Who are you trying to appease and why? Nobody seems to be asking for anything.
Read the whole sentence and not just part of it:
I read the whole thread. One visitor (the OP) has asked for anything with any conviction, and even that was just an ask, not a demand, so I am wondering who needs to be appeased? The users looking for a Free Lightroom are present in the user forums for every piece of software making the same requests. Coming back month after month, year after year with the same demands when they find the developers have not yet learned their lessons. Giving them Free Lightroom will not appease them. Iām sure you already know this. Iām sure youāre weary of users, new and experienced alike making requests and demands and recommendations without solutions or contributions, and you seem like you just want to be accommodating, but trying to broaden the appeal without a marketing department might not have he expected results.
On reading this I popped over to the darktable webpage. I have 2 small suggestions that are not too much work.
One might be in the install section shown here
right under the install links there is mention of the FAQ and in that if one were to read it there are links to manual sections but perhaps we could just reword the sentence that refers to the FAQ to include also a mention of the manual and then add a link there tooā¦I know we have the resources page which is my second pointā¦there the top level is for version 4.6 of the manual so we could update that at least to the most current version we have. Back to point one at least right under the download link to install is the link for the manual and the FAQ so that if someone says they couldnāt find it well then they really didnāt look very hard or had tunnel visionā¦
This doesnāt address much of what we spoke about so far here but I think it would be two little changes we could makeā¦
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Youāve answered it with the rest of your reply, without actually saying it: nobody. Just wondering if someone else who is newer will also say it directly as well.
Iām weary of having the same conversation over and over and not getting anywhere.
Iām interested in getting improvements and building a community to maintain what we have.
Iāve been coming around to the idea that we donāt actually want more users, we want more user/contributors.
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I think that with over 250 comments without getting anywhere says it all.
I suggest you close this discussion.
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I donāt know if youāve seen the neighboring threads:
Videos like these are good and help you get started.
More videos are also good, but they ultimately lead to the same problem that exists in darktable: confusion caused by too many modules.
A beginner then no longer knows where the beginning and end are.
Perhaps it would be helpful to categorize such videos into groups on the darktable.org website, so that beginners have a guideline.
Suggestions for this could come from the users.
I already mentioned it in my post above. I see the complexity of some modules related to the scene-based workflow as the main obstacle to getting started.
This isnāt a criticism, and I donāt think much can be done about it. Very good results require such modules.
But as a beginner, do you need excellent results right away, or are good ones sufficient for now? Or to put it another way: Does it have to be a scene-specific workflow right away?
In photo forums, people often ask for a photo editing program. If Darktable is mentioned, others immediately point out that itās difficult to get started.
These are often simple requirements that Darktable can easily meet. Therefore, I would see a step-by-step approach:
- Photo management with darktable
- JPG editing with darktable
- RAW in a display-related workflow
- RAW in a scene-related workflow
- Advanced configuration and Lua scripting
You can do a lot at Level 1, and even if you donāt know all the intricacies, you can start at Level 2 after just a few minutes.
This gives you a good foundation with which you can achieve a lot from a beginnerās perspective.
There are many people - especially the Fuji Users - who are satisfied with the JPGs from the camera, but a tool to manage the images or make one or two simple changes would be great.
If you try it yourself, itās amazing how much you can achieve with darktable and JPG files.
Even at Level 3, you can get good results and solve one of the main problems with JPGs - correcting exposure - without having to acquire too much knowledge.
This creates an incentive for some to invest more effort and tackle Level 4 to gain even more editing options.
I think Darktable already has this potential. Itās just somewhat hidden and not appreciated properly.
When you look at posts and some videos, as a beginner you get the impression that without the scene-based workflow everything is pointless and it is very difficult with it.
For me, the question is, where does Darktable actually want to go?
- Should it be the software for power users who start directly with the scene-based workflow?
- Or should it also be a software for beginners or people with less demands.
If it only applies to the first group, I think thatās a shame, because as of today, darktable is also suitable for the second group.
But then itās clear, and darktable should only be recommended to people who have the appropriate requirements and are willing to invest a lot of learning effort.
This feels like a chicken-and-egg problem. If no other software works like darktable (I donāt think thereās any other scene-referred RAW editor and I think we can agree that darktableās UI/UX and workflow is a lot different than other editors), then how does one become a power user?
