(Side note: staying convinced that you are an eternal beginner is probably the best way to keep learning new stuffs in your field).
Thinking that you know what a photographer needs is a total nonsense. Maybe you think you know what you need to do your style of photography, and that’s about it. Be a little humble and people will listen and respond to you. If you already know everything better than everyone else, you don’t need to come to a forum to discuss it, because you won’t have anything to learn.
I’ve been programming for over 30 years, and I wouldn’t dare say what a programmer needs or how to do it. I’ve been doing image processing for over 30 years, and I wouldn’t dare say I know enough about it. Hopefully, I’m still learning. The only thing I’m sure of is that these fields are too broad to pretend to know anything about it.
Your approach was really bad, try to realize that.
In this case I don’t think that the need is misunderstood, it was your initial approach to conveying it. That folk are still engaging you here should be evidence that there is motivation to consider it; some of the posters in this thread are major contributors to the software you’re probably most interested in using. But attempting to shame them into meeting your needs is probably not the most effective approach.
In the time I’ve participated here, I’m continually amazed at this dynamic: a new member posts “I’ve abandoned LR and I have a problem using RT/dt…”, and within a few posts the problem is clarified and sometimes a fix is committed to the source tree. Try getting that sort of responsiveness dealing with the commercial software houses…
Sometimes I feel like open source developer are not really open to criticism. Too much shoulder padding.
Coming to darktable/Rawtherapee, to me they feel like ‘pure’ tools, they are perfect if you have ONE image to develop. In Affinity I can get the sky from another image, add trees, or tigers if I want to, or add a Happy Birthday! - nice, but it’s not what I need in a RAW developer. I still prefer dt for my RAWs.
Not quite. Here, when one is conversing with @heckflosse about RT demosaic, they are talking to the “chief cook and bottle-washer”, and if he agrees a thing needs to be changed, it ends up in the source tree post-haste. At the Adobe forums, developers might participate, but I’m pretty sure they’re not the only ones who have a say about what/how their source tree is shaped…
Thank you for this wonderful lesson in humility!
Can I pay by credit card?
All kidding aside, all the professional photographers I know (including me!) Open their photos, sort them, select them, rename them, label them and process them in a single software package, before exporting them.
I’m talking about people who do photo reports (corporate events, press photos, weddings, real estate, etc.) and who have to work quickly and cleanly.
None of the photographers I know will juggle multiple software when they can do what they need to do in one software and it does it well.
So, I don’t think I know everything, but I do know that.
And I also know that while Lightroom, Capture One Pro, Aftersot Pro and others offer certain functions, it is not to make the software look pretty or to make the software unnecessary, but because customers need and demand it.
If we can’t hear that, we can wait a long time for the general public to come to free software.
(Hope my text is understandable. I am using google for translation)
I will grant you that point. But questions are often quite basic and probably many users can give support. And a good coder is not automatically an artist.
(@heckflosse has somewhere here some quick edits that I all bookmarked, great stuff!)
@Eric_de_Nice. You might have missed one of the basic things in Linux design: make one program for one task and be sure that it works well. So use RT/ART for raw processing and for renaming for example gThumb.
This last little program has a powerful rename function where you see the new name before anything is renamed. Simply select a lot of photos, then apply nearly whatever you want. See screenshot.
We? I think it is fair to state that no single develeoper of open source software is interested in that, market share. They just want to make bloody good software, nothing less and nothing more.
PS. Visit Github to ask for new functionality, devs are often very open to that. (But psst, be a little polite!)
“Free software wants the healthier community it can get”
Does that mean that professional photographers who currently use Lightroom, Capture One Pro, or other similar commercial software are not part of a community “healthy” enough to make them want to come into the free software world?
Does he need to be? Does a manufacturer of internal combustion engines need to drive the F1-car around a racetrack like Michael Schumacher did? Both, the engine manufacterer and the driver are artitst, but in a different way, though only if they are good at there special tasks.
And they have to work together…
Thanks paulmatth for your reply.
I know gThumb and it is indeed very good (simple and fairly clear interface) for batch renaming images.
But my problem is that (to my knowledge), it does not allow to sort the images by giving them a rating (star or color) and then only rename the images thus selected.
So, unless I missed something, it’s mostly useful for batch renaming images … that have already been sorted elsewhere.
Otherwise, I don’t think I’m rude.
I’m just saying it clearly and bluntly.
No. That was actually my point. Although I believe most developers have an interest in photography. The user side is more clear, you can be an ultra expert user and have no idea about coding whatsoever.
Suppose a bunch of professional photographers that participate in healthy communities from commercial software (I know they exist, of course) come in.
After using darktable (the one I can talk about), they start asking for developers to simplify its somewhat messed up GUI: “Why don’t you make darktable simpler, like ACR, where a minimum of slider tweaks gets you a very nice image?”
You know what, this kind of demand is here, in the forum, and you know what, developers stated that they won’t do it. Period.
What is the next step? Initiate a fight with the developers? Fork the code and start a new, simplified darktable version? Realize that free software don’t give you what you expect, so leave the forum and get a new licence from software X?
“* The user side is more clear, you can be an ultra expert user and have no idea about coding whatsoever. *”
Absolutely.
And that’s why I find quite revealing the speech of people who say that if you are not satisfied with free software, you just have to shut up and improve it yourself.
Above all, they are computer scientists who do not appreciate criticism from “laymen” in what they consider to be their reserved domain (I will still make friends ).
That’s welcome (though you do not need to mention this, as your past posts never have been desctructive in my mind)
The whole point of this discussion should be to give constructive criticism. But that is not what the op gave at all (especially by opening the discussion with God said...)
I assume, all developers are open for constructive criticism, no matter of from dt, RT, ART, Digicam, RPD, whatever. But i can only speak for RT, and for RT I know that we are open for constructive criticism. And (this is adressed to op) if you feel wer’e not, please open an issue on github.
This means that if an F1 driver makes a remark about the car, the best is that the mechanics do not answer him: "If you are not happy you just have to make your own F1 the way you want it. wish. "…
(though you do not need to mention this, as your past posts never have been desctructive in my mind)