Curious what experience people here have had with Ansel.
For anyone who hasn’t come across it: Ansel is a rolling-release fork by Aurelien Pierre, the developer who designed filmic RGB and the scene-referred workflow at darktable, then walked away from the project. It uses a continuous-delivery model with frequent builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
The v0.0.0 tag is a permanent “virtual” release that gets updated with nightly packages from the master branch, so despite the version number, it’s actively maintained. The most recent build went out yesterday (2026-07-31):
Aurelien’s own explanation of why he forked, and what he was trying to do differently, is on the project site:
For those who’ve tried it: how does it compare to darktable in practice?
who should use two incompatible raw editors in parallel since they mess up sidecars due to their same roots?
Without experience in using the tools in daily work ‚thoughts‘ is just useless gossip.
In my view I felt handcuffed when I tried Ansel. He deleted modules which I liked because he didn’t like them. So it was do it his way or not at all.
I appreciate the modules AP contributed to DT and I wish he could have continued to contribute to DT but he chose not too. DT is more than a single developer and we have some great new talent and ideas coming to DT.
Dare I say it, but why would I want to continue using Filmic when I have AgX as an option. Even Sigmoid got me away from Filmic.
Ansel is not even going to get a look at from me anymore. You did ask for my thoughts. I am not actually knocking AP as a person so please don’t take it that way.
Thanks @Terry for the thoughtful feedback. Your thoughts on Filmic/AgX/Sigmoid would give helpful educational background to this as well as other discussions, for people not familiar with them (like me) and how they apply to DT as well as any other raw processing tools.
If you have read up on the history of Ansel, you could have noticed that the original author of Ansel didn’t leave darktable development on the friendliest of terms… For me, that history and AP’s attitude did not encourage me to try Ansel.
And now, of course, it appears compatibility is broken, so there’s even less reason to switch. The more so as the website is still very aggressive and negative towards darktable (from which they got the original source code for Ansel, a huge advantage when you start such a project).
You might find it helpful for your own learning to try DT. It has filmic and the other tools you are used to like tone equalizer but it also has Sigmoid and AgX and you can see how each has its own strengths and weaknesses. With DT I have the choice of which I want to use, but that is not the case with Ansel.
Sigmoid is the easiest tone mapper for a beginner and does an excellent job with no intervention from the user in most cases. AgX looks overwhelming but is simple to use once it is mastered. Filmic is my least favourite tone mapper and I no longer teach it to my students when I teach DT classes. It is too difficult a concept for a new user to master. For me I find the effort required to get an edit that equals the quality of AgX or Sigmoid is just not worth my time. But if someone else wants to use Filmic I am not trying to tell them they are wrong. Use whichever tone mapper you are happy with. DT gives me that choice but Ansel doesn’t.
I think it’s futile trying to debate which is a better option and being critical of Aurelien’s. He didn’t like things so he moved away. My take is as an individual you should take the call which serves your photo editing in a better way and live with that, and not look over your shoulder on what Ansel is upto or Darktable is up to
For me DT is what serves me better, so I don’t really care about Ansel
I think Aurilien’s comments are only to provoke. I am not going to fall into that trap
It might be an OK discussion if it focuses on the software, not the developers.
Ansel pros:
Updated colour science to filmic, agx (his implementation), diffuse or sharpen, and modules using dt ucs (color balance, color equaliser, etc).
New modules such as scene referred split toning.
Mostly improved UI, less cluttered.
Deduplication of much code/features.
Ansel cons:
Some deduplication of features might lead to limitating results. Eg. Is it really possible to get the same results using the agx curve + color calibration primaries, instead of agx with the primaries tab dt has?
Xmp sidecar is currently the same as dt, making it hard to use and test both programs together, since they override the same file.
Doesn’t have: all the highlight reconstruction options (missing the best ones), capture sharpening, the improved snapshots module.
Colour equaliser is split into shadows, midtones and highlights.
Fewer dam filtering options, even if it’s much tidier.
I would say this is an easy one…just turn off xmp for testing ansel…if for some reason you wanted to seriously use both then ya managing your sidecars would be tricky…
The masking UI is very different the last time I looked its not in the modules now…you have to go to the mask manager and you have to have the module active so you sort of go back and forth from left to right… But I confess I just took a surface/trival look…
This is not exactly the case. Instead of AgX as a separate module, Ansel has a subset of it as a new color science version of the Filmic module. So you absolutely can compare the behavior of Filmic when set to v6 vs v8, and to me, these are different tonemappers, similar to the original Filmic and to AgX, with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Yes I don’t fully understand the ins and outs of it, but it seems a bit misleading to call it ‘filmic v8’ when it is more like ‘agx v1’ (of ansel’s implementation). I would rather they have one drop down to choose between ‘filmic’ and ‘agx’, and a separate drop down to choose which version of colour science. ‘filmic’ would then go v1 to v7, and ‘agx’ would start at v1 (but what is now currently called v8), if I understand correctly.
And here I was in another post hoping that filmic V8 might find its way into DT and it is not really filmic anyway. I do have to wonder what AP would have to say about Filmic V8?
thanks for this. So reading the notes it is an adaptation of AgX and therefore is not identical to the AgX found in DT. If Ansel’s version is superior or inferior if not something I will get to find out for myself being a diehard DT user.