I wasn't sure what Darktable was, but they provide a good summary on their homepage, which it seems many projects fail to do nowadays, so kudos to them.
> darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
I was in the same position. So I looked for an about page, and found exactly the right level of detail there. I looked at the install page, and saw installers for everything (images without captions, which I did not like, but that’s the only flaw I found on the whole site).
at that point I simply began spelunking around the site out of sheer amazement, just trying to see how they communicated things. To me, it’s maybe the best presentation of a product of any kind I have ever seen. It answered all of my questions directly, without any kind of trouble navigating.
It should also say that it fulfills the same purpose Adobe Lightroom does. I think this would help a lot of people. It’s not an alternative for photoshop for example.
I agree and it's funny that something so basic is refreshing to see. I had assumed it was an IDE (I guess because of Light Table), but they made it clear as soon as I hit the home page.
Huge fan of DarkTable. As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo-processing pipeline into a subscription-based model for the rest of my life (Lightroom) it's by far the most powerful tool at my disposal.
That said, pain points for me have included:
- Managing multiple databases across multiple machines. My use-case is I have a central database with all photos on one machine. Generally do initial edits on another and then move the files across. I have yet to find a workflow - with the "Local sync" feature, or simply moving files and their edit files across the network - that feels simple. Should be noted that dragging files + their XLF's from temporary machine to primary machine wont import into the "database" for you. And you have to make sure all your directory structure and naming schemes are the same on all your machines.
- The community around "styles" (presets) doesn't scratch the surface compared to Lightroom's. There's one main website [1], but it's not really curated. I'd like to see more blog posts and pros offer these.
The difficulty managing files across multiple machines is not unique to Darktable. It's anywhere the CAP theorem is relevant. Even Adobe's Cloud.
Darktable's database is not the single source of truth. Functionally, it's an index over the XMP sidecar files. When it's deleted, rebuilding is 'simply' a matter of reimporting all the files. The XMP sidecar files are the actual data records...well ok, so are the images but they're immutable.
Local-sync's is inherently mutable state semantics. That's probably never what I want in my workflow. Disk space is cheap enough that I don't find an append only workflow cost prohibitive. Particularly since duplicating a Darktable image only consists of a new XMP file there's little point in overwriting an existing one to save a few bytes. [1]
Practically speaking, local-sync doesn't work for me because it munges filenames. This breaks my tiered backup logic...or rather complicates reasoning about it beyond the number of brain cells I can commit to it.
What I think I want is more tooling for operating outside of Darktable (I already ingest images from my camera with Rapid-Photo-Downloader). Two tools in particular. One which takes a list of XMP files and generates new XMP files based on Darktable's duplicate semantics. The other an inverted index of all the XMP documents. The goal is to move file operations outside of Darktable where they can be automated in the shell.
[1]; XMP files could be versioned with Git if duplicate files are a problem. They aren't for me.
As for styles, I noticed it too, but this got a huge boost with the addition of 3D LUT support in darktable 2.7. Here’s a site with free LUT’s: https://freshluts.com
Regarding databases across machines, would not Syncthing [1] work for this? Storage is fairly cheap these days, so having an exact copy of everything on two machines would not be that bad.
On a personal note, I desperately want to get into using darktable as Lightroom is the last piece proprietary software that I rely on. However, it seems Leica M8 support is still “not there” [2]. They do link to how to help out by adding support at the top of the page, but as mine was stolen two years ago I am not much help and I do want to be able to support my range of cameras dating back to 2006.
> As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo-processing pipeline into a subscription-based model for the rest of my life (Lightroom) it's by far the most powerful tool at my disposal.
Couldn't you just outright buy a Capture One license?
As a longtime non-professional user of Darktable on Linux, I love it. It has allowed me to turn badly exposed raw photos into usable ones more times than I can count. Some of its tools are uniquely powerful, e.g., the equalizer. It's amazing what the Darktable team has achieved. Kudos!
I have licenses for some higher-end photo post-processing software on macOS but, I always return to Darktable because, it's fast, extremely flexible and the results are terrific.
It's a really good piece of software. Kudos to them for keeping up the good work.
I use an antiquated version of Lightroom on Windows that I shelled out for years ago, but I seem to recall that Darktable got Windows support 1-2 years back - I'd love to see a direct comparison to see if it's worth making the switch.
Feature-wise, Lightroom is great - my main beefs with Lightroom are performance and stability: it's slow, and crashes occasionally.
Yeah. I can see myself switching from LR to this if I could import my catalogue. I wouldn't expect the develop settings to be exact but it would still be a big help.
Indeed! The annual Christmas release. I do think it matters to note darktable yet again. This is a major release, of what has become a key piece of photographic software. It's also a wonderful example of some people deep into imaging math getting together to put some current thinking into nicely put together open source code, and a community of committed users showing up to try to understand and use the thing. One could think of it as the Dwarf Fortress of open source imaging software...
