Is darktable (or any photo soft) ever too complicated ?

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It’s nice to have some philosophy, rather than disputing which version of a certain parameter is appropriate :slight_smile:

Several years ago, I wrote ground-up code for the fuel-injection system on my motorcycle. There was existing code for the hardware, but it originated from American V8 cars. It was compromised. So I started again. Along the way, I learnt that a lot of what was said to be necessary was not… it was simply that people didn’t understand the system, they were trying to adapt things that had been written by other people who didn’t understand the system, and they looked at OEM Japanese manufacturer code, which is enormous. I also learnt that when a chip manufacturer gives away the compiler for the modified C that is ported to their µ-processor, it’s not because it works perfectly. Even the bits of assembler that are certified as “verified” clearly were not. After pushing the bike home a few times, I finally got it all working.

So by the way of that story, I’m trying to say that there is an aesthetic side to programming, which can manifest in very efficient code. On the other hand, that aesthetic may depend on the user’s deep understanding of how the code works, how fuel injection works, how a motorcycle engine works. Some of that is objective, some is user specific, some is an interaction of the two: I may give more weight to smooth throttle response, another may want a sharper reaction or simply more power.

darktable suffers from trying to please everyone. I don’t expect to ever touch velvia, I consider detailed masking to be an emergency fix for a bad photograph, and I don’t like the tone equalizer, because it seems to be telling me what is a “correct” way to improve a photo. I avoid sharpening except at the minimal level of tuning the underlying frequency response around the Nyquist frequencies (of the different rgb channels). I work 99% in B&W. I add weird kinks in the tone cure to create globally unrealistic lighting despite my dislike of (local) masking.

But this is all very subjective. I may change my opinion. I have a deep knowledge of FFT sampling and less understanding of wavelets. My knowledge of colour theory is patchy as hell. It’s entirely possible that changes in my technical competence will modify my subjective response to a certain type of image… it all comes back to emotional engagement, and that isn’t independent of emotional engagement in the technology.

We’d all like a software tool that reflects our own habits of thought… even if they are wrong!

A quote from André Lichnérowitz borrowed from a physics text:
“On a besoin que le mathématique devienne un instrument de pensée”
But we don’t have the luxury of setting the bar that high for users of software.
A quote from Nellie Melba, a soprano of great repute from the end of the 19th century:
“Give 'em muck!”
Presumably, we find our individual truth in between the two.

Maybe the answer comes back to music, or photos: do we get more pleasure from playing alone, from playing with a few friends, or the possibility of performing in front of a concert hall? From making photos, from the appreciation of a few friends, or being a “famous photographer”?

In the end, we all do what we want to do…

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Recent film and photography suffer imho from the designed look as much as from the off the shelf look. It’s natural I guess but there’s a self conciousness and lack of immediacy that has come with the over engineering of looks. I guess scripts suffer the same. The film can be beautiful but theres often this layer of “look” to obviously sitting over the film. I can barely watch another orange teal movie.

I find it interesting that this is less of an issue with older films despite the amount of effort spent on “look” even in the 70’s. Perhaps I’m objecting to craftsmanship reaching levels so high that it becomes a barrier. It becomes overly self aware. Contemporary movies captured on analogue suffer this as much as digital due to the processes involved in making the movie.

I know though that someone should be able to engineer a look that feels immediate and not designed. I know that the error probably lies with the people designing the looks rather than the looks themselves but at the same time I feel the level of design ability and skill is a huge hurdle in itself.

The above is not philosophical. About purity. Or some such. It’s that the results are not great i my subjective judgement.

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I think the big difference with analogue art/craft is the breadth of resources you can call upon in the learning journey and the type of learning required. There are books, courses, tutors that can take you from being a relative novice to playing Beethoven, painting landscapes etc. Most people understand that learning the analogue arts is hard but they can see the path in front of them and it’s often one that’s as suitable for four-year-olds (at least to start off with) as it is for adults.

The digital learning curve is harder because it always, to some extent, is software-dependent, and the learning material varies significantly in quality. To understand it in the depth that you do and want others to (no criticism here - I agree) requires a lot of fundamentals to be in place, some of which can’t be fully appreciated until you’ve progressed a fair way through school (and further). And some of which (the sciency-mathsy bits) haven’t previously been part of the traditional analogue art/craft world making it difficult for people to move from that world to this.

