> 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.
If you're using nix, I was able to make a build from the darktable derivation[0] modified to use fetchgit (since he hasn't made a github Release since December) and `s/darktable/ansel/g`.
src = fetchgit {
url = "https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel.git";
rev = "f7669af89a71882ebad15982d698b8df7e6c6ce8";
sha256 = "sha256-FI6dKUrmtTG7DIV0MmY6XdqlUpqdt7boKuXKU6CywjA=";
fetchSubmodules = true;
};
I use Darktable quite extensively for underwater photos, but keen to try Ansel out and see if it's less friction.
An example of friction in darktable:
- I have an external strobe which means I have to put the exposure down to its lowest when shooting, otherwise everything is washed out. Darktable in newer versions has "Compensate camera exposure" on by default, which washes out all the images until I click it off. I'm sure there's a way to make this checkbox disabled by default, but why can't it accept what comes out of the camera?
- No favourites: there used to be a way to have all your panels in a favourites tab. This was great as I usually only use a handful of modules that I use. It's gone in later versions
- The "color balance" panel, not to be confused with "color balance rgb", it's not in any of the default tabs but useful for saturation adjustments. Why are some of these useful modules hidden? Shouldn't all modules be available by default. The only way you can get to it is by searching.
- White balance: there are now two modules and it warns you if you adjust one or the other: "white balance" the standard one on the "base" tab and "color calibration" tucked away on the "color" tab. Both modules are turned on by default, but if you adjust one or the other without turning one off it has a big red warning.
- One upgrade decided to reset export settings, and so my EXIF data was stripped out when exporting. It took me way too long to figure it out.
My favorite photo development program remains lightzone, I find it has by far the most intuitive work flow that let's you achieve extremely advanced steps in a quite straight forward way (much of the functionality can be achieved in darktable but it's often very unclear how). I originally bought a copy but it has since been open sourced. Unfortunately it's photo management features are really subpar and development has been quite slow.
I wish I could use it just for the development and use something else for the management, but last time I tried that wasn't really possible. I have looked into contributing several times, but it's written in java and I really don't the have time to invest in getting up to speed first.
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.
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.
I can't get this to build for MacOS, has anyone succeeded? I ran the brew commands from the mac-nightly CI script, did `git submodule init; git submodule update` and get this error running `build.sh`:
``` $ sh build.sh --build-type Release --install --sudo --clean-all;
In file included from /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX14.0.sdk/usr/include/cups/http.h:39: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX14.0.sdk/usr/include/netinet/ip.h:189:2: error: unknown type name 'u_char' u_char ipt_code; /* IPOPT_TS */
```
...etc
> 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
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.
I for one am glad that someone with a more holistic approach takes this on, even if Aurélien is really snarky. Darktable really is a usability mess and is easy to use incorrectly.
I'm also glad he is taking donations, since the darktable project won't take any. It gives me hope that this would give him the freedom in actually implementing his vision.
For those who want to switch to Ansel or Darktable, it's possible to do it in one day with this youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@s7habo The first video you should watch is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsbw98KxMJc Then if you want to learn how to use one of the most powerful feature, parametric masks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfw-GWowH9M
About the Ansel fork, I've used Darktable for 6 years and tried Ansel the last two weeks: if you have never used Darktable, Ansel UX is better for a first time user imo, more streamlined. Keep in mind that I'm biased as I agree with most of the author's points here: https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
innovation in raw developing software is always very welcome. my main gripe with basically all of them is that the controls to manipulate colors are very tricky to use for the precise work that color grading requires. "Curves" is still the de facto standard even if it is a usability nightmare, and apparently simple stuff like "take the non saturated, light blues and move them towards cyan" is very hard or straight up impossible in many raw converters. This is especially painful if you compare that to video grading software and its companion LUT building software, where new paradigms to manipulate color has emerged.
I sincerely hope that this is an effort that will bring the state of the art forward - the author's stance on scene referred workflows is a good premise
This might actually get me to check out Ansel as a current Lightroom Classic user. I tried Darktable a year or two ago, and there were some immediate dealbreakers. I really like the idea of someone capable and opinionated forking a popular project. I’m rooting for him!
> 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.
Some feedback from a long-time Lightroom user:
Nikon "High-efficiency RAW" support is missing. This is IMHO the fault of Nikon and their vendor TicoRAW. If you're going to come up with a new RAW format, then it is your responsibility to commit the decoder to open-source libraries! Sure, patent and license the encoder, but if you keep the decoder closed-source and proprietary, then you're a <insert expletive>.
The installer is an EXE instead of an MSI. Publish an MSI! Use the "wix" tool in your build pipeline, it's not that complex.
The installer and the deployed app are not digitally signed, which throws up a litany of scary warnings and errors. Other open-source developers have gone to the effort of signing their builds.
