The idea that if your work is brilliant enough it excuses you from being a decent person is so tired, dated, and old. Even Linus had to go to some personal development classes where they taught him that it is not OK to swear and call people names. Maybe this will happen at some point for AP too. One can only hope.
I feel sad that you’re still of the opinion that his technical prowless excuses his human interaction shortcomings.
I’ve never said I like or approve of his “ways.”
I’m saying we’re talking about tools for good RAW photo editing. I’m not going to dwell on a developer’s past social awkwardness. I’m only interested in his work. Anything else is like a medical diagnosis, and I’m not qualified to do that. Maybe you are.
Cheers.
This is still tacit approval. You can use and like Ansel, that’s fine, but you miss that many of us have had extremely negative personal interactions with him, and that make us not want to use the tooling.
You don’t need to be a doctor to see that he could use some professional help.
A lot has changed since then. Things might be different now. Six years is a long time in the world of software development.
Cheers.
I only managed to last through fifteen minutes of said video. Any interest I had in trying Ansel evaporated after seeing that display. Depressing.
Swap “developer” here for any vendor/creator, and it doesn’t seem that strange for it to be a determining factor. That’s what boycotts are all about. When I’m buying anything, I try to assess how ethical the company is or how the vendor/creator treats their users/customers. It’s not always easy and it’s not always the make-or-break factor, but it’s ok for it to be part of the decision.
When this thread was posted, it was inevitably going to be about both the tool and the person. It wasn’t just a post about Ansel, it was a 4hr+ video from the developer of Ansel, a huge part of which is dedicated to criticizing many of the people on this forum.
Not that I think we should dwell on this aspect anymore, but this thread was always going to react to it, and I think that’s very understandable.
It’s not my intention to offend anyone, nor to defend anyone. We’re all adults and know how to use arguments to support our opinions.
I simply wanted to make it clear that I’m interested in the tool, and whether or not I use it doesn’t depend on the developer(s), but on how well-built and useful it is. I’m not an artist, I’m a craftsman. If I wanted to talk about morality, I wouldn’t be in a technical forum about raw image editing tools.
But I understand that some people are upset by the comments from the Ansel developer.
And I’ll stop here, so as not to bother anyone and lengthen this thread. For my part, if I took that aspect into account, I wouldn’t use Linus Torvalds’ kernel, nor probably Fedora, or Ubuntu… and many others. However, I do use them.
Reflection: Sometimes we’re very thin-skinned about certain issues, only to contradict ourselves and end up using what we’ve criticized. (I’m speaking to myself, not to any of you).
I’m still giving Ansel a try.
Have a good day.
Just trying it on a couple of more images, the autopickers don’t really seem to work well when using the agx color science modes… the will set to quite low levels and in some cases it seems to undo the agx …I might be using it wrong though…but it’s an initial observation…
No, we are not.
We are talking about a four-hour video. Allegedly (I haven’t seen it) a lot of criticism of darktable is involved. If that tempts you to try his software, fine, anyone can do that.
A four-hour video is a person thing. That’s why we are talking about the person. As well as the software. Or what we were doing: it was fizzling out, as most topics do, until you turned up to tell us that we shouldn’t have been doing it.
The best thing to do with a disliked forum thread is to leave it alone. Time takes care of the rest 
So as long as he isn’t a horrible person to you directly, you’re good with it? Or are you willing to tolerate verbal abuse from him too because the tool is that good?
Note that neither of these sound good, but that is what you’re saying.
But that doesn’t mean we should have to completely ignore the knowledge he is sharing either.
For a ‘product presentation’ it was one of the worst things I have seen ever. And if someone promotes his own application by putting another down, I get very skeptic…
But that doesn’t mean we cannot learn…
Who is “we?” How much verbal abuse are you personally willing to tolerate?
With ‘we’ I meant us as the darktable community. I am not saying that everyone, should watch this four hour video. Which is mostly a rant.
I completely understand the feelings towards AP. And yes, it is abuse.
But AP is a very capable software engineer. I took a look at his comments on the code and other things. Often it a matter of preferences but not everything. He is making some good points.
So I do understand that you personally don’t want anything to do with him. But I don’t think that we should ignore him altogether.
And if his Ansel project really good, I think I will have a look.
FWIW, Darktable developers are not ignoring ansel, but backporting improvements they consider worthwhile, eg
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Most of us are not talking about “morality”, but a very basic set of manners that enable people to work in a cooperative environment.
This is not a high bar to clear, and most people are capable of it: you resolve tensions, not escalate them, listen to others, answer nicely, don’t take criticism of you work or even just questions about it personally, don’t denigrate the work of others even if you would have done it differently, etc.
This is one of the most important points in this whole business. Multiple people saying “we should not ignore AP’s ideas” sets up a false impression that his ideas are ignored.
It’s also pretty one-sided, as from what I can tell, there is next to nothing new in darktable going back the other way into Ansel. Not having Sigmoid isn’t an accident, it’s a feature.
This kind of deep dive is appropriate to ask of someone wanting to be involved in that specific project, not of users that have different priorities, favored tools, and established workflows.
I’ve tried it out of curiosity, but I’m also going to skip it when it comes to working on photos. I should be able to do that without being told that I should have tried longer, harder, and engaged directly with AP (the last won’t happen again). Everyone has different goals, different claims on our time, and different reasons for our actions that we are not required to explain.
I think it’s good that it exists and there are other people trying it. What I personally don’t want to read anymore are vague “there are good ideas here we shouldn’t ignore” statements (we had a whole thread of that recently shut down because it devolved into mocking and sarcasim). If someone sees something they like that might make sense in darktable (or ART, or RawTherapee, or Spektrafilm…), a single thread about a single idea and a discussion about whether and how to make it happen does a lot more good than setting up like there are two competing teams.
Regardless, I feel like Ansel is a perfect example of code and theoretical design choice over usability. The interface really looks off-putting. A lot of people tend to think that darktable has a bit of an engineering-over-usability vibe, and maybe it does in some ways, but Ansel takes that to such an extreme that at least I found it discouraging.
I very much question the ui-decisions. He kept on talking on menu’s. Well I am happy that darktable is not doing.
But actually the code itself (which is a completely different topic), he is not wrong.
Thanks for that update!
Can you tell us more about this? I was at a time interested in understanding the conceptual differences between filmic and sigmoid, read through a couple of threads on it (AP vs the author of sigmoid), but never caught that there are psychovisual emulations.
I read this thread and the readme @Jiyone shared. To me I think it is time for AP and the Ansel developers to move on. Make the best software you want to make. But I think y’all should stop the constant comparing with dt to validate your feelings on why create a fork. I don’t think anyone cares, of course except AP.
I think the ansel comparisons to dt are a very valid way to discuss the tools. After all, many people will be wondering, why should I use this darktable fork over darktable? And a comparison between the two answers exactly that.
The unfortunate part is the personal insults, not the tools comparison.