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.
In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.
If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.
That said I don’t think the UX of LR and Photoshop is particularly good, especially in recent years. People just expect their skills to transfer over, but I don’t think FOSS should be doomed to clone the UX of proprietary software it seeks to replace.
A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.
I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).
In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.
This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.
Code embedding has been considered many times but the rabbit hole is way too deep. You are embedding unverified executable code, to begin with. Then there's diversity problem: too much code, too many implementation specifics with every quirk being able to mess up the result. All of that spanning multiple generations of color science pipelines, experts, hardware, and third-party software to interact with. Since the advent of ML (for denoising and segmentation in particular) you have to also embed the weights as well, making it outright impossible.
All this leads to RAW processing code going the way of scientific and financial code: once written, it's frozen and the substrate is emulated if necessary. Even the bugs are preserved.
If you embed the image pipeline’s code in the user’s raw metadata, you essentially need to give them a perpetual license to that code, which isn’t a problem for FOSS.
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
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.
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)
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.
I'm not proud of it. But I'm also not really ashamed.
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
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.
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.
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!
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)