I’m still there, up to my armpits in IBM internals. I do a certain amount of work in C/C++ and a little bit in Metal C, but the bulk of it is in Assembler. BTW, the “Principles of Operation” book (for others, the book that documents how all the machine instructions work) is about 10 times thicker than it was in the eighties. The majority of the new instructions are added for the benefit of compilers, and some of them require 25-30 pages to describe.
As far as photo editing is concerned, I’m constantly bouncing between dt, RT and ART, which is quite ridiculous because I have so little time for editing… I’ve never touched Lr or Ps. The rest of my workflow (RPD and Geeqie) is static; I’m totally content with those.
Indeed I have not. They’re were before my time. I suppose my formative (programming-related) books were “The Art of Unix Programming”, “The Pragmatic Programmer”, and Petzold’s “Code”. And perhaps an honorable mention to “Snow Crash”.
I regret that I really don’t remember why I bought that boxed copy of SuSe Linux 1.0 in our local electronics store. But that sure played a role as well.
My involvement with Darktable started with version 2.4 or so, if memory serves. Several years after picking up my first raw-capable camera. Has it only been five years? That doesn’t sound right. It feels much longer.
Damn, in my eyes you guys are/were working in hardcore mode, something to look up to, even if it got trivial for you at some point.
This is amazing. I’ve recently started getting into synths and am now building a small sequencer with a pi zero 2w and a few shift registers, leds, buttons and a 4x7 segment screen, fun stuff. It’s always very interesting when technology serves art.
I get that the art we do here is also tech serving art, but in a way there’s always a degree of separation since we barely see things printed, and imo it’s always different than when they are on a screen. In music even with all the digital - analog and vice versa conversions that happen during a signal chain, It still reaches you ears all the same and is far more immediate. I guess with acoustic instruments this can be argued, but with analog and digital synths, they were meant to be played through speakers either way, so it’s still valid Maybe this is just a new obsession talking
I may be the odd man out but I tend to use raw editors for editing raws and bitmap editors for editing…bitmaps.
When going through a set of shots, I tend to use DT (or in the case of pixelshift raws RT) to do everything I can to bring the image overall to a state I consider acceptable. I then use Gimp for spotting, cloning and other pixel-related manipulations as well as the GMIC plugin for effects.
I consider both tools as essential parts of my toolkit and although I could use either/or, I find using both for their intended purpose results in a better outcome.
Of course I have not used anything Windows related for almost 20 years now but the relationship between PS and LR sounds very much like that between Gimp and Darktable TBH. I see no reason to not use either tool for the purpose it is best suited to.
Darktable got so good I no longer need photoshop. On the rare occasions I might need a bitmap editor Krita or Gimp usually suffice, with gmic for effects and ImageMagick for repeatable stuff that can be scripted (batch resizing, mostly).
I can get good results fast in darktable by starting with presets and limiting myself to a standard set of modules and making only global adjustments (no masking). This is perfectly suitable for images that don’t need to be terribly artistic, so I don’t see the need to pay for a LR subscription. Only the best shots get treated with all the bells and whistles, which I wouldn’t want to use LR for.
Of course, it took a fair bit of time to learn how to use the tools, make the presets I like, which modules to limit to, etc… so the learning curve was slow, and I can understand one using LR for speed if they are still in the middle of trying to work all that out.
Maybe this is just a new obsession talking 