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Posted by siatko 9 hours ago

Darktable(www.darktable.org)
248 points | 124 commentspage 3
guohaochuan 7 hours ago|
digiKam(https://www.digikam.org/) is also very good.
vividfrier 7 hours ago|
I 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)

popPopBoom 5 hours ago||
I cant beleive its a free product; you will do very well going to market with this. Thanks for the work
e12e 7 hours ago||
See also: https://ansel.photos/en/
TheqO 7 hours ago||

    Ansel 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 7 hours ago|||
Right?! And the rest of the README continues like that. Must be some juicy history here
Mashimo 6 hours ago||
And I think this was a few years back. Imagine still having that in your readme.
esafak 7 hours ago|||
I'm digging their Sentry charts. That's the kind of discipline we need more of. Stability is a feature.
lolc 5 hours ago|||
I used Ansel for a while, and I agree that Darktable is suffering from feature creep. Ansel right away had some usability improvements. But the amount of regressions introduced was wild. The anger you can read in the messaging was apparently also employed to cut code, and things got flaky. In the end some features I used stopped working in all releases I tried, and I went back to Darktable. Maybe Ansel is stabilizing now, and I should try again.
GordonS 7 hours ago||
Looks interesting - does it have better library management than DarkTable?
mangogogo 7 hours ago||
this 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.
bix6 7 hours ago||
I am switching soon. I hear a lot of people complain about the catalog management. What solutions have you found?
Mashimo 6 hours 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 6 hours ago||
Same for me. Managing images in Darktable alone is terrible but with Digikam it’s quite doable.
arikrahman 7 hours ago||
How does it compare to RapidRaw?
patrakov 6 hours ago|
RapidRaw 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.

selfawareMammal 7 hours ago||
Is this better than Lightroom?
donatzsky 1 hour ago||
Better 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 6 hours ago|||
Depends on what feature of Lightroom you use. Give it a try and see for yourself.
vjvjvjvjghv 6 hours ago||
Better in some areas but also very frustrating in others.
weezing 6 hours ago||
I found Darktable to have very steep learning curve while RAWtherapee felt perfect immediately. Never used other software like that before besides some Photoshop.
thatxliner 5 hours ago|
I'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

actionfromafar 8 hours ago||
https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
vjvjvjvjghv 6 hours ago||
I 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.

lukah 7 hours ago|||
I 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?
jillesvangurp 5 hours ago|||
The 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.

lukah 4 hours ago||
Thanks for the detail - it's really interesting to hear
hack1312 7 hours ago||||
If 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/

CharlesW 3 hours ago||
Nitro 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 6 hours ago||||
I 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

cmrdporcupine 7 hours ago|||
There's also RawTherapee, which I found more usable than Darktable for reasons I don't recall.
ezst 7 hours ago|||
Is the last release on GitHub from 2022 or is it me?
Infernal 7 hours ago||
Not 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.

junaru 7 hours ago||
> Meet Chantal, your image processing AI librarian

Instant pass.

Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.

orbital-decay 6 hours ago|||
It's just an ordinary search engine for the specialized topic. Aurelien Pierre is being overly dramatic here, it's in his character.
sejje 7 hours ago|||
I 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 7 hours ago||
It's on https://ansel.photos
tristor 6 hours ago|
I 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)