darktable user survey

Software darktable
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I wouldn’t say we are all rich, I know I’m not. I’m busting my ass of with a crop sensor camera often times for less then 1 euro per image and the most for 20eur per image that I’ve spent hours working on. I’m borrowing better equipment whenever I can and using all open source software for everything. Yes, I have a vm and I have Lightroom in it (you deduce if it’s pirated or not).

Also poorer countries still follow the western practies so what better way to promote the software then to have highly educated and rich people use it?

One thing why ppl with lower living standards don’t use Darktable is b/c the weren’t introduced to it and b/c they all watch Peter Mc’Kinnon and he is using Lightroom.
I honestly think we can change that. There is enough knowledge, time, money and effort on this forum alone to do this.

There are are rough edges in Darktable that keep professionals of any status from adopting it and those have to be identified, recognized and worked on.

Look at Linux, nobody was using it. Now Dell ships all their laptops in Croatia with Ubuntu preloaded. You can’t buy a Windows Dell laptop in Croatia. Mostly b/c they realized that ppl don’t have money and will go with Ubuntu for the lower price and pirate windows if they don’t like the experience but still!
Also, a few years ago nobody knew about Linux, a few Linus Tech Tips videos later everybody has at least heard of it. It’s now in our every university and if the creative foss software continues to grow like this I’ll bet you anything we can get Darktable in schools too.

Just wait untill some big Youtuber gives Darktable a true chance and start hanging around here an all the marketing problems will be solved.

One thing to note. LibreOffice is now being preinstalled in all school laptops that are being distributed to teachers and professors.

What I’m saying is; this is not the time to give up, this is the time to fully rise.

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62

Which of course begs the question: what audience(s) is/are the target audience(s)?

Aurelien’s survey aimed to characterize the existing audience. He was unhappy with what he took from the data he collected.

There has been a fair amount of discussion on this thread about trying to compete with Lr, and that has come up not infrequently in the past. Clearly some portion of the current user base wants to overtake Lr as the raw developer of choice for photographers. If that’s the right direction, then much needs to be done to work on easy-to-consume documentation and entry-level tutorials, which is a tough ask when the package is developed by interested volunteers.

Or should dt (and RT, ART, etc., for that matter) emphasize what makes it capable of producing wonderful output and spend less time looking in the side view mirror at Adobe?

And, at the end of the day, who decides?

63

As an open-source developer with a target audience of 1 (Me!), I do. I took a rawproc user survey just a second ago, and I responded quite favorably… :smiley:

Seriously, there are decisions on both sides to consider. dt is decidedly targeted to the user who’d want to spend their effort crafting quality images, and I think it’s making inroads to more folks in that genre. I think it also has potential in the time-constrained professional workflows, but that aspect hasn’t been communicated richly, to date. If dt wants to be in the trade space for a particular workflow, then it needs to bring tools to that table for consideration. That may be just an education campaign, and/or there may be development needed to accommodate.

Or not. There’s clearly need for dt as it has been developed and communicated. If the devs are content in that genre, that’s good also. If all else fails, there’s always the aptly-named fork…

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64

If it was actually available to anyone, we would see a similar distribution of users solely based on population density, no matter the country or the education level. Every non-gaussian histogram of population says that non-random causes are at work. We need to find them.

It’s fair to say that huge inequities are at work in the World right now, and if we get even a slight chance to make that better through coding, we shouldn’t disregard it.

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65

How is it not? github is pretty accessible… Okay, if you want to drag oppressive governments into it like North Korea, maybe, but the Internet makes git clone a rather trivial thing.

Really, open-source and it’s present infrastructure is as close to a perfect supply chain as anyone could hope for in this day. Really, what needs to be done to make the horses come to the trough?

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No it’s not. My grand-parents don’t read English and also don’t understand what a code forge is. Having Github 3-clicks away doesn’t make it accessible to them.

It’s fake accessibility.

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67

Would you consider an internationalized home page, an internationalized install page, and an appimage to be simple enough for them?

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68

Yup. They use Ubuntu :wink:

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Maybe that’s a good approach to lowering the barrier to entry, at least for novice Linux users.

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Oh, appimage. That IMHO is the single most effective next-thing to do to increase dt consideration. Linux distros are a bit of ‘wild-west’ in terms of consistency, 'specially in the support libraries…

1 Like
71

Well, at the risk of making myself a target for certain individuals, I can’t resist a response here.

There are perhaps other factors that might have been overlooked (at least as far as I can make out by scanning down this thread).

I’d take exception to much of the reasoning going on here. I’m not rich, but not especially poor. I can, or have been able to, afford to buy modest camera gear, but at the same time want/need to minimise my monthly outgoings.

I make no money from my images, they’re purely for my own use and enjoyment. I’m happy with Lightroom, it does a fine job at what it does, it’s probably the best all round DAM/Editor solution there is, and the best overall value. But even that few pounds a month saved would be welcome, as we are so overwhelmed now with various monthly subscriptions in the ‘First World’.

