I like Affinity quite a bit but I think their UI is tiresome with tiny drop downs and quirky slider controls that you have to constantly go back to while editing.
2 Likes
Maybe I was quite direct yes. English is my 4th language and I’m using it in a purely functional way, so I’m used to my tone being misinterpreted, especially by the native speakers. Not much I can do about it, but either way it’s a good filter for those who can’t see past things like tone, I wouldn’t want to be all friendly and approachable with them anyway.
I think that this is unhealthy for the project. Moreover, I don’t think the current vector of development in any way treasures the sunk cost anyway, seeing how completely new functionality comes out regularly (not a bad thing at all in my book). I had to learn filmic, then I had to learn agx, just the other day I had to learn how to confirm the mask the AI has proposed. Not sure where the impression of being able to avoid learning darktable is coming from, and learning new semantics for the sake of the discoverability and usability of the project should be taken as eagerly as learning a new tone mapping module, in my opinion. If it’s that there’s 10000 new users less just because we spared the trouble of having the veteran users learn new semantics it’s a complete loss and a sign of project stagnation.
3 Likes
Personally I don’t think that DT needs to be a “free tool for editing raws, in a quick and simple way”.
Now, this is not me saying what DT should be. But just for the sake of argument, it does seem to me that the entire design philosophy of DT (whether by accident or on purpose, I’m not sure), is a set of tools for maximizing flexibility rather than ease. I’m not sure the two are always compatible.
It’s the same with a high-end dedicated camera. I’d say a camera like the D500 is well-designed but it’s also something I wouldn’t recommend to someone as something to “take pictures in a quick and simple way”. That’s a smartphone. The goal of ease and maximum flexibility had to be compromised there.
Can usability be improved? I think so. There are some decent suggestions in this thread like a global command palette. And I bet there are others. But I hope DT never sacrifices flexibility over ease, and if something must be sacrificed, I hope it’s ease over flexibility.
I think calling the DT UI awful is not productive. It’s an emotional overexaggeration of a frustrated user that is probably 20% right and 80% a desire of a person who’s better suited to using a different program. I think if there are some UI changes to be made, maybe specific ones should be suggested with a rationale beyond “it’s not simple for beginners”.
Again, I’m not suggesting that there are no improvements to be made. Maybe DT can be made simpler to some degree. But I think there is a large subset of people who want it changed who have good ideas but who also see DT’s power and want to leverage it without putting in all the effort that would be required to use it, and I think those are fundamentally incompatible. Just like it’s incompatible to take amazing landscape photography without some years of serious practice and study…I think in our modern society we’re trained to think that we can have something as long as we throw enough tech at the problem and that’s simply not the case.
4 Likes
Agree. That’s why I sometime ago suggested to add a search field, at least, for those cases where you know there is a shortcut, but you forgot which one.
1 Like
Give us 10 motivated devs for 2 years and we’ll see 
3 Likes
I like darktable and I also like GIMP. Quirky yes but often giving results you hadn’t expected. I was away from darktable for a few years and came back to find this weird scene and display referred stuff going on (necessary?).
Also masks had changed and worst of all white balance was now inside a very complicated colour calibration tool. So I had to relearn. and discover new stuff at the same time.
Darktable has its own redline - keeping old modules on the offchance someone might want to do a raw re-edit from a few years ago. I find this insane. Someone coming back to darktable to do such an edit would be best advised to start again with all the latest and improved modules.
The UI/UX doesn’t need a massive overhaul. I’m sure a survey on annoying quirks would be enlightening though.
That Safelight project with IDEs might show the way forward. A lot of the darktable screen is often taken up with stuff that I’m not interested in. Might be nice to have options to hide these.
Thanks for your very detailed post, @dfcsd. There is for sure a lot to unpack.
There is a search box that works quite well.
Can the search box be made more prominent and accessible? Yes. But finding modules isn’t hard at all, I would say.
This has been proposed and discussed multiple times. I used to be ambivalent about it, but now I understand why we do not want to hide or confound the pipe order. The reason is very simple: if you do not know what the input of your module is, you cannot possibly operate it correctly. For one thing, raster masks are only published by the previous modules in the pipe. If you do not know which modules come before, you do not know which raster masks are available to you.
In summary, being able to rearrange modules independently of their pipe order may be useful for experienced users (who do not really need it) but would be more harmful than not for novices, who would be just be more confused (why can’t I use this raster mask? why does my image look wrong? which module introduced these artifacts? etc.). The current approach requires a bit more effort (really, it’s not that hard to understand that information flows from the bottom up) but it is way less confusing and error prone.
Should the UI make the pixelpipe order more obvious? Yes. The empty screen that you get when you have no photos in your collection tells you how it works, somehow, but that is not enough. I think that some visual clues for beginners (e.g., numeric indicators next to each active module, or a very clear arrow pointing up next to the right panel) would be very beneficial in this respect. Of course, one should be able to disable these visual clues when one does not need them anymore.
While each tool has more or less it’s own jargon, so I am not so convinced about the “industry standard”, I agree that darktable’s sometimes appears to be cryptic by design.
Agreed, there should be more consistency. Also, the “right click to open the precision selector” or whatever the widget is called is not very obvious, which is a pity. It’s a very cool and useful feature and it should be more advertised.
