Improvement Suggestions

Software darktable
101

Hello everyone,

Wow, what a discussion, I’m not going to go over everything that has been said, I’ll humbly share my experience with Darktable.
On Linux I was using Bibble 4, and in parallel I started using Darktable from version 0.9.
What attracted me at that time was the modular system and the modules using the Lab color space. I always got results that met my expectations, until the day I replaced my Pentax K-5 with a K-1.
At that time, I tried several commercial and open source solutions and was confronted with the same problems as mentioned above. I was lost, and the arrival of the Sigmoid module solved my problem.

In the evolution of Darktable, the only mistake I’ve seen as a user was when a developer tried to impose a “marketing” strategy on Darktable.

I consider Darktable to be FREE (LIBRE) and open source software, and with that in mind, I’m free (libre) to choose the modules I want to use or not.
So for me, Darktable will never have too many modules, and I regret that some modules have been deprecated. They should be able to be reactivated, with the exception of modules that have been replaced, such as “crop and rotate”. FYI, I’ve turned them into styles.

My suggestion would be to implement a “tourist” guide for first-time users to help new photographers set up Darktable and suggest a processing style.

My second suggestion would be to implement a hybrid workflow by default: scene referenced before the tone mapper and display referenced after.

Greetings,
Christian

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102

What? For a free piece of junk software that doesn’t even have an official TikTok? Do they at least give out discount codes or something? And if I remember correctly, they didn’t even have a sale during Black Friday last year!!

Clearly, such an unprofessional outfit is not worth investing time into. Much less spending influencer effort on.

I kid, of course. But the notion that free equals worthless is hard to shake in some heads.

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103

Hello @bastibe

I kid, of course. But the notion that free equals worthless is hard to shake in some heads.

Yep. You are right. Lighroom, Capture ONE etc are spending a LOT of money to promote their products, for instance, on YouTube.

However, related to darktable I suppose your previous point is more to the point:

The way two programs use the same names to refer to entirely different concepts completely wreaks havoc with their intuitions.

Usually, most of the complaints about someone’s user experience (with darktable, GIMP, you name it) comes down to this abovementioned problem. That is, from users coming from other softwares and pretty much wanting the same workflow.
The response, to these requests, from the developers and power users is usually:
“you must read the manual” (just kidding) :slight_smile:

104

Having worked in the bakery-pastry sector and sold my products in the supermarket sector, I’ve had this debate many times.
In theory, a free product has no value, but in practice I sold more éclairs with a 3+1 free promotion than with a 25% discount.

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105

The worst one is “developed by programmers, with documentation produced by programmers”…

106

Programmers are people too

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108

Relative to many dt users, or most photographers, I am brand new to this stuff and so I will stay out of the way. When something is difficult to do, I assume its because of my own ignorance and not the fault of a dev.

I will say that for the first year of doing any post-processing, I was using both dt and LR. While LR seems simpler/has a better UI initially, I found it was more time consuming to do anything more complex. My sub ended just after LR introduced “AI” masking/features. So maybe that has changed since. I dont know.

Darktable’s prima facia over-complexity seems, to me, suitable given the fin-grain control it provides. I am not a power user yet, but i appreciate that there are multiple modules that can accomplish the same goal since they do so in slightly different ways.

So…thank you for not making the 73rd LR clone.

If there is one complaint I have, it is that the pdf version of the manual on darktable’s website is from 4.6. It was only within the past few days that I found out the git site has a pdf of the 4.8 manual. That is frustrating to someone who will first go to an organizations website for things like documentation. Maybe its just me. Is there anything I can do to help?

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109

Not really, but these were in the context of finding a Lightroom alternative. If your goal is to find Lightroom, but free, darktable is probably going to be a bit of a shock.

And to be clear, I don’t agree with those sentiments, I’m just acknowledging them. It’s a tale as old as time with FOSS, the free as in beer part is what attracts a lot of people but they have the same expectations as they would commercial software.

110

I’m going to chime in as well just to say that I think the current approach of having the first tab with most of the modules you need to process a picture is very good, and a good compromise given that nobody wants all the modules deleted.

When I first tried DT a few years ago I found it impossible to get good results, so I used rawtherapee instead, then when I was trying to process an image with a totally blown out sky I thought I’d give DT a whirl again and it beautifully rendered the clouds without me having to touch anything, I was pretty much sold at that point, the first time I tried it the huge number or modules onscreen was offputting, but using the quick tab in a new version was much clearer, I think hiding most modules is good enough to get started, I would like to learn some of the tools better, but that’s partly a question of me rtfm where r is “reading” in this case.

another package I use made some changes, the first time the new version loaded it came with a 3 panel “whats new” guide, “these three tools everyone uses are here and here”, it was very good quick explainer.

would anyone find value in having some kind of brief mini guide screen like this on installation?

it could be something like a bubble saying “load your images here, select a folder and press import”

then

“click on an image to select it, double click to load it into the darkroom view”

then

“the quick tab has most tools you need to process an image, try learning these tools first”

and maybe then a link to a few learning resources.

