaces etc, and
| although I hardly know anything about colour I rather
| appreciate that. It's interesting to note that almost all the
| modules that contribute to that 'feel' are written by
| Aurelien.
|
| [1] https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-
| ralent...
| acherion wrote:
| Weird, I scrolled down to see what cameras it supports, and there
| was a link labelled "Supported Cameras" that goes to
| https://rawspeed.org/CameraSupport.html but that's a squatted
| domain now. Is there a list somewhere? It doesn't instill much
| confidence in me if I can't even see what camera RAW formats are
| supported.
| okl wrote:
| How about this? https://github.com/darktable-
| org/rawspeed/blob/develop/data/...
| nurple wrote:
| Take a look at the darktable docs:
| https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.0/en/overview/suppor...
|
| The rawspeed lib is at github here:
| https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed
| hexo wrote:
| Can someone compare this to RawTherapee, pretty please?
| macintux wrote:
| Somewhere very recently I encountered a quote from Ansel Adams,
| in which he seemed to anticipate that "electronic" photos would
| be the next big thing, in (IIRC) 1980. Wish I could find that
| again. Seemed remarkably prescient.
| robga wrote:
| It was in Playboy (May 1983)
|
| https://petapixel.com/2022/07/30/ansel-adamss-interview-with...
|
| "There's no end in sight. Electronic photography will soon be
| superior to anything we have now. The first advance will be the
| exploration of existing negatives. I believe the electronic
| process will enhance them. I could get superior prints from my
| negatives using electronics.
|
| "Then the time will come when you will be able to make the
| entire photograph electronically. With the extremely high
| resolution and enormous control you can get from electronics,
| the results will be fantastic. I wish I were young again!"
| nurple wrote:
| "I wish I were young again!"
|
| Ah, the oft-repeated refrain of those who never stop
| learning.
| hurryer wrote:
| In early 2000 a lot of photographers were saying that digital
| photography is not "real", it doesn't have a "soul", it should
| not be allowed in photo contests and it's just worthless in
| general.
| macintux wrote:
| Hence my surprise that Ansel anticipated it with open arms 40
| years ago.
| renjimen wrote:
| Looks good, I'll give it a whirl. I could never figure out a good
| darktable workflow. The UI seemed all over the place with some
| basic features missing and way too bloated in certain areas that
| I imagine 99% of users would never touch. Hopefully Ansel has
| figured out a better feature balance and UI.
|
| My current Linux photo processing tool is Another RawTherapee
| [1], which is a wonderful blend of the power of RawTherapee with
| a UI that has a lot of similarities to Lightroom.
|
| [1] https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/art/36
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > You will find very few people with this kind of full-stack
| understanding of light and color able to also write efficient
| computer programs and read academic research papers on applied
| mathematics. Yet, you will find a lot of image editing
| applications and a lot of guys trying...
|
| Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence.
|
| On the other hand, open-source photography and bitmap editing is
| still waiting for its own Blender or Godot and I applaud anyone
| willing to have a go at it. What's available (GIMP, RawTherapee,
| darktable, ...) can mostly sort of get the job done, but if
| you're the kind of person who seeks relaxation, pleasure and
| aesthetics in photography, the open-source software feels just
| too geeky, too unfocused, too unrefined.
|
| I'm currently on DxO + Affinity and even though they cost quite a
| lot of money, I'd probably shoot and enjoy the whole thing
| significantly less if I had darktable and GIMP waiting at home.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| Once you try it, and read his blogs about how all of this shit
| works, you'll know that he isn't exaggerating.
|
| The amount of control and physics-based editing you're doing is
| very unique.
|
| This wasn't what darktable was like a few years ago, but this
| guy has been making incredible strides to implement his vision.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| lmao, Aurelien Pierre has been making insanely big leaps in
| darktable, putting it leagues above its competition and providing
| something so unique compared to Lightroom and others, so I'm not
| surprised that he just created his own fork.
| camillomiller wrote:
| > On the following picture, I made the styling, the make-up, the
| lighting, the shot, the editing, the retouching, the software
| color filters, the documentation to use them, the website to talk
| about them in 2 languages, and even the colorspace used for
| saturation adjustment. You will find very few people with this
| kind of full-stack understanding of light and color able to also
| write efficient computer programs and read academic research
| papers on applied mathematics. Yet, you will find a lot of image
| editing applications and a lot of guys trying...
|
| Jeez, wish I had 1/10th of the confidence of this guy
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(page generated 2023-11-23 23:00 UTC)