I think itās important to remember that for anyone coming to darktable from almost any other experience with digital photography will be faced with something strange and unfamiliar. Itās possible for darktable to embrace its differences as strengths, and market itself in a way that better sets those expectations and encourages people to dig deeper. The darktable home page has some blurbs that are generic and could apply to just about any other RAW editor. The about page has some technical jargon but still feels like verbiage that could describe other products. Itās a contradiction in that darktable is very different from other editors, but describes itself as something that could sound familiar to users of other applications. A shift in this verbiage doesnāt need to be for the purposes of attracting new users, but rather setting expectations. āAbandon all hope, ye who are expecting Lightroom-but-freeā
But that leads to the matter of directing people toward some knowledge. Curating some āofficialā content would be a useful endeavor in my opinion, not just links to channels with hundreds of hours worth of video. Iām working on something for myself, essentially summarizing what Iāve learned and the workflow Iāve developed for myself, thinking about it in terms of what would have been helpful as Iāve been learning. Someone reached out to me recently with similar ideas, and maybe something bigger will come of it. I believe the knowledge, skill, willpower, and value is there to make something happen.
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I would recommend Darktable to anyone who wants an alternative approach with more control over their edits, but it comes with a willingness to learn and to āwork under the hoodā. I had only recommended some introductory tutorials because they would have helped me at the time, but there are plenty out there now, so my comment was off base.
BTW, I donāt agree with the criticism that DT has too many choices. I can point to a couple of commercial programs where local contrast controls are scattered without organization across menus and modules with all sorts of names like clarity, texture, structure and detail. With DT, you know what they are and itās not hard to figure out their differences. And some stash old caches into obscure places on your hard drive and fill up your disk with hundreds of GB of data without you knowing it.
Id say the beginner may need some help getting oriented to start making photos, but after that they have a responsibility to learn. Iād say there is no āendāā¦ Iāve been using DT for years and feel comfortable with it and Iām still learning.
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Darktable is a RAW developer at the end of the day. To edit jpegs people can use GIMP or similar.
I donāt understand the mysticism behind the scene-referred workflow. It doesnāt need a lot of time investment to learn contrary to popular belief, neither does it need a lot of modules.
I think you are over complicating what people really need to learn in order to use darktable for simple raw edits.
You can edit a photo with 4 steps, in order:
Adjust color calibration
Adjust exposure (1 slider)
Adjust tonemapper (sigmoid, 2 or 3 sliders)
Adjust Color Balance RGB (Apply a preset and then use the first tab only)
How much simpler can it get?
Those modules donāt really need any study as well, you can learn them through experimentation and casual editing. 10-20 photos in you will already have a feel for it without reading a single paragraph of the docs.
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Iām starting to get confused as we are somehow now meandering into marketing. Iām not aware of anyone who is currently doing things for darktable that is a marketer. Maybe that is part of the problem, I donāt know.
For me, we are back at the same place we always arrive at, which is lots of ideas, and while sharing and discussing ideas is good, putting ideas into action is better. Thatās where people generally stop.
Iām grateful for the handful of people who are opening PRs on the documentation. Iāve worked with some of you on git stuff to get you going. I hope you all will stick around for the long term, as that is what is needed most.
For this thread Iām done, I hope it results in some action taken, but Iāll believe it when I see it.
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Yes, but GIMP doesnāt have any photo management, and itās destructive. In Darktable, I can make 20 changes to a photo, then discard three, or start from scratch, or even create multiple versions - with RAW or JPG.
Yes, that could be an alternative for step 2.
But at some point in step 3, youāll need to learn more and understand what the sigmoid and color balance rgb sliders do.
feel free to start a new topic with a collection of recommended videos ā¦
FOSS is about contribution, not just suggestions - and in difference to contribute code, contributing guidelines is a quite easy task ā¦
if you know, what youāre expecting, start collecting the most recent and helpful videos according to those topics ā¦
no one who spent a little bit of time exploring darktables capabilities recommends darktable to people expecting just a free lightroom or whatever clone. You also wouldnāt recommend a manual mid format camera to someone just used to take photos with a smartphone 
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why not simply drag the sliders and look at the result? The results count - itās not about editing by numbers ā¦
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Digikam can do the management part, as for non destructiveness, GIMP 3.0 has made a lot of progress in that field so things have changed a bit.
That said I understand your point, but the thing is, darktable is just not for editing JPEGs. There are also other developers which might be better suitable for that and for people who come from lightroom, like ART.
For Sigmoid itās Contrast and Skew, one is self explanatory, the other might appear more complex at first but just by turning it once or twice you understand its function.
For color balance RGB, they are functions that are present in every other editor, so I donāt get this pointā¦ Saturation, Chroma and Brilliance can be found in all other editors and are self explanatory. There is no problem here.