Things like Photoshop/Lightroom, with their single sliders hiding lots of complexity are much closer, I suspect (having never delved into the analogue or Adobe photography worlds) to the sort of things that were done in analogue photography (waving bits of paper about over enlargers and the like). For example, you can dodge/burn but doing so without halos is hard because it’s imprecise and you don’t always have complete control. darktable is a whole different (in my opinion, better) approach that forces you to learn. Learning the tool helps you understand the theory; learning the theory helps you understand the tool.

Personally, I’m somewhat of a magpie - flitting to the next shiny subject to learn before I’ve fully mastered the last - and photography is the first ‘hobby’ that has held my attention for a significant period of time. The sheer breadth of the subject has kept me fascinated for years - the mix of maths, physics, art, psychology, computing, and just getting out and experiencing the world in a different way. And I’m still nowhere near close to understanding it to the extent I want to. I very much consider myself an amateur.

I like that this is hard and I like that it is technical. It forces me to understand what’s going on under the hood. And the way darktable is put together is a big part of why I use it and haven’t moved on to another application - because I can use it to learn some of the physics and that learning makes my craft better in a way I can understand.

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There are good resources (covering the theory and practice) for digital cinema professionals (especially for colourists), but their content never made it to photography it seems. That’s one of the things that baffle me, to be honest: I don’t get how two sister disciplines (cinema/photography) are so far away in terms of culture and education.

You could easily learn colour theory in painting books, then look at Youtube painting sessions to see how painters build a picture from scratch (what colours they use, how they build their palette). Then learn about colour timing in cinema books. Then, looking back at old darkroom technics helps giving context to modern light and colour processing, at least it becomes more real.

Just caring about photography and nothing else, because what you do is photography, is doomed I think.

The maths bits are my personal added value, but you can honestly make without them and there is no reason to get impressed. It’s useful for those who want to run the extra mile and go in-depth, but it’s not mandatory. Just like you don’t need to solve Schrödinger’s equations to get a sense of what an atom is. I think people make it sound worse than it is. Understanding how things interact with each other doesn’t necessarily imply you should know if they follow a log or an exponential rule.

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Thank you @anon41087856 for bringing up this fascinating topic. On a personal note I’m not bothered by the technical nature and movie-length of your videos. Please continue!

I think your point is that learning digital photography is not simple, but worth the effort. I agree completely. But hiding in your essay, there is another more important question for the Darktable community: For whom should we make Darktable?

A real strength of free software is as a tool for learning. Darktable is an excellent example of that. But I think that we (as the community) could be better teachers. Or more precisely, provide better tools for self learning.

@anon41087856 , you bring up your 12 years as piano student. One thing we could learn from the hundreds of years of experience in the art of teaching music instruments is how to progress the student from beginner to expert. As I understand it, musical students progress from one level to another. Each level comes with specific skills the student must master to progress. This system makes it easier for the student to know what to learn, and for the teacher to know what to teach.

But learning digital photography by acquiring a camera and downloading Darktable is like learning to swim by being thrown into an ice-cold river. You need skills in colour management, colour theory, the mechanics of cameras, knowledge of how a digital sensor works, learning about how to manage an effective processing workflow, etc. And since OS X and Windows are second class citizens (as they should be), you are encouraged to learn Linux as well.

In other words, you have to begin your journey by learning what you need to learn, which is not pedagogical. Furthermore, the sink-or-swim approach makes it harder to contribute to the community by teaching other people about Darktable, since everyone has to invent their own lecture plan.

How could we do better? One solution is to collect the video and text resources out there and organize them into lessons with progressing difficulty. Each level should have clear goals. These resources should be reachable by a big button on the Darktable home page.

For example:
Level 1:
Getting your pictures off your camera and organizing them for easy retrieval in the future.
Installing Darktable

Level 2:
Importing pictures into Darktable. Basic editing of a jpeg: Cropping according to the rule of thirds, adjusting white level using a grey card, straightening the horizon.

Level 3:
Sharing your picture (exporting for prints vs exporting for the web).

Level 4:
Calibrating your monitor using open source tools. Understanding how colours work in your camera, your monitor and printer

Level 5: etc etc.

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“Constant new discoveries in chemistry and optics are widening considerably our field of action. It is up to us to apply them to our technique, to improve ourselves, but there is a whole group of fetishes which have developed on the subject of technique. Technique is important only insofar as you must master it in order to communicate what you see… (bold/italics are mine; ggb) The camera for us is a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy. In the precise functioning of the mechanical object perhaps there is an unconscious compensation for the anxieties and uncertainties of daily endeavor. In any case, people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952). The Decisive Moment . New York: Simon and Schuster. pp. 1–14., from Wikipedia, Henri Cartier-Bresson - Wikipedia

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In my opinion, learning art is the combination of 3 things, not 2: mastering the medium, learning how to open your creativity channel, and having enough talent make the first two mean something. You can be a great technician with the oils, for example; you can be supremely creative and imaginative, for example; yet there is a part of being an artist that is not learned - it is given to you by grace. Many refuse to admit this. Let them remain happy in their contentment.

