I am sure I know the answer to this question will be no, but I will ask anyway. The best camera is the one you have with you and I use my iPhone 14 Pro quite a lot these days to take some half-decent images that I would like to catalog and process in darktable.
Currently, darktable does not support accessing the Apple Photos catalog. It also does not support Apple ProRAW images or HEIF. I have to export to PNG or TIFF to catalog them and make some small adjustments.
The global camera market is about $15b, whereas the global smartphone market is $500b. Probably, in the years to come a lot more serious photography will be replaced by AI and what humans do photograph will mostly be done with smartphones, while real cameras become an even smaller niche.
I know many here will call me a heretic, but I wish to ask if darktable will be interested in adjusting to camera trends by supporting smartphone catalogs and image formats?
Both are processed in darktable. One can argue about the saturation and crop, but what one can’t argue is that they are really quite close in quality and both cameras are capable of capturing good quality photos.
Which is why I would ask the darktable devs to embrace the future of photography.
Well, it doesn’t support accessing Lightroom or digikam catalogi either. Perhaps because those are basically databases with a “private” database scheme (which can and does change between versions, just like darktable’s).
As for reading Proraw or Heif files, a simple google search shows that those formats are being worked on (and afaik, heif should be readable already, at worst as an option at compile time).
I agree on this - my Nokia’s DNG files are supported by darktable (mostly - no denoise profiles) and it’s an excellent camera, albeit wide angle only.
I believe Pixel phones are supported too, so it’ll be good when ProRaw support becomes a reality.
(no offence meant at all, but trust Apple to use something different to everyone else!)
That’s a very limited view of photography if you ask me. Ok many phones today can create decent pictures of landscape with good light with large depth of field. But try some studio work or sport / spectacle where light is limited and the speed is important. Or if you want a short aperture for short depth of field. In other words, some photographs are doing something else than landscape
And if you ask me the future of photography is not a phone but IA, should we also embrace this?
At the moment I would say you are mostly correct, but the speed of improvement in sensors and computational photography is significant. I enjoy playing with my toy camera iPhone and it produces some good images in different genres. I got better images with my camera, but still I think I could also have tried harder to push the iPhone and maybe the result would have been event better.
@Steven_Adler You have me looking at trying to work with iPhone raw images, again. I put a lot of effort into it a year or more ago, and I gave up. My phone is a 13 Pro Max. Today, I shot a test photo in what I think is Pro Raw, but maybe it is just raw. I really don’t have a grasp on this stuff, yet.
Anyway, trying to process the .dng (whichever raw format it is) in darktable, I was unable to get anywhere near the result of the .heic (Apple processed High Efficiency Image Compression) file. Oddly, the .heic was rotated 90 degrees. Rotating it back to the correct orientation is the only correction I made in darktable. This is the heic converted to jpg::
I have several duplicate attempts at editing the raw dng. I wont even try to say that this is the best one, but they are all pretty bad compared to the .heic. I am most dissatisfied with the washed out color of the top (in the photo) rim of the flower pot, but nothing I tried made it look right.
I can edit ProRaw files in Pixelmator Pro and Luminar Neo. CaptureONe could read them too. Mostly they were easy to edit but produced some banding and noise when pushed halfway as far as I can push an ORF file. The HEIC files work fine in darktable but they are highly compressed and produce artifcacts quickly.
