haha @Chen_Hendrawan nice synopsis.
I have to say I expected a lot of discussion about what a good default is. I’m completely surprised 161 posts in that we’re still stuck discussing whether defaults exist 
I’m also surprised to see arguments of the importance of some unspecified default by people admitting they never use the default!
The thickness and number of bricks in those two walls was unexpected.
Put simply. There is a default. What should it be.
Whatever the developers choose to develop.
So is the strangeness of the whole discussion a result of “in defence of devs” ?
Makes a lot of sense if it’s mostly about protecting some existing situation and people rather than any opinions about actual defaults or serious consideration of workflow and the experience of new users. If that’s the case it’s been well hidden by making completely different arguments. If that’s the case we’ve seen an impressive 160 post inability to communicate.
Hi,
I was thinking of staying out of this, but I have to agree with you that after >150 replies nobody has really addressed your question (though I didn’t read them all in detail). So I’ll give you my point of view, FWIW.
A good default should satisfy the following principles:
a default is for new users of a particular piece of software, not for experts. If you are an expert, by definition you know how to change the defaults to suit you;
a default should be easy and quick to override in case you don’t like it;
(perhaps the most important) a default should show no surprising behaviour; it should not make you ask “what is going on here?”
Given the above (with which you might disagree), and given also that:
whenever you interact with your camera, you either see the world or you see the camera-produced rendering of it (EVFs, LCD/live view, previews)
in many applications that are normally used for importing, culling, and quick display (e.g. rapid photo downloader, geeqie, digikam) you see the camera-produced rendering of your RAW file by default
the raw processors I have experience with (RawTherapee and ART) will show you a thumbnail based on the camera-produced rendering of the raw by default at the beginning
I think it makes sense to have a default setting that produces a tone curve extracted from the camera-produced rendering of the raw that is often embedded in the metadata. This is just one change, that is simple to revert, is completely transparent, and gets you close enough to the camera version most of the time for most people. It’s not perfect of course (it would be nice if it were, but what wouldn’t? :-), but it’s a good fit for the requirements given above. It would be also great if this was a great-looking picture out of the box, or if it produced a great starting point for further edits, but neither of these are necessary conditions IMHO (also because they are very subjective, as people have so vehemently stated over and over again in the previous replies).
No. It’s a reaction against the general idea that some external third party (commercial software, camera manufacturer) has hit the holy grail of “good defaults”, that we should replicate those defaults, and the idea that such a thing can even be objectively defined. Defaults are given in a lot of individual modules (I’m talking darktable here). Some of those defaults are designed to provide a reasonable starting point (filmic has some default settings that attempt to work for an average photo) and some of them are entirely neutral.
In the end those defaults are the choice of the developer, and informed by discussion with other developers (and any users who take part in the review process). Some of those defaults change over time as new suggestions are made. If you want to take part in that process, the way to do it is to raise a feature request, suggesting a new default for an individual module, and be prepared to justify your suggestion and argue for it. If a developer thinks it’s a good idea, someone might code it, or it will wither on the vine.
Generic discussions about wanting a vaguely defined “good” default are just saying “developers: give me good”. This is not actionable and is just frustrating for developers, who will quickly tire of the discussion and leave you to it.
As an example, we are changing the default value for the filmic middle-tones saturation as part of darktable 3.6 following discussions, and planning to introduce a preset to allow you to do a similar thing in color balance rgb, but in a better way. It’s a single small change and has been made for a justified reason, so we did it.
That was an interesting argument. I never considered the advantage of sooc like rendering in terms of the whole workflow and experience from scene to the computer as a thing in itself.
It ties in nicely with someones post above linking the exposure moment to pp. It does make one more annoyed that camera manufactuers generally won’t allow sharing and loading of settings.
Why on earth would anyone react against an idea never proposed? No one ever claimed the commercial alternatives had perfect or even good defaults. Theres intent behind their defaults and there can be intent behind ours.
But this is the problem. If it’s only looked at from the perspective of individual module settings you’ll never get to the discussion about the whole out of the box experience. You’ll never discuss all the user experience issues and it will be on a software by software basis.
This kind of great work and discussion happens a lot at pixls and repos. People do amazing work and the software progress impressively.
Stepping back from nitty gritty and discussing meta questions can reveal things such as @agriggio post about the value of sooc to out of box pp from a completely different but very much experience focussed angle. It’s just one angle though, thought provoking but I’m not sure I agree fully.