With photography you can get closer to art with a lessor degree of pure talent. Like it or not, photography is a technical art, at least to a greater degree than painting, for example. Pervasive AI developments are narrowing the gap incrementally. I shoot with a Leica M in the somewhat self serving idea that it enhances my creativity, or vice versa. Of course I could still process the raw files with, say, Luminar and put an end to that delusion once and for all.

One of the appeals of darktable is the promise of using highly sophisticated software to make more “natural” edits. Perhaps that is a delusion as well. To me, however, the problem with darktable is the lack of really good learning tools, coupled with the rapidly evolving nature of open source development. Sure this guy or that guy has some Youtube videos. Some are better than others. But there really is nothing comprehensive, and there is too much contradiction within what is already out there…

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That reminds me very much at a talk from Peter Sikking at one of the last LGMs. Here is the blog post from him:

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Very interesting text.

Given the statistics about photography occupation in the US, I wonder how many among those really care about theory and math bits.

image
image757×531 56.6 KB

What comprises Other Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services:

image

I wonder how many of them would fit the artistic approach and be sensitive to deep-learning the medium they work with.

Disclaimer: I’m not a photographer, just a junior hobbyist, and I’m very glad about the current state of darktable development.

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Yes, in spades.

For instance, there are a lot of really good professional guitarists out there. And then, there was Prince…

They get the first one. He got all three…

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Maybe the real point of departure for an art is the passion to master it.

The second is probably the level of deception: it looks easy (or easier than it is), so you throw yourself in. Then you discover that it’s not so simple, and you’re willing to ask yourself why that is…

Even the piano: I’ve heard the comment that the piano is immediately seductive, because you just touch it and nice noises come out. Compared to a violin…

You could also wonder if the same issues apply to sports: some people just run faster than their school mates, and then 10 years later they are doing selective muscle strengthening, studying stride patterns and trying to optimise nutrition.

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This is a must read! Thank you!

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Is that in fact Darktable’s core audience? It seems to me that Darktable uniquely attracts people of a more technical bent, and plenty of hobbyists. Not exclusively, of course, but moreso than, say, Lightroom. Or maybe that’s just my own filter bubble.

Does anyone have any insight into Darktable’s users?

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These thoughts really can be generalized from art to any activity. Once I know something will take significant effort to master (whether that’s up front or not), do I have the passion to make that effort in order to get the results I desire.

Returning to photography in general and dt in particular, there is obviously a variation in skill and knowledge levels from the top developers to the newest users. It’s pretty obvious that those that are happy with the JPGs they get shooting in auto mode are not part of the user base. But just how far above that should the “floor” for target users be?

“Hey, I just heard that I can do more with my photos if I shoot in raw mode, and I heard darktable is a good raw processor.”

“I use Lightroom but I’m pissed off with Adobe’s business model. I found darktable and want to use it to get the identical results to what I get in Lightroom.”

“I feel restricted in what I can do in such-and-such raw processor, but I’m having trouble figuring out what tools I should use in darktable to get the best results.”

Deciding which types of users should be targets of darktable roughly translates to “which on-ramps need to exist?”

I suspect the nature of the user base has changed since darktable was made available for Windows, but I sure can’t prove that.

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@anon41087856 I’m glad you’ve declared your preferences for sugarless coatings. It makes this easier to write. None of the below is about your Darktable contributions just responses to the text.

Both paragraphs are mistaken. Art is defined through a process involving many people. A process loosely comparable to peer review and publishing in the science world. Only it’s (even) more corrupt. This makes the comment on absolute definitions misguided it’s not really a relevant comment as we are dealing with a process.

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I suppose you actually mean learning to be an artist? Learning art would be art history or some such? Regardless. Your statement is wrong! Or rather mastering the medium is to narrow a definition because many (recognized) artists are not masters of any medium. Opening your creative channel sounds like a self help phrase from those books at airports. It’s about learning refining and rethinking.

