[DE] darktable.info – A new resource for the German-speaking community (Modern Workflow & AgX)

Software darktable
142

O both posts are clear to me. I have issue with writing as you may have noticed (in any language - including my mother tongue - so I will never contribute to the manual… it will become one big mess). but not at all in reading. These are posts are very clear to me.

But my point in this case was not the language. In this case, it was about how these posts (especially the first) were contributing in understand AgX.

And for reference… I have read large parts of manual. But as someone mentioned earlier, also for me the official documentation is more like an encyclopedia. For me the documentation has not helped me in understanding how to use to darktable. I have just spend a large number of hours watching YouTube, and playing around darktable. And I get mostly the results I want. But has not been the most intuitive process.

I will give an example. I do a lot of a bird photography. And because many birds have white feathers, for which I don’t want to blow out the highlights, I have developed a way of photography which leads often to (slightly) under exposed images. But since often birds have a high dynamic range in the colours of their feathers, there is always a bit of struggle with raising the shadows.

So the first time when I opened darktable I jumped right in, found the shadow and highlights module, and was shocked by how it did not work, is giving halo’s etc. So then in the manual it explains that you should use the tone equalizer. This baffled me… why would someone want to keep to the shadow and highlights module, leave it broken and add the tone equalizer and not just fix the former.

This is an example of the steep learning curve of darktable. My understanding of shadow and highlights, did simply not translate to darktable. Require more effort than I would have had in almost every other editor I tried.

And I don’t find it easy to translate the wording of the documentation of the tone equalizer to a mental picture of what I have to do. So I have ignored the documentation, spend time to find YouTube on that module and then learned how to use.

Note:
I think it is very important to understand my intentions on in this thread. I have said it many time before, I value darktable a lot, and have high regards for the developers. It is phenomenal what they have accomplished and I use darktable with pleasure.

But I would like new people coming to darktable to have a better experience than I have. And I think there are way to improve in that regard. New comers can be a burden. But they can also help - in the future - to grow darktable in ways we now can’t even think about.

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143

I did not. Your writing seems clear to me and your English is quite good. We’re generally our own worst critic.

I dunno, this sort of reads like a win to me. You tried something without any knowledge, it did not work as expected. You read the manual, the manual pointed you to the better tool to use.

Can you point to some specific part of it that caused the confusion? That is how things improve.

144

Perhaps the most egregious part of darktable.info is that it isn’t even free licensed:

The contents and works created by the site operators on these pages are subject to German copyright law. Reproduction, processing, distribution and any kind of exploitation outside the limits of copyright require the written consent of the respective author or creator. Downloads and copies of this site are only permitted for private, non-commercial use.

The license of the content of the forum also isn’t clear to me.

I only now noticed that, and I’m sorry I didn’t catch it sooner. I assumed that it was freely licensed because of the nature of this forum and everything we do here. But clearly it is not freely licensed, and I think the license prevents us from any kind of collaboration on ethical grounds.

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145

If you grab your car manual, does it help you understand how to drive? When you should stop vs go at a traffic light? The manual is not the place for How to guides. The current place for that is in a Blog post and we do need better guides on how to setup, which modules are ideal and how to use each module. Can there be other places, sure. Only a few tried to write any content to share on their processing steps.

This is very inaccurate. darktable user manual - other resources

Because it still works, TE is better, but plenty of folks still use this module, just dont push it too much as the note highlights (pun intended).

Now back on subject: dt.info

While originally I liked the dt.info tutorial ideas, I noticed now too many subtle digs (passive aggressiveness) in some of the content. For example;

Terms like “scene-referred workflow” , “unbounded floating point order”, “gamut mapping” hit you. Or you’re looking to brighten the image and find five different modules that theoretically can do that.
Don’t panic; it’s not your fault.
The encyclopedia problem

Like others, I dont like two forums. A while back we had a dt fork with a lot of excitement. I dont think it ever reached a single release. So time will tell what happens with two forums. I do have a feeling/guess that dt.info will eventually try to monetize some how.

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146

See: Tone Equalizer - How raise shadows.

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147

I can explain that quickly. That will never happen. There will also be no advertising or anything like that.

We have also received several enquiries regarding donations and have referred them to pixls.us.

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149

This is indeed problematic and not intended. We have adjusted the usage accordingly.

Copyright & Licensing

We believe in free knowledge and open source. Therefore, we make our work available to the community.

Content (Text & Photos)
Unless otherwise noted, all text and original photography on this website are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

This means you are free to:

  • Share: Copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
  • Adapt: Remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

  • Attribution: You must give appropriate credit to darktable.info (ideally with a link) and indicate if changes were made.
  • ShareAlike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Screenshots
Screenshots of the Darktable software user interface are subject to the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), in accordance with the licensing of the Darktable project.

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150

As of now, you have complete control and ownership over the content on darktable.info (and presumably over the forum content as well). What happens with that content is entirely dependent on you and you alone as the copyright holder. Note that it seems your collaborates forfeit their copyright to you as well.