The purpose of the thread was to get people to flesh out as many precisely defined “good” as possible. We’ve had very few! Not good as in the mathematics of operators but principles and workflow considerations.
I’ve tired of this discussion and will leave you to it.
We’re getting somewhere. A default is a choice guided by some design principle. Alberto proposed a few very reasonable principles. Of course, other developers might have different principles. So what @elstoc says is truthful as well: it’s up to the developer. The rest is up to the user. Do they perceive the choices of the developers are useful ones?
Edit: to clarify, this is about any developer, whether a big company or open source one-man band.
Edit 2: the more pertinent question may actually be “how do developers determine their design principles for their default?”. They may cook something up arbitrarily, do user surveys, or rely on some mathematical principle. This is where things start to deviate immensely imo.
I’ve seen multiple commercial and FOSS photo flows over last 4 weeks and I have soem thoughts regarding what i consider “good” approach to “good” starting point.
Some editors apply as much of their internal magic to image as possible to re-create the base response from camera and then set all the params/sliders to 0 as if THAT was the starting point. That “we tried to recreate OOC look” as a starting point. That is opposite to good, regardless how it looks. That’s what eg Lightroom is doing. And for me it’s pretty evident, where I can take couple photos in similar lighting situations and similar exposure params, yet some will look like garbage while processed by lightroom “starting poin” while others will look “totally fine”. And both garbage and fine looking have sliders set at 0.
That as I said is opposite of good regardless of looks.
So I don’t want apps lying to me and saying “yep, that’s the 0 on all corrections despite the fact that there’s magic curves applied all over the place”.
Another thing is anchoring effect (IMO). I grow to like a “neutral” (as in looking like similarly to log footage pre-grading), because there’s no anchor for me in it, there’s just endless possibilities. But in something with already enough “contrast” and “punch” i could get anchored and not go where I’d otherwise like to go. That might be hard for some people though.
So - regardless of what “default” might be, it should not lie that it’s 0 corrections applied and allow for going to “as neutral as possible”
Why do you want us to make your argument for you? Lots of people are happy with the current defaults, that’s why they are not proposing anything different. This point has been made ad nauseum, but because it doesn’t agree with your thesis, you won’t accept it, and now try to spin it as
Personally, I moved to open source because there were no or very few defaults baked in. This makes the discussion of a good default completely irrelevant to me - I would never use it as it came. I suspect this is true for many on these forums, which is why you don’t find many arguing your side. This is a big point of difference between open source tools and commercial tools - commercial tools want you to be wowed at first sight. Most open source don’t care about that - they want to give you the most flexibility. Therefore, my ideal default is as little turned on as possible to start with, so I don’t have to go turning everything off first. This is basically just white balance (and color calibration in darktable), demosaic, and lens correction. Does it look great? No. Is that how I want it? Yes. If there ever comes a time I want something out-of-the-box, because I don’t want to spend any time editing it, I’ll just use the OOCJpeg. And if I wanted that plus a few tweaks, I’d probably just be a lightroom user.
It’s also hard to have a non-program specific discussion about this, because some programs already come with exactly what you ask for (for example, rawtherapee has lots of profiles to choose from), while the programs that don’t, usually allow you to save a preset/style which you can then apply to all your images in one click. So you can already do the things you ask for - the only difference being you have to come to your own conclusions about what looks good out of the box and save it, as opposed to someone doing it for you.
Remember, you didn’t start this discussion by asking for our default starting points. You started by suggesting commercial programs are designed to ‘look good’ out of the box, therefore open source programs should be too. The replies to this thread have addressed that very well. It is a philosophical difference.
Good!
That’s a view expressed by many in this thread but no current software caters to this so it’s interesting to learn more about how and why. More over there’s a question beyond ones own preferences. What default is ideal as a starting point for new users disregarding personal preferences and thinking through workflows, expectations and learning opportunities. Perhaps it could be argued that the shock of log will force people to learn from scratch but no one has made that argument yet.
Personally starting from log and crafting unique looks would net me like 5 images a week and I typically have at least 100 to process.
I have no personal gain from this discussion.
But beyond yourself what do you think could be a good idea. Shock of log, maximized “reality”, punch drunk acid?
Yes but that includes determining or at least discussing what is good and why. This has proved incredibly difficult. As if people here are incapable of thinking beyond their personal preferences for final edits. It’s almost as if it’s considered morally wrong to step out of your own ideal finished product to think more generally about questions of software design and workflow.