Very many artists don’t work that way. I’d say it’s counter to vast amounts of art if not the majority. It’s often not a process of conveying a message or even less making the message clear. For many, making art is more akin to a search, working your way until you find something that resonates. Many aren’t quite sure what it is they’ve found. The process you suggest would prevent a lot of very good art. There was a good documentary on Gerhart Richter on youtube but I can’t find it atm.

I think you are venturing into areas where you aren’t so well read or experienced when your are discussing art in these general terms. In fact you are falling into thought traps I’ve seen before from people who leans heavy on non art/humanities education. Particularly engineers or scientists. There’s a fairly well known photographer/internet guy with a finance background who structures his texts and thoughts like you do above. He has been lamenting not getting a foot into the art world but reading his texts and seeing his work its so incredible obvious why it’s not going to happen. He has all the arguments structured and all the technique down but he doesn’t understand that he’s aiming the wrong way. Playing a different pitch than the game he wants to be in.

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Extremely interesting!
How do people then design tools for artists? Or rather: which demographic cares for which tools? Which distinctions are useful when talking about the userbase? Artists, professionals, semi-pro, amateurs?
A lot of food for thought! Thanks.

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Not my cup of tea, sorry, but grace means nothing to me. Neither does talent. Nothing is ever given to you, you have to fight for everything.

Same with “pure” talent. What is that beast ?

Nature is forever out of the equation. That’s why I say “plausible results”, as in something you know is fake, but somehow feels like something you can accept as real.

Violin is more awful than piano in the first years, but then it’s easier to play it expressively because you have a direct contact/interaction with the string. You can’t do vibrato and tremolo with a piano, so you have to cheat to still make it expressive. But most people won’t make it that far, so they will never realize the expressivity problem, they just “hit” keys and think it’s enough.

We don’t collect data on users®.

Not sure about generazing. Art has an essential emotional component that makes it quite different from sport or science, for example.

It’s also a matter of looking at what the market already offers in terms of photo solutions (being opensource or proprietary tools) and see if some people are not forgotten by the offer for not being a profitable market. Since opensource (usually) doesn’t care about profits, it’s the only one that can fill some voids that don’t interest big companies.

This is art market you are referring to. I’m referring to art as a practice. The peer review in science is completely different, since it’s a cognitive process involving proofs management and logical validation. These arts moguls who do peer reviewing are able to find mystical sense in paintings done with a brush tied to a donkey’s tail. If the scientific reviewers were so high on LSD, rockets would crash a lot more.

Which artists recognized by whom ? Or are we talking about con artists here ?

Art is not always, and certainly not only, about thinking. In a world of efficiency, rationality (well, trying to be rational, because we are still not there), data crunching, profits and such, it’s probably the last ground on which you can do things just because. Because it feels good, because it feels right, because that’s what you want.

Maybe it sounds like personal development bullshit, but you can’t deny the irrational part of this process, even with a technical part, that kind of makes the whole fun of it.

How is that incompatible with what I said ? A message is vague way to describe something you try to convey, whatever its shape and grammar, and even when it has no grammar. But anyhow, a vast part of art is communicating (if only because art needs to be acquired through senses). If art was not meant to communicate, it should be as effective if it was unseen and unheard. As long as people have to be in the room to experience and witness it… there is communication.

Ad hominem bullshit, here we go. When you don’t know how to disagree with people on non-technical grounds, you call them uneducated.

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We can disagree with each other, but we have to remain civil.

Civility is not optional on this forum, it is required. We don’t need to resort to calling each other uneducated.

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I think he refers to art as something that is nothing without an audience AND the reception of the audience. Which is, like he said, loosly comparable to peer review. You’re using a strawman to discredit his point.

Good question which touches on the very philosophical problem of ‘what is art?’. Which leads to: no, this is not about con-artists.

There wasn’t even an ‘always’ in his sentence, not an ‘only’ and it was ‘rethinking’ and not ‘thinking’. I hope it’s me and I am too tired, but to me there is a lot of ‘arguing against things nobody said’ going on. I hope I am wrong.

But this can be non-deliberate, as in ‘I document my search’ and not ‘here is what I found, see it!’.

I don’t see the ad-hominem here. Because when someone points out: ‘On this topic there is that paper that you might need to read (and he even argues why he thinks so).’ That’s not an ad-hominem. Especially when you tell personal anecdotes of what you think art is. Because every critique of your assessment could of course touch personal topics…but he did not do that, he argued against your postulates and not your anecdotes.

I’ll come back to my first post and rephrase a little: What is it that got you get so upset, that you need to argue against something by seemingly misrepresenting it?

Completely agree.

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