I upgraded yesterday and have been using this for several years. I'm running this on a mac which is not ideal from a performance point of view but am loving the UI refresh and the two new tools: filmic rgb and the tone equalizer. The developer of these two new tools (Aurelien Pierre) has a few nice very technical videos about how these tools and the Darktable rendering pipeline works on his youtube channel:
If you don't know it, Darktable is awesome and unique. It often gets compared to Lightroom but it goes way beyond what that can do in many ways. It's main weakness is really that it maybe offers too many ways to do things. In addition to some easy to use filters it also offers many specialized filters and tools. Also, masking and parametric masking is vastly superior and that works on pretty much any tool.
What an odd coincidence, I was just looking up if there was a new version of Darktable available.
Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all your pictures from different sources? (macOS)
I have pictures on Dropbox, Facebook, and a huge removable drive. I want to view all of these pictures in one place in chronological order. I have 50,000+ pictures and it is so overwhelming where to even begin. :-/
I can't seem to get darktable to do this do smoothly for me.
Don't select Pictures with the recursive option. The import will run in a single thread. Instead select dir1,dir2,dir3...dirn all at once. Then the import will run in as many threads as are available. The number of available threads Darktable can use is set by the config menu.
You can select more directories than you have threads available. I saw several orders of magnitude speedup in the import. All those threads kept the CPU running. All that running CPU kept the IO flowing.
+ Advice: Work in two stages. Get all the images locally first. Download from Dropbox and Facebook onto that big disk. Then import them. Once they are local, you can manage them, back them up, etc.
> can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all your pictures from different sources? (macOS)
If you’re under 2TB, iCloud Photos supports all formats including RAW. If you’re over 2TB, Flickr Pro.
// It’s not there yet, but third party tools that integrate with Photos and use non-destructive “edits” are now approaching the usability of Aperture, barring the ability to have 5 levels of selectivity (e.g. marking photos in multiple passes from 1 - 5 stars, for rapidly paring down a large shoot).
Same but I’m willing to copy them all to one place. Bonus if it ingests sources and does the copying for me, but in some kind of sane or simply flat file layout. Difficulty: must support live photos, and videos, too, and no cloud crap (or I’d just put it all in iCloud).
I don't have a ready answer - but in general the type of software you're looking for is digital asset management (DAM).
There are some open source solutions in this space, but AFAIK no really great ones.
You could just use bitkeeper (now ope source) for just kerping track of files - it's said to handle binary files better than git.
I suppose you already have a Mac or two - I'm curious if anyone use icloud with only free software? Is it possible without any Apple devices - and would it even make sense to try?
I’m a happy user of iCloud Photos for this exact reason, 40k+ photos from 2005 to today. Having the ability to access all of them from any of my devices is just great.
I personally use Rawtherapee which seems more advanced(but a little more difficult to use for beginners) than Darktable. Ιs there any reason to use Darktable apart from ease of use?
I haven't used Rawtherapee much. I liked the creative opportunities it offered.
Darktable's workflow better met my needs at the time I was picking between them. In particular, Darktable was better for processing a few hundred images in a couple of hours right after shooting. Darktable's integrated image management was the key difference. Darktable's ability to offload processing onto GPU's was also a factor. GPU's make Darktable much much faster than without.
Rawtherapee is what I use too. I like tools that I can just point at a random directory, and get to work on. There are a lot of photography/image-management tools which insist on importing images into a "library", which ruins my filing-system.
I've got a photoshoot booked for tomorrow, so I'll try this out and see how it compares. (An average shoot for me results in 200-400 CR2 images to examine/reject/process.)
Just based on looking at the sites, Rawtherapee appears to focus on RAW "developing", while Darktable appears to also do photo management and Lightroom-style non-destructive editing.
I think developers should really take note of VS Code's release notes (e.g. https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41) which include lots of screenshots and animations of new features or improvements. Makes it very easy to see at a glance what has changed. But it's a lot more work than just dumping the git commit log, of course.
Once a year I'm installing the darkroom and giving it another chance, but usually half hour later I'm deleting it.
It's slow as a hell. I don't understand why changing exposure on my 16 core i9 macbook takes up to 2-3 seconds for 24 mpix image. Same with zoom: 24 mpix image takes 3-4 seconds to zoom in/out! Really? How this software is written that simple actions are taking so much time? Enabling OpenCL helps, but not so much: changing exposure takes up to second (yes, 3-4 times faster) and zoom still 3-4. Meanwhile devs are spending time on css driven UI...
But UI is also unusable: it's very compact and many elements on a retina display are very close to each other, so I'm constantly miss-clicking them. Slider knobs are ridiculously small and hard to grab and drag. Numbers on controls can't be entered manually, so if you need some exact value you should spend seconds on dragging sliders until you get what you want.
Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention.
This is a great piece of software and is a crucial tool for anybody looking to manage a RAW photo processing workflow using OSS. I've used it for years and am really excited to try the new release. What a great Christmas present!
How good is Darktable as a tool for a non professional simply looking to organize all their photos? Maybe apply some automated improvements, and do some deduping?
Gah, I would love to be able to use Darktable, but it doesn't yet support the CR3 files my camera outputs (since I opt not to use JPG). Once that's supported, Darktable will have a couple more users in my household.
Pretty ridiculous that manufacturers are still leaving ISVs to rely on reverse engineering in order to support their products. It's not like the formats are "protected" somehow by not being documented; they inevitably end up well documented.
My biggest issue with Lightroom is that it is dog slow with large catalogs > 100k images. It is as if it kept everything in memory. Can Darktable be used to store the data in mysql or postgresql?
Does it support presets similar to Lightroom? My workflow is pretty basic, I got about 10 presets I use on 90% of the photos I take, depending on the lens exposure, etc.
Not sure why the post by user "norlywtf" was flagged, I'm having the same issue: on macOS Catalina the UI comes up in Russian. I can read Russian, so it's not such a huge issue for me, but for someone who doesn't it'll be very non-trivial to find where to set the UI language because it's a tiny gray gear icon on a gray background, an the program does not use the Mac menus, nor does it respond to Cmd+, shortcut.
Interestingly, one of the most annoying UI aspects of the program, the lack of label capitalization, is not present in the Russian translation. Everything is properly capitalized there.
[+] [-] kingbirdy|6 years ago|reply
> darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
[+] [-] tomcam|6 years ago|reply
at that point I simply began spelunking around the site out of sheer amazement, just trying to see how they communicated things. To me, it’s maybe the best presentation of a product of any kind I have ever seen. It answered all of my questions directly, without any kind of trouble navigating.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radiowave|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m-p-3|6 years ago|reply
I want to see what the apps looks like if I'm even going to download it, do at least a minimum of effort to entice potential users.
[+] [-] xwowsersx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwowsersx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deanclatworthy|6 years ago|reply
That said, pain points for me have included:
- Managing multiple databases across multiple machines. My use-case is I have a central database with all photos on one machine. Generally do initial edits on another and then move the files across. I have yet to find a workflow - with the "Local sync" feature, or simply moving files and their edit files across the network - that feels simple. Should be noted that dragging files + their XLF's from temporary machine to primary machine wont import into the "database" for you. And you have to make sure all your directory structure and naming schemes are the same on all your machines.
- The community around "styles" (presets) doesn't scratch the surface compared to Lightroom's. There's one main website [1], but it's not really curated. I'd like to see more blog posts and pros offer these.
[1] https://dtstyle.net/
[+] [-] brudgers|6 years ago|reply
Darktable's database is not the single source of truth. Functionally, it's an index over the XMP sidecar files. When it's deleted, rebuilding is 'simply' a matter of reimporting all the files. The XMP sidecar files are the actual data records...well ok, so are the images but they're immutable.
Local-sync's is inherently mutable state semantics. That's probably never what I want in my workflow. Disk space is cheap enough that I don't find an append only workflow cost prohibitive. Particularly since duplicating a Darktable image only consists of a new XMP file there's little point in overwriting an existing one to save a few bytes. [1]
Practically speaking, local-sync doesn't work for me because it munges filenames. This breaks my tiered backup logic...or rather complicates reasoning about it beyond the number of brain cells I can commit to it.
What I think I want is more tooling for operating outside of Darktable (I already ingest images from my camera with Rapid-Photo-Downloader). Two tools in particular. One which takes a list of XMP files and generates new XMP files based on Darktable's duplicate semantics. The other an inverted index of all the XMP documents. The goal is to move file operations outside of Darktable where they can be automated in the shell.
[1]; XMP files could be versioned with Git if duplicate files are a problem. They aren't for me.
[+] [-] jug|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninjin|6 years ago|reply
[1]: https://syncthing.net
On a personal note, I desperately want to get into using darktable as Lightroom is the last piece proprietary software that I rely on. However, it seems Leica M8 support is still “not there” [2]. They do link to how to help out by adding support at the top of the page, but as mine was stolen two years ago I am not much help and I do want to be able to support my range of cameras dating back to 2006.
[2]: https://www.darktable.org/resources/camera-support
[+] [-] bosie|6 years ago|reply
Couldn't you just outright buy a Capture One license?
[+] [-] cs702|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|6 years ago|reply
It's a really good piece of software. Kudos to them for keeping up the good work.
If you're interested, you can see some of my photos at http://www.flickr.com/zerocoder
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAs...