On first launch the app flashed a command-prompt window up and then disappeared.
The "Exposure" tool has an automatic setting to compensate for the camera offset. Okay... then why did I bother to offset the exposure just to have ansel undo my intent by default? Then... it layers on a default +.7 EV for like no reason...
The overall GUI is completely non-standard and bizarre. I've never seen anything even vaguely like most of the UI controls in this application anywhere else... ever. It's like someone who's never seen a GUI in their entire lives invented everything from scratch.
The non-standard UI elements like the combo boxes aren't just weird, they're buggy too: they don't work consistently with the mouse. I can see the option being highlighted, I can click it... and then it'll pick something else! They only work reliably with the keyboard. In general the "selected item highlight" appears to be off-by-one, but not consistently. It's bizarre.
Colour management is a mess. On a HDR OLED monitor, Lightroom can display wide-gamut and HDR images correctly if the desktop is set to HDR. E.g.: if toggle an image from SDR mode to HDR mode then the only difference is that highlights get brighter and some extreme colours become more saturated. Everything is correct by default and SDR tones don't "shift". In ansel, the colours look wrong and any setting I choose in the menu makes them even more incorrect.
There's a lot of talk of HDR support on the site, and the menus even "suggest" that PQ/HLG support is there... but not really. The export formats are all from the 1990s and modern HDR formats like HEIC, AV1F, JPEG XL, etc... are missing in action.
A lot of the options/alternatives seem like developers being too reluctant to get rid of old, bad code. For example, if a new superior demosaicing algorithm is added, then it's usually best to just drop the worse ones! I tried every option available, and all but one was broken, to the point of returning super-green results or just all-black. Lightroom for example just uses a really good demosaicing algorithm and doesn't burden users with a choice of a bunch of bad alternatives.
In general, the same criticisms apply to ansel that applied to Darktable: over-complicated, too many options, most of which are either wrong or useless. Internal details exposed to the end-user in the UI that should be debug traces for developers, not permanent GUI elements. Easy to inadvertently "break" the whole thing by reordering pipeline elements by dragging and dropping something accidentally.
I suspect that on top of the ~30K lines of code Aurélien Pierre deleted from Darktable 4.0, another 60K should be deleted...
The author's search engine:
https://chantal.aurelienpierre.com
might be the real hidden gem here. It's neat!
I’ve used Darktable and would happily try Ansel. But in recent years ios compatibility became an important feature for me.
My camera can send raw files to my phone wirelessly, with an ios app I can edit them on site and have a draft ready instantly. This is especially useful for events or anything time sensitive - but convenient in other use cases as well.
Still, I have good memories of Darktable and the author’s filmic module, I hope to try Ansel anyway at some point.
If I wasn't exclusively using linux, I would use photoshop (not interested in using wine)
It is good to see some other alternatives out there.
I couldn't get over the steep learning curve of darktable, along with what I perceived to be bloated ui and function
Photo-Editor beased on darktable
This man is on a mission. I love it. The world needs more people like Aurélien.
lmao, Aurélien 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.
Can someone compare this to RawTherapee, pretty please?
Haha, I love his a bit unprofessional tone. :D
So much pent up anger - and I understand! Darktable has a strange approach to evolving their software. They somehow keep everything old and bad as they add improved versions and you end up with tons of ways to do very similar things, and to add to this mess, Darktable often uses its own nomenclature, or a very very technical one. If you're coming from Lightroom or Capture One, you feel like taking your first steps on a new planet. For no reason!
So, I'm sold! I'll definitely take a look at this. He gets it!
pretty awesome tool! next steps are to make a chat interface to this so non photography nerds can use it
On Win 10 downloaded the install pkg but it would not run until I tried program compatibility mode for Win 8 ??
wow, that README is bitter https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
No macOS version?
Looks fantastic!
nice,
not super related but I made a simple tool to publish apple photos to the web.
so hot right now
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.
Beautiful open-source photo editing app, and that's really saying something. A tremendous achievement. However, the lack of a macOS build shows a fundamental lack of market knowledge & project management skill that will ultimately doom this project. It always surprises me when technical acumen is combined with complete blindness to a significant potential customer demographic. I hope they wake up.
EDIT: Am a professional photographer who frequently interacts with other pros on assignments and their own art projects. We're discussing tools constantly and have no qualms between paying for commercial tools or paying in the form of dedication to ascend the learning curve of a less friendly tool. We'll figure out a tool if it's worth it.
“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.”
ok
Ansel makes me think of Nvidia Ansel.
Darktable needs the tantacrul treatment. https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul
Maybe Pierre can pull it off himself. He’s clearly knowledgeable and has strong convictions and Darktable is incredibly powerful, so I’m hoping the good bits from either camp can be reconciled into something lasting, minding the bus factor.
Darktable’s issues and lack of coherent stewardship is quite noticeable.
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.