I agree, there is a lot of margin for improvement there. It’s difficult to say exactly what I don’t love about them, they just feel clunky and snappy to me.
Agreed. I think that having multiple panels would make a lot of sense, especially given that a lot of people have widescreen monitors nowadays. I had also put together a working proof of concept, but it was not received very well:
3 Likes
Here are two actionable ideas:
Modules
I think I have the default install. My layout has 6 tabs. This seems to cause issues with new users.
This is non-intuitive. I found this by accident. If you click on a tab twice (meaning “no tab”(?)), it shows a subset of configured modules, but not necessarily all modules (?). For example, when I do this, it doesn’t show base curve. I have to know it exists to search for it to activate it.
Maybe just a single list in the the pipeline order. Use filters instead of tabs. The default filter would be active modules, plus filters for base, color, correct, effect and however many user filters the person wants to have.
I haven’t though of quick access. I don’t personally use it. I understand it has both a set of modules and a simpler controls for changing the modules.
Modules masks
There are 6 kinds of masks for a module. Can you reduce it to two?
Personally, I only use drawn + parametric (and raster). You have all of the features of drawn-only, parametric only and uniform, so these are redundant. Raster is necessary. “No mask” doesn’t need to be a tab. You can use the reset icon to remove the mask.
This sounds absolutely awful and I don’t think this attitude is acceptable here. Please do better in the future.
It continually baffles me why people start off so negatively and then are shocked by the reaction they get. But it couldn’t possibility the the way you’ve chosen to communicate!
You are right that people “can’t see past things like tone.”
8 Likes
How about “Risk assessment: put the brakes on new module development”
When you actually make suggestions, they aren’t bad suggestions, but this line trivializes volunteer developers’ available time.
If you have one specific idea, a way to enact it, and the time to do it, I think you’d find the resistance around here much reduced.
Put better than me, by someone whose opinion actually matters:
I think Affinity and a lot of similar programs just copy from the most popular program without tweaking too much…which results in Bad UI/UX.
I like the idea of combining the drawn/parametric/both tabs. Maybe in combination with making the separate sections collapsible. I often start with only parametric just to find that I need some additional drawing.
Note that disabling the mask with the “no mask” tab keeps the parameters, though (i.e. I can re-enable it if I want), so it’s not the same as resetting.
2 Likes
I know @paperdigits has already addressed this, but I have to say that this kind of attitude is a surefire way to stop people engaging with you. This is not some “purely functional” forum where we put aside all human decency just to try to get things done. It’s a community, and while it doesn’t have to be always warm and fuzzy, we should at least try to get along to reach common goals.
You probably don’t really know anyone on here, but you have essentially said you don’t want to be friendly with many of them if they care about the tone of your communication, even if you think it’s been misinterpreted. But then your next sentence about it being a good filter basically shows that it’s not being misinterpreted. I’ve seen that kind of “I speak my mind because it’s a good way to filter out the snowflakes” attitude on other platforms, and it’s usually just an excuse for people to act like assholes.
Back to the topic at hand, did anything come of @rudantu’s proposed redesign? Or did he get too busy and it ran out of steam?
8 Likes
I just want to say that I love darktable. it is part of my life. When I moan about it it isn’t because i don’t like it, it’s because it is so wonderful that little issue grate a bit. That’s all. There are lots of things that could be tweaked and improved and I don’t think anyone should really get defensive about that, but if it never improved again I would be still be very happy. 3 days without a working install reminded me of that, big time. Now I am back I am so happy and I haven’t even looked at the new features. I’mmmmmm baaaccckkk!
p.s.
I have one question that might or might not be practical. As we have a css based customisation and theming system, it would be really useful for us css coders, if we had some kind of inspector tool to tell us what classes to customise. What do you think? is there some third party tool that could do the trick? For example, I can’t read the version number in the top left corner because I am old, the text is tiny and it is grey on grey. Trivial really, but it sounds like it could be tweaked to taste with css, if only I knew what element to tweak…
3 Likes
I think you should be able to use gtk-inspector, on linux at least.
Also here are the GTK3 docs for reference.
You didn’t notice that some, if not many, of us like the current interface?
1 Like
That is essentially what I shared from ON1 above…There you have them in alpha order but it could also be allowed to show this with the modules grouped in a custom way…and there is some guidance for each…
These are mainly people want a free version of those programs. If that’s all they’re after then I can’t see why any developer would want to cater to them. Darktable isn’t “free” - it may have a zero price tag but it comes at a cost of time required to learn it.
4 Likes
They are there.
I work from a favourites tab (and occasionally quick access tab). I see no modules that are unlikely to be used. And, they are customised for different locations, etc by styles.
I keep the left panel closed; I don’t use a film strip; I minimise on all four sides as much as possible.
There we are: my picture, my chosen modules and me, a happy boy 
Wait. Stop right there.
Why would we want 10,000 new users. Exactly?
Lack of growth and stagnation are not, outside the commercial world, measured in user numbers. They are measured in active developers, new features, bug fixes, users taking part in forums: not new users
darktable is an incredibly vibrant community. No danger of stagnation whatsoever. Look again at the model you think you are talking about.
3 Likes
Really? I haven’t seen anyone say that, though I haven’t been looking very hard. What I have seen - and probably said myself - is that other software has a better UI than DT. That’s not the same thing.
1 Like