I love the concept of this being a digital darkroom where much artistic expression occurs long after taking an exposure.
[+] [-] HenriNext|6 years ago|reply
But everybody is and forever will be comparing Darktable to Lightroom, so how about:
- Add to website a clear comparison vs Lightroom.
- Add to website how to import Lighroom catalogue.
[+] [-] GordonS|6 years ago|reply
Feature-wise, Lightroom is great - my main beefs with Lightroom are performance and stability: it's slow, and crashes occasionally.
[+] [-] risingsubmarine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753
(for the curious)
[+] [-] trop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/vid...
If you don't know it, Darktable is awesome and unique. It often gets compared to Lightroom but it goes way beyond what that can do in many ways. It's main weakness is really that it maybe offers too many ways to do things. In addition to some easy to use filters it also offers many specialized filters and tools. Also, masking and parametric masking is vastly superior and that works on pretty much any tool.
[+] [-] kilroy123|6 years ago|reply
Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all your pictures from different sources? (macOS)
I have pictures on Dropbox, Facebook, and a huge removable drive. I want to view all of these pictures in one place in chronological order. I have 50,000+ pictures and it is so overwhelming where to even begin. :-/
I can't seem to get darktable to do this do smoothly for me.
[+] [-] brudgers|6 years ago|reply
+ Tip: If you have:
Don't select Pictures with the recursive option. The import will run in a single thread. Instead select dir1,dir2,dir3...dirn all at once. Then the import will run in as many threads as are available. The number of available threads Darktable can use is set by the config menu.You can select more directories than you have threads available. I saw several orders of magnitude speedup in the import. All those threads kept the CPU running. All that running CPU kept the IO flowing.
+ Advice: Work in two stages. Get all the images locally first. Download from Dropbox and Facebook onto that big disk. Then import them. Once they are local, you can manage them, back them up, etc.
[+] [-] mceachen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjaminl|6 years ago|reply
Adobe finally made Adobe Lightroom sync your library with the cloud. So you can now have all your photos from on all your devices.
[+] [-] Terretta|6 years ago|reply
If you’re under 2TB, iCloud Photos supports all formats including RAW. If you’re over 2TB, Flickr Pro.
// It’s not there yet, but third party tools that integrate with Photos and use non-destructive “edits” are now approaching the usability of Aperture, barring the ability to have 5 levels of selectivity (e.g. marking photos in multiple passes from 1 - 5 stars, for rapidly paring down a large shoot).
[+] [-] shantly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|6 years ago|reply
There are some open source solutions in this space, but AFAIK no really great ones.
You could just use bitkeeper (now ope source) for just kerping track of files - it's said to handle binary files better than git.
I suppose you already have a Mac or two - I'm curious if anyone use icloud with only free software? Is it possible without any Apple devices - and would it even make sense to try?
[+] [-] kejaed|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decasteve|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] algorithm314|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|6 years ago|reply
Darktable's workflow better met my needs at the time I was picking between them. In particular, Darktable was better for processing a few hundred images in a couple of hours right after shooting. Darktable's integrated image management was the key difference. Darktable's ability to offload processing onto GPU's was also a factor. GPU's make Darktable much much faster than without.
[+] [-] stevekemp|6 years ago|reply
I've got a photoshoot booked for tomorrow, so I'll try this out and see how it compares. (An average shoot for me results in 200-400 CR2 images to examine/reject/process.)
[+] [-] CharlesW|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seabass|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ygra|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stunpix|6 years ago|reply
It's slow as a hell. I don't understand why changing exposure on my 16 core i9 macbook takes up to 2-3 seconds for 24 mpix image. Same with zoom: 24 mpix image takes 3-4 seconds to zoom in/out! Really? How this software is written that simple actions are taking so much time? Enabling OpenCL helps, but not so much: changing exposure takes up to second (yes, 3-4 times faster) and zoom still 3-4. Meanwhile devs are spending time on css driven UI...
But UI is also unusable: it's very compact and many elements on a retina display are very close to each other, so I'm constantly miss-clicking them. Slider knobs are ridiculously small and hard to grab and drag. Numbers on controls can't be entered manually, so if you need some exact value you should spend seconds on dragging sliders until you get what you want.
Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention.
[+] [-] dbrgn|6 years ago|reply
Can you name a few open source ones? I'm not aware of any open source RAW development software that comes close.
[+] [-] devit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JeremyNT|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darthcoder1011|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thawaway1837|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jeaye|6 years ago|reply
https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type...
Congrats on the release!
[+] [-] microcolonel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolc|6 years ago|reply
Just the other day I decided to include Darktable in my yearly donations. Not a chance. They don't take donations :-)
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] notyourday|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vassy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
Interestingly, one of the most annoying UI aspects of the program, the lack of label capitalization, is not present in the Russian translation. Everything is properly capitalized there.