I have created a survey to collect (anonymous) data on how darktable is used, for what and by whom, to help making design and development decisions with a little less guessing and assuming.
It’s here : http://www.poll-maker.com/QSDGDNJ
Please share it massively to your networks, friends, forums etc.
Also done
in Pentax Forums:
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/32-digital-processing-software-printing/377697-darktable-users-coterie-10.html#post4937987
and Dpreview
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/63718074
Done. Though these days I’m mostly back on RT/ART. At one point I switched to darktable from RawTherapee since RT colors and tone were off too much and difficult to fix. Then I discovered .dcp profiles for my camera and now I’m back to RT/ART because they produce great looking images faster/easier than darktable. Meanwhile DT goes through the linear RGB revolution and I’m too lazy to relearn everything again. A few times I tried filmic RGB all I got were kind of flat and washed out images. I’m sure it can fixed with enough efforts, but so far I’m happy with ART.
Great, already 181 participations. Keep it going. Thanks !
Done, but to me it says there are 25 respondents atm, not 182.
By that same end survey stats, it would appear that I’m the youngest user of Darktable atm and I’m 23.
I have mixed feelings about that stat. On the one hand it means that I can find very quality info and guidance very fast since probably everybody has more experience and knowledge about photography and software development than I do.
On the other hand it means nobody is teaching it in schools and “new kids” are not discovering it on their own.
Which wouldn’t even bothered me at all if I hadn’t been forced to used Adobe master collection in highschool and was forced to pirate the entire software suite.
If I had known about Darktable back then, today I would probably be a “doctor” of digital editing understanding not only the editing practices but the source code itself since it’s foss.
Instead, I’m faced with having to unlearn myself from the abstracted Adobe workflow and learn how to actually edit an image and understand what is actually happening to the data.
It’s fun and all but still, it would have been nice if I was introduced to it 7-8 years ago (I know it probably sucked back then but so did Lightroom).
That is because I have a free account on that plateform, and they only afford you 25 users/month, but any other users are still recorded (simply not shown). I wait for the survey to end, so I can switch to a pro account and fetch the full data.
Photography in itself seems in dire shape. Amateurs are teaching amateurs on the internet. Pretty much everyone is self-taught. Then, the less amateurs eventually go professional, and use that as a reference to keep teaching garbage, while they are only the same amateurs they use to be, only with a market. Everyone has this blog or Youtube channel when they try to help but just spread wrong stuff and mix guts feeling with information. People feel they understand color, but they don’t.
If you compare with cinema, there is way more knowledge and skills there, regarding colour, perceptions vs. physics, etc. but there are no discussions between still photographers and cinema photography directors.
So… yep. I don’t like technics and theory more than another guy, especially not while doing art-related stuff, but understanding what’s going on in that box surely helps you choose your fights and not fight everything at once, because you are clueless about everything. Basically every software, every camera, every display has flaws, if you know them and understand them, you can save a lot of time by working around them instead of jumping in them head first.
@anon41087856 yup, it was a big deal for me since, funny enough, I thought of myself as a true professional. It’s only when I discovered this forum that I’ve realized that I don’t actually have a clue about anything and that Darktable isn’t a broken software but that I lacked the understanding of the most basic concepts in image editing.
When I think about Lightroom now, It’s like using a GUI tool for a framework for a language (without actually knowing the language) to do software development. Adobe Lightroom has that level of abstraction as I’ve come to realize.
Then again, it was a very fast workflow, few sliders and you’re done, you’re selling the image.
And since not every photo is art, I was a happy Lightroom user.
I did a lot of holiday apartments, there’s nothing creative in that at all. It was, shoot > merge HDRs > move a few sliders > sell. And for that purpose it worked best. And I guess that’s true for most of those youtubers since I learned from them.
That’s what I lack in Darktable sometimes when I have to edit 100 photos in one night.
This is where find the presets come in handy with Darktable like tone eq clarity preset etc. For those photographs that have nothing to do with art and I just want to be done already. And I hope to find an even faster workflow for real estate with DT. Also what I’ve lost in speed generally, I’ve pretty much gained back with Darktable masking abilities. So yeah, I’m a pretty happy user.
And whenever I capture a really meaningful photo, I know I can go to town on it with Darktable.
Nikon Fotografie Forum (D) Netzwerk Fotografie
@anon41087856, this survey is a great idea. It’s nice to see someone wanting to prioritize what the user base of a package finds to be important.
Unfortunately, I can’t finish the survey. The last page requires giving a star rating to features, some of which I don’t use (e.g., culling: when I get to darktable, culling has already been done in Geeqie). Any rating I give is going to skew your results, so best for me to just step aside.
If you don’t use the culling in darktable, it’s safe to assume that you don’t like it at all, so give it 1 or 0. Anyway, we are past 550 participations, so you won’t bias the stats too much.
Incorrect. I haven’t tried it, because I don’t need it (I’m fine with Geeqie and see no reason to change), so I have no opinion on it at all. There’s no option to give 0. I’ll go ahead with 3/5.
If you do another poll in the future, maybe you should use radio buttons instead of stars for these types of questions, and include an option like “I don’t use the feature.”
Again, I’m really happy to see that you have sought to learn people’s preferences with a poll.
I will.
I’ll be very interested in these results. At least from the 25 results I could see, there was a large majority of deeply technical people (highly educated engineers and scientists).
Which explains my own love for Darktable as well. But then this might imply that DT is essentially “too dense” for other folks. Which is not a bad thing per se. But interesting.
Done. I forgot my current system is now 5 years old. Perhaps a good excuse for an upgrade 
We are past 900 participations now. Keep going !
Ciao, completed the survey and posted the link on FB darktable unofficial group.
Had to think for a second about that snippet of C code, guess I’m getting a bit rusty lol
There is a language for you then 
(badum tssssss)
Thanks for the tip Might be a bit tough though – I heard that if you want to progress with Rust, then you really need Oxygene as a prerequisite…