I’m thinking in terms of something very brief so it’s not overwhelming, no million and one tooltips on startup etc

would it be heresy to suggest DT defaults to sigmoid instead of filmic so that people have a usable looking image straight away? I guess that would break some peoples workflow temporarily

I don’t have very strong feelings about this, I’m happy with DT’s UI and defaults as they are for the most part, I think it’s already fairly non-confusing, it’s possible a small amount of direction on installation might guide people towards a simple workflow

111

I actually think pseudo-modules are the solution to a lot of the issues newcomers have with DT. I’ve been using DT for ~8 years and am very comfortable with the module system and the workflow. Once you learn (and sometimes relearn!) what each module does it is possible to get some extremely impressive results. To this end I do not think anything really needs changing.

However, I can also understand how frustrating it is for newcomers coming from another application. Instead of a few sliders they now have half a dozen modules to content with, each with their own set of sliders. The fact the recommended set of modules changes from time to time (with very good reason) also makes it difficult to use older tutorials.

Pseudo-modules could go a long way to reducing the learning curve here. Specifically, if there was a slider-for-slider module which emulated the main controls in Lightroom this would greatly aid newcomers. Under the hood the module would of course just parametrise existing modules (turning them on and off as needed). The key benefit here would be that people would be able to see what is going on underneath (so how when they push/pull shadows they can see what techniques are being used in DT accomplish this). It doesn’t need to be feature complete but just aim to cover the main high level features.

For me the psychology when moving to a new application is to first understand if it can do what I want. If I can convince myself of this then I’m more than happy to invest time in learning precisely how it works and its nuances. Thus, the key is to make it as easy as possible to do the basics to convince the user that this application is capable and can do what they want.

Regards, Freddie.

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112

It’s easy to set filmic or sigmoid as the default. I actually default to applying both but inactive so I see the image first and decide if I actually need either. I adjust exposure and see where that leaves me… I can toggle either of them on for a look-see if I do find it necessary

113

yes, I guess what I’m saying is that a new user won’t know they can change the default necessarily, I don’t think having filmic as default is dealbreaker, I came into DT with the idea that my images histogram should fit on the display and sigmoid was a revelation in that regard, I spent a lot of time tinkering with filmic and eventually got fairly good at using it, then I heard about sigmoid and it was often a quick press of the “on” button and that was that, very handy when processing a lot of pics at once.

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114

Nobody prevents anyone from writing user documentation…

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115

what do you mean?
Darktable’s programmers are also passionate photographers.

116

Also the implication that because I’m a programmer I can’t write documentation.

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117

Well, although the statement is very generic is do see what @epeeist means.

Often, what for developers (who wrote the software) is fairly obvious - because they have a very technical background - is not so officious for less technical users. But that results in that users do not understand the documentation.

Let me give an example from the DorS module. If you are not a color scientist, a software development or a mathematician, and you read the documentation that you read this sentence:

2nd order speed (laplacian)
The speed of diffusion of the low-frequency wavelet layers in the direction defined by the 2nd order anisotropy setting.

Then this make no sense at all… What is a laplacian (not explained in the documentation) wat is anisotropy?

Another example form the dither or posterize module:

Floyd-Steinberg (default): Systematically distribute quantization errors over neighboring pixels. This method can be selected with some typical output bit depths. Alternatively, you can select Floyd-Steinberg auto, which automatically adapts to the desired output format.

Wow… Again If you are not a programmer is this field, you have no idea what this means.

These are examples of what is often an issue if none-developers read documentation by written developers. Developers have the tendency to write in documentation how the element int the program (sliders in this case) function. But are often less aware of what a task a user what to accomplish…

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118

DoS is a beast, yes, but the description of dither clearly describes, right at the beginning, what it is used for:

This module eliminates some of the banding artifacts that can result when darktable’s internal 32-bit floating point data is transferred into discrete 8-bit or 16-bit integer output format for display or export.

Someone who is not interested in the details, can simply try the different settings to see which one looks best. Plus, the user guide should not copy Wikipedia to define every term.

What I do think is missing is a kind of “cookbook”, listing common problems:

  • Working with high dynamic range
  • Enhancing contrast
  • Reducing noise
  • Handling lens issues (distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting)
  • etc

If we want, we can create it. Or we can sit and complain and wait for someone else to do it.
Will anyone read it? Nowadays, people seem to go to YouTube for everything, and several people (quite a few also active on the forum) have provided excellent guidance there.
Of course, the cookbook could also refer to videos. But unless we keep it up to date, it will become obsolete surprisingly quickly, I think.

Shall I open a new topic to collect what topics would be interesting?

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119

And you think that this is clear for non-technical users? It would say this also describes it:

This feature helps reduce unwanted lines or stripes that can appear when converting images from darktable’s internal very high-quality format to standard formats for viewing or sharing.

But of course, this is for us programmers not providing the details we want.

Please beware, I don’t say that the documentation is bad, no far from, it is excellent! But the documentation is not written for an audience that has no technical background. And that makes it hard if we refer to it, the non-technical audience get’s frustrated and thinks that DarkTable is just a bad program.

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Can you provide an example with your explanation of how the module works?

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For the DorS module? No I have no idea to do that at this stage. Especially because you need to explain what those speed sliders are doing. That is so hard to explain in non-technical terms… As already mentioned before…