[nas]

This is the work of a former "darktable" developer (Aurélien 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. Aurélien 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.

[Tomte]

> moving away from a "display-referred" to a "scene-referred" workflow

What is that?

Edit: they have a page about it: https://ansel.photos/en/workflows/scene-referred/

[codethief]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing the link!

[jillesvangurp]

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.

[chefandy]

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it.

I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do their job right, they need to talk to the community to figure out what their needs are, and if maintainers shrug their shoulders while the few people who speak up are skeptically bikeshedding everything they say into oblivion, then we're also going to shrug our shoulders and walk away. That's what happened to me the several times I tried to contribute to various FOSS projects as a(n experienced, professional) designer rather than a(n experienced, professional, former) developer. Often, the response you get for merely intimating that something could work better if it was set up differently is like calling someone's kid ugly.

It would be like a team of civil engineers working on a restaurant design scoffing at an architect that specializes in restaurants offering to help make an effective kitchen layout. From the civil engineers' perspective, the architect's input is superfluous and would probably slow down progress. Meanwhile, everyone else that has to interact with that kitchen suffers.

[actionfromafar]

I tried to use Darktable coming from Lightroom, and I have seldom felt as stupid. I just couldn't grasp how Darktable worked.

[kqr]

On the flip side, coming from Darktable and trying out Lightroom felt like trying to do good old darkroom work with my hands tied behind my back.

Darktable offers a few really powerful, generic tools that you can use in different ways to get different effects – things like equaliser, parametric masks, LAB curves, etc. It makes little sense to use it without reading up on some of those more advanced tools first.

Lightroom, in contrast, focuses more on offering a small selection of pre-defined tools for specific purposes. But once you want to do something outside of that (parametric masking is one of those things I really missed) you're shit out of luck.

[brudgers]

I admire his work.

But as a Darktable user, I found the implementations of strong opinions frustrating because I value actual workflow above potential technical superiority.

Display referred worked fine for me because the important work happens before the shutter is clicked. The skill I want to develop is fixing things in the lens not fixing them in post.

Breaking changes suck.

But again open source developers don’t owe me anything.

[nurple]

I don't disagree, I spend a lot of effort thinking about things at exposure-time. I think the thing that sold me on scene-referred is that I started conciously thinking about the kind of data I was capturing. It's often the case that the display medium, or its artistic representation, has a much lower dynamic range than the sensor in the camera, and so there are a number of things you can do to get the most data possible when capturing to leave yourself room for expression at presentation time.

What this gives you isn't necessarily the ability to "fix" things in post, but the ability to decide how you want your image presented in a certain medium or format when "developing". Even master photogs like Ansel would take liberties when developing to realize their vision from the negatives they were able to capture.

[ISL]

The legacy editing workflows are generally, if not entirely, still available in Darktable. I haven't yet encountered a defect in my old edits on new versions of Darktable.

[hef19898]

It absolutely is, it is what I use for RAW developing and post. Does everything, does it good and is, above all else, non-destructive.

It is, at least of I go by my dad who is a Photoshop veteran, quite different to what he used to.

The only things I could see as, if I am really really critical, are:

- sharpening, usually decent enough but SharpenAI from Topaz is another league. As I said, good enough for all except the edge cases

- de-noising, same as sharpening, astro-denoise works like a charm so

- masks, which I haven't really figure out yet, so my problem and not darktable's, Lightroom and Photoshop seem a tad more intuitive so

One thing I'd love, but again maybe I just didn't find it yet, is the possibility to export the database of picture edits. For now, I have darktable create dedicated files once a photonis edited and I make back-ups of those. I did loose edits for around 100ish photos due to some unrelated issues which required reinstallation of darktable so, which again was on me for missing darktable stopped creating said files after an update. Being to just dump the darktable database of edit data would be really nice so.

Summary, I can only recommend it. Especially for people starting post processing, the learing curve for each software is basically the same after all, and without prior knowledge they wont recognize any differences.

[photoGrant]

The DB is compatible with Darktable v4.0 and below only

[codeptualize]

> "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!

[PuffinBlue]

This opinion comes from a former pho photographer, one who desperately wanted to love Darktable...the shots are warranted in my opinion. Darktable is a complete car crash of poor usability and militant contrarianism on established user experience design.

It has so much promise but the 'lead by committee' approach just resulted in some kind of collective 'demand avoidance' from the devs who seem to revel in delivering an unusable product. And I mean unusable for those not willing to learn an entirely new paradigm of interacting with a piece of photographic software and dive into the docs for everything, including stuff as silly as a keyboard shortcut or move between modules.

I've yet to read all the Ansel blurb but I'm pretty sure this is from the guy who's made the most improvements to Darktable in recent releases. So it's incredibly exciting to see.

I doubt it'll get any DAM capability though, even for a fork that is asking too much :-)

[marcus_holmes]

But this is the ultimate dream of open-source, right?

The whole "if you don't like how a program works, you can fork it and change it" thing.

Amazing to see this actually working in practice. You might not like Ansel, but he does, and more power to his elbow!

[hef19898]

As a darktable user, I have to say none of that would motivate me to switch.

But then I care about the results, a nice picture to print or look at on a screen, way way more than about the tools used to get that result. Goes for cameras and lenses and whatnot as well.