As a household, we could be looking at Broadband, Sky TV, Netflix, Streamed Music, Disney TV, iCloud Storage, Apple TV+, Mobile Phones, and on top of that little lot, there’s all the old software I’ve been using for years now charging me a monthly fee - of course I don’t necessarily subscribe to all of it, but the potential cost is scary.

Now, I get the purpose of darktable, at least now I do, it’s not meant as a replacement for the likes of Lightroom (so why does it still include a Lightroom edits importer?).

Anyway, I digress, had anyone considered that the ‘Third World’ regions might just be simply less likely to have large numbers of Raw capable camera owners? There will be a lot less disposable income in such places, so a DSLR and a selection of lenses is unlikely to be a priority. I’d suspect there’s also probably the widest rich to poor gap as well.

Have you tried overlaying the data gathered here over a similar map of DSLR sales?

Of course that is all just a bit of guess work, but would seem logical to me.

72

Third world doesn’t necessarily equal poor. Third world is a way of describing those countries that are not part of the American influenced countries (first world) or the (former) Eastern communist-socialist states (second world).

All the oil producing middle eastern states, India, Africa and all of Central and South America are seen as 3rd world.

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73

@anon41087856, if you find yourself doing a further survey at some point, maybe the following sort of questions might be worth including:

  • I use darktable on (provide list of platforms including common Linux variants, Mac, Windows, and of course “other”) .
  • I found it [easy | somewhat difficult | very difficult] to find the appropriate dt package for my system.
  • I found it [easy | somewhat difficult | very difficult] to find installation documentation written in my primary language.
  • I found it [easy | somewhat difficult | very difficult] to obtain assistance for installation problems, at a level I could understand.
  • I found it [easy | somewhat difficult | very difficult] to find information about how to use tools in dt.
  • I found it [easy | somewhat difficult | very difficult] to obtain assistance for problems with tools in dt.

Here on the forum, we see the difficulties some people encounter among those who have found and joined the forum. We don’t see how many people don’t have problems, or how many of those that do have problems either suffer in silence, skip using a particular tool, or just move on from dt.

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74

That’s actually a good idea. Detailed review since in the making.

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75

I didn’t say they were poor countries, they do have very rich people in them. But they do have a massive divide between those that are rich and those that are not.

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I though I read that between the lines. Sorry for misinterpreting!

Yes. That is absolutely true!

I did mention it though 'cause almost all the people I come across seem to have the idea that 3rd world equals poor.

OK, nuff said. Not what you meant.

77

hi,

silly question, but if your primary concern is to save money, why don’t you use Adobe bridge, which is gratis?

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78

That’s another part of the reason for my search for something to replace Lightroom.

It’s not entirely all about the money, it’s also about my trust on the large corps. As Adobe have broken promises regarding subscription only services, as well as failing to delver the promised functions in the new Lightroom, and having suffered at the hands of other losses and changes over the years, I’m trying to work towards not being dependent on them in the future.

I would not assume that the subscription service would stay at a reasonable price level forever, and I wouldn’t assume that Bridge would remain as a free standalone forever too. They might never change, but the historic evidence indicates that nothing is for certain either way.

Of course I have no way of knowing if darktable (or anything else) will be around for any length of time either, or that it will continue to work on any hardware I have, or that future developments wouldn’t break my favoured workflow, as v3 very nearly has.

I would like to redesign my workflow so that I’m not dependent on any specific software for any part of the workflow. At the moment, I have all my management and editing within Lightroom, and I’d like to change that. I’m being very cautious about the next move, as I don’t want to be in the same trap. For all it can do, darktable also still has that same dependence on the software if you want to continue using a fully non-destructive workflow.

Of course I know I can always edit and export, and that might well be my next plan. But even with a modest number of images, it still needs something to manage it all.

Apart from all that, I’ve only ever found Bridge to be very slow and cumbersome to use,

Cheers.

79

Unless the unimaginable happens and someone develops raw processing tools as pluggable entities, and gets all FOSS and commercial projects to use those entities, the results of your processing will always have a dependency on the software used to do the processing.

At least in the FOSS world, you can keep and use the same version of a package that you used to do the developing in the first place and get back identical results (not that you are likely to want to…both the tools and your skills improve over time, and you are likely to get better results via a fresh edit).

1 Like
80

Indeed so, which is why it’s been such a problem in choosing a replacement. I realise that using any kind of non-destructive workflow will inevitably mean using something that encloses my collection of photos into its own system.

Good points of course, although that might only work as long as you don’t upgrade your own hardware/OS etc. (such as moving from Motorola to Intel CPUs, or 32-bit to 64-bit only, or as might be happening in the nearish future, Apple might move to their own Axx series CPUs.

At some point, you’ll probably be forced to update the software, but as you say, you can take advantage of fresh edits using newer tech. That’s something I’m not averse to, and embrace such things (to a point, you don’t want to be re-editing every few months).

Another consideration is that as tech is advancing now, I might well not stick with using a traditional Desktop/Laptop machine, but perhaps switch to using a more mobile device - the latest iPad Pro is so close to being able to do everything I need, for example. But most FOSS is not available on that platform.

Regards