Not at all, but you must accept people have different ideas about software design and workflow to you. That is what they are expressing here.
I’ll order the baroque oil painting look thanks 
But almost no one has offered any thoughts on how it could work and why. In addition the popular “flat/log” starting point doesn’t exist as a default and no one has even suggested it should be default only that they like it. Refusing to commit even in a forum post to an idea of software experience and workflow.
The energy is there to post a lot in this thread but few seems willing to think a bit wider. Is there a fear that offering an opinion will step on devs toes?
If you think your softwares starting point is perfect outlining how and why is a lot easier than posting 20 posts about “everyone is different”. It’s particularly hard to understand why it’s not obvious that “everyone is different” is the whole reason for a carefully designed starting point. It should also be obvious that it’s impossible not to design a starting point it’s there.
1+1 = I like it, therefore it should be default.
Next, one wonders if you’ve even opened the two most popular open source tools? Or perhaps you just don’t understand them. Rawtherapee indeed does have a ‘neutral’ profile, just as they have many profiles, easily selectable from a drop down list, underneath the heading ‘processing profiles’. Darktable ‘scene referred’ is basically a neutral profile + filmic, which is close enough to what people (here) want to not ask for something different.
I have that’s why I’m so puzzled by the responses. They bear to resemblance to the status quo people claim to defend.
For anyone wondering why I have so much time it's because I'm rendering at work :) its the architects [compiling](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/compiling.png ) equivalent.
@nosle I understand where you are coming from, and I have to admit I was in your camp a long time ago, too. Give the user something “beautiful” as a starting point.
But over time I have come to appreciate things that slap the user in the face and tell them right there from the beginning:
“Dig in, you have a lot to learn, this is gonna be fun. Here is a good starting point for your creative vision. We do not try to sell you the latest in fancy, we have no style agenda, we give you a tool to accomplish your own vision. If you want pretty out of the box … go somewhere else. But if you stay with us there is a whole community of people that will help you make the best of it. And all you have to do is put in some effort.”
That’s not my camp though at least not if beautiful means punchy 
I haven’t had an opportunity to articulate my camp because of 160 posts misunderstanding the issue, and now my rendering is coming to an end 
I like @agriggio s arguments. Before I heard them I would say as “correct” as possible (obviously lots of work do define what is correct) managing highlights and shadows while respecting the in camera exposure. Enough colour and contrast to feel like the real scene.
Thanks for the “vision” it adds to an idea of an approach.
There is no correct. 
As soon as you try to find out about good usage there will be others that have very good arguments against that because their use case differs. They even might have multiple opposing use cases.
Getting a default handle on all light situtations, cameras and their behaviour and so on is a massive undertaking. And it will have to involve automagically applying settings to images based on experience, circumstances, image analyses, content detection and so on.
Phones do massive amounts of computational photography. But even your olde (D)SLR¹ has a low resolution sensor in the prisma to record the scene, compare to it’s internal database of images and set exposure and other things on the fly long before you have pressed your shutter button.
All that to create brand awareness with the ultimate goal to earn money for the stakeholders². I do not know the numbers, but I bet you that any major camera and/or image processing software company have spent more man hours on color look branding science³ alone than what went into the software packages you’d like to improve.
And then there is the core principal of any profession: never create a feature you are not willing to maintain at least for the foreseeable future. Especially if you are doing this on your own clock.
¹) the Nikon F5 from 1996 is the first camera I am aware of that had an imaging sensor to evaluate the scene for exposure. Please correct me if I have that wrong.
²) the customers that any corporation is catering to are the ones earning money from the corporation. End-consumers are crowd sourced money providers which get a tool in return for their donation. Nothing wrong with that, but it helps if one understands where the priorities are directed to.
²) it’s working the numbers until the marketing departement approves them
That sounds like defeatism.
They spent thousands of hours honing their defaults, so we should spend none at all and instead languish in mediocrity.
And changing the defaults isn’t really something that requires active maintenance. Heck, it hardly requires coding skills at all.
… once you have painted about a hundred bike-sheds in the process, that all have to match together, everything will be fine.
I just think it is not worth the effort unless someone comes along and really tackles that project.
Why? Because it is all opinion and no facts.
Just look at this thread, it is almost 200 messages long and we can not even agree upon a general approach.
Me thinks a topic like better defaults can only be solved if there is a very strong entity that has absolut power to cut through any bike-shedding. Otherwise it will just create discord.