I think people want, first of all, more than their JPEGs. A good tutorial must provide that.
Personally, I feel the simple four-step process falls a bit short of that. To approximate a reasonable editing approach, Iād add at least
- a tone curve (RGB tone curve or Color Balance second tab, possibly AgX)
- an area tone adjustment (tone EQ)
- a color adjustment (Color Balance second tab or Color EQ)
- some contrast/sharpening/denoising (Contrast EQ or DoS)
- a crop and perspective tool
- import and export
At that point, we have a complete workflow thatās roughly comparable with other raw developers.
Perhaps not all of these need to be fully grasped right away. I also suspect that the graph adjustments are easy enough for us engineering types, but my wife is bewildered every time she sees a graph.
So it certainly needs some gentle introduction. But the real challenge is not the raw developer (regardless of brand), but developing a taste and style. To that end, darktable isnāt so different from other programs. Sure, the sliders are different, but the generalities of color harmonies and contrast and composition remain the same.
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Weeelll, besides the fact that not all coming to dt has been passing through other editors first, I think you have illustrated perfectly the difference between a beginner and one with experience ā¦ In particular beginners who donāt speak English natively.
AP has been adamant that the term āSaturationā is (mis)used in a variety of ways in various image processing relations, and that users need to accept that its meaning is different in dt from other stuff they may be used to. (And let us just rest the question what the difference is to āpurityā that we find in rgb primaries.)
Chroma is a word many never have met before they come to dt. What is the relation to āchrominanceā, āchromaticityā, ācolorfulnesā etc. Looking up the CIE definition we find: āThe ācolorationā of a stimulus relative to the brightness of a stimulus that appears white under identical conditions.ā. No problem ā¦ Besides wondering why CIE even bothered to define it all, so self explanatory as it is, one may of course also wonder what it really means - (particularly when we compare to the definition of Saturation: āColoration of a stimulus relative to its own brightness.ā). According to Wikipedia" chroma" is among a group of terms āoften used loosely and interchangeably in contexts where these aspects are not clearly distinguished. The precise meanings of the terms vary by what other functions they are dependent on.ā
And Brilliance? What is the relation to and difference from Brightness, Lightness, Luminance, Luminocity etc., I mean you canāt even find a definition of it in CIE, but I guess that is because it is so self explanatory that they really didnāt bother to define it .
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http://www.huevaluechroma.com/018.php#brilliance
Basically a wander through this excellent site by Dr Briggs would benefit many DT users that need some clarification on terminology and color theoryā¦Also AP basically wrote a manuscript to explain the color terms in the UCS that he introduced into DT. Because DT exposes so much of the color theory and terminology in the controls, modules and pipeline IMO deciding to use DT is more than saying okay module a or b is for color go push some sliders until you figure it outā¦ (of course experimentation of this sort can lead to discovery and learning and is part of the process and Iām not saying donāt do it but maybe do it with some context) Better understanding the rational for the module, the role of the sliders included in the module and the intention or impact of those changes is likely to be more fruitful and productive when at least some basic color theory is part of the base or starting point for a user trying to learn DT.
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Yes, I have had great outcome from reading much of what Briggs have written, and there are some excellent videos on the site.
But thatās the whole point of mine that diving into darktable one meet a lot of new issues and need for learning new stuff - there are much that really isnāt āself explanatoryā, but rather confusing and creates a lot of questions like some of those I listed.
It takes time, but for someone like me it is a great pleasure to steadily increase my knowledge - which I appreciate as an aspect with photography in general - and which you to a large respect have contributed to (thanks a lot!) in the forum over time with the many links like this and to other resources .
But I agree with those who think that we should seek to make it somewhat easier for new dt users to gain that understanding. I remember my frustration over APās hammering that dt users need to spend efforts to learn and understand, and wishing that someone could indicate a curriculum list. And currently Iām working on that.
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You know I went back and took at look at the beginner module presetā¦Itās actually not too bad and really streamlines things and leaves Diffuse or Sharpen out for the momentā¦The QA panel is straightforward for the most partā¦ with single sliders for most of the basic adjustments. People might say oh this is missing or that but if a consistent problem is module overload then maybe the default should be this reduced basic set making clear that there are more advanced modules that can be added or exposedā¦ Most software that has this sort of feature set begins with the simple subset and has a means of then enabling or accessing the more advanced features and dialoguesā¦ Its just a though ie why donāt beginners get the beginner module settingsā¦ Have a look and see what you think??
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