So if you decide that darktable sucks and remove the website, the resource is lost. If you forget or unable to pay your hosting bills, the content is lost. If you get hit by a bus, the content is lost, and the effort of you and your contributors is also lost. You could also decide to move all or part of it behind a paywall. You could start charging a subscription fee for it.

The darktable manual is freely licensed, meaning people can use it, quote it, change it, redistribute it, and freely share it. This is also how darktable itself is licensed. The authors of the source code and the manual give up specific rights so that the user and consumer of these things reap the benefits. darktable and the manual are part of the commons; they can’t really be taken away from you (in the philosophical sense).

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151

Apologies for the overlap and thank you for your reply!

152

Was all this text on darktable.info written by a person?

153

Yes, the content is basically all written manually, if that was the question. The content itself comes from different people. We used tools for the translations and then the pages were (and are FR) reviewed accordingly.
The imprint and legal information were freely available content.

154

What does this mean?

155

It refers to content that we did not write ourselves. So to the last paragraph. Perhaps I misunderstood “by a person”; is it a reference to AI content?

156

Yes. There are some interesting choices with structure and punctuation. Maybe its just the English, which is the only thing I’ve read. I don’t read German or French.

157

We used a total of four different translation tools (for EN).

  • Google Translate (poor)
  • Chrome AI Translate (no better)
  • Gemini 3 Pro Translate (quite good, most of the time)
  • Deepl (works best)

@EmerS reviewed all the EN pages. Some of them were at very different stages. Even though writing in English is difficult for me, I can usually read it quite well, even if I may miss one or two subtleties. For me, all of Scott’s revisions read very well. However, this may also depend on personal taste.

158

To be clear, I did not use a fine tooth comb to look for every spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistake (unfortunately I don’t have the time for that), I was looking more to see if the meaning was clear enough in English to follow the instructions and make adjustments as needed. Nor was I looking for ways to change the content Chris had provided unless I noticed any obvious-to-me errors concerning how darktable functions (I have zero technical background, so I may have missed things).

If I missed any errors, I’m more than happy to fix them, just point them out.

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159

I take issue with the following sentiment:

To ve very blunt: Darktable is a technical program. If a user does not want to engage with it, there are plenty of “easy” commercial alternatives that will happily take their money.

What makes darktable unique is that it not dumbed down. It trusts the user to learn, understand, and wield powerful tools. This is its “unique richness”.

I find the framing of “adults” vs “PhD candidates” deeply insulting. If you don’t want to understand what you’re doing, you’re looking for a video game, not darktable. That’s not how you treat adults. Heck, in my household, that’s not even how we treat children. Especially they deserve real, considered answers. Else, they will form wrong intuitions (e.g. contrast and saturation are intrinsically linked; when saturated highlights get too bright, they change hue; overexposed highlight detail can not be recovered).

Above all, this community strives for understanding. We exchange ideas, we learn, and we teach. Many of us do this on other fora, too, not just pixls.us. That’s perfectly acceptable. What I find hard to swallow, however, is dumbing it down. If such advice were given here or elsewhere, I’d object to it loudly.

160

I agree with this sentiment, and this is why I find using DT so rewarding to use.

That said, there is a difference between (a) “hiding the complexity” and (b) “exposing complexity gradually”.

The UI and the docs of DT should not do (a), but ideally they should do (b) - and there is margin for improvement there.

@Qor’s statement above and also some of the wording on darktable.info read more like (a) than (b). I am not sure (and probably I do not believe) that this is the intention, but this is how I (and apparently many others) perceive it.

161

Of course, the comparison is exaggerated, and the same applies to the post to which it referred.
Sometimes a discussion becomes more heated than is good for it. If this came across as derogatory in any way, then I apologise for that.

I think it would be helpful to move away from black and white thinking and differentiate more.

Throughout the discussion, many topics are lumped together.

So, once again, to clarify my personal opinion.

What do I think of the manual?
It works very well as intended. I enjoy reading through topics to better understand things.

Do I think it’s good for beginners?
Not really, but that’s not what it’s meant to do. Its purpose is different. I think it would be very difficult to set up a tutorial section, as can be seen in the existing sections.

Should there be a central point of contact?
Yes, it would be great to have all the important information under one roof. Whether it’s a forum, instructions, blogs, etc.

Then why does darktable.info exist?
Because it tries to fill an existing gap. In other words, a bridge for beginners who receive as much help as they need until they can cope well with the existing content. So the same as with many YouTube videos.

Shouldn’t that be the task of darktable.org?
It’s not my place to judge, especially when it comes to FOSS software. I think it’s fair for users of FOSS to contribute as well. To give something back. So, no, I don’t think so.

My personal request is to please keep in mind that the site is intended for beginners. Our goal is not world domination :wink: but rather a small contribution to Darktable.

It would be nice to put aside any potential conflicts and differences of opinion and work together to find a compromise that is best for darktable.
This is about software, not the survival of humanity.

Chris

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162

Perhaps there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. I/we do not want any changes to Darktable. Perhaps the impression has been created that we do.
For us, the software is fine as it is; we have no concerns about it on darktable.info.
We are concerned about how we can help beginners to use the existing software more easily.

These are two different things.I hope that is clear enough?

Darktable is what it is, and that’s fine.

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