To clarify (again): there are no demands or expectations here, at least not from me, just being curious why people do things in a certain way.
I am not sure I understand the purpose of trying to turn this discussion into one about demands etc. There aren’t any, naturally, just a lot of respect to people who write tutorials.
I’m not expecting any creator to “explore the different demands of unknown users”.
And I’m most certainly not implying that the video creator should provide lecture notes. While I was at university, it was the student’s responsability to take notes for what he thought important, relative to his prior knowledge and what was provided in the books (yes, that’s a while ago).
I am stating what I see as a disadvantage of video tutorials. Do with it what you want.
As an aside, I do find youtube videos rather annoying due to the ads. One reason to avoid them (especially the longer ones). I totally get why the ads are there (someone somehow has to pay for servers and bandwith), though.
You could say that the many of the playraw threads evolve into a sort of dynamic/interactive tutorial and there are many examples to evaluate and lots of good advice. Also there are some less than stellar edits (me included) in there to make you feel better… 
and provide you with some context for how people view, evaluate and choose to edit an image.
Different people have different learning styles. While many learn well from videos, others like me learn best from text and screen shots. However, I really appreciate all the effort put in by everyone for learning materials in whatever format they are. I will actually watch Aurélien’s videos, pause and test out what he demonstrates on my images. I then make notes of what is important for me. These notes are for my own reference and for teaching students about DT. Maybe I should try and find time to create DT learning material as screen shots and text, but where would I post it to reach the people who would want to see it?
We can post things to the DT blog or to the pixls blog.
I didn’t see a ‘post’ function in the blog. But I think some post should be converted to a blog format. Not darktable, but an old classic:
There are quite a few post that are somewhere lost in the forum and difficult to undigg.
You can submit a pull request on github or write up the article in markdown and we’ll submit it for you.
I’ve also been wondering if an unofficial Wiki, functioning as a FAQ maintained by the community, with much simpler language and more screenshots than the manual, providing guides, examples and answers, maybe partly sourced from the pixls forum, would be a useful resource.
The beauty of the written tutorial is that it is search-engine friendly. If you’re looking for something specific, you can get exactly to the content you want. Something really good, you can print / download an offline copy to use again, and again, and again.
I’ve gotten a lot out of videos, but it requires a fairly heavy time commitment to sit there and watch. It’s really hard to watch a video about desktop software on a mobile device, so you have limitations where you can watch. I can’t watch them at faster playback because I miss too many things. Finding a specific piece of content inside a specific video is virtually impossible. A table of contents / index and transcription would go a long way. Not sure whether this is an issue with the content creator or delivery platform (or both).
The clickable transcription that would take you to that specific time point in the video would a great method. With all of the text-to-speech and AI, it can’t be that hard to map the transcription word-for-word to that specific time (e.g. specific enough to start playback in the beginning, middle, or end of the sentence).
For many years since video tutorials were introduced, there has been the case of people who live and have always lived in countries with virtually no internet access, or where the internet is so expensive that it is more of a luxury, and where watching an online video from Youtube is almost impossible because of the low bandwidth available. HTML tutorials have always been the salvation. thanks to the fact that they don’t condition the download so much because they are mostly images and texts, they are the best.
Then there is that you can take it to your computer (which is not so powerful) and you can read calmly and practice step by step the explanations given in these tutorials.
“Man thinks as he lives” and that conditions the use of technologies for learning, that’s why for many the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries is getting bigger and bigger.
Essentially it is a substantial difference between videos and HTML tutorials. For video content generators, this form of explanation is better, it is even easier to give explanations on the use of a computer program, in this case it is superior to HTML, but it is still excluding for a certain group of people.
Poor countries are known to use cracked versions of proprietary soft rather than FLOSS. FLOSS crowd is white educated men whether we like it or not. Just look at the % of Indian people here, for whom the language is not a barrier… I’m not sure access to internet is the first barrier.
It is true that this happens in our poor countries. But in them there are also communities of people, not exactly all “educated white men” who use FLOSS for their personal and professional development, and who are as well prepared, and in many cases even more prepared than many of the “educated white men” who live in developed countries. So I don’t understand that somewhat racist statement on your part, it doesn’t seem to me that this statement is from such a prominent professional as you are. Many of my best friends are black as ink and that does not make them any less professional, even some of them work from here, a third world country for companies that request them for their knowledge in C and Java programming among other languages, UNIX, network administration and more.
India was a British colony, they imposed their language, religion and customs on them, of course for Indians language (English) is not a problem.
Yes, you can say that from your point of view, “Man thinks as he lives”, I can assure you that it is not what those of us who live in these countries think or feel. I am sure that this is not what most users, programmers and other professionals living in poor countries think either.
Sorry for the off topic. I don´t want to start a war, here the main subject is to know if screenshots are better than videos for ones.
I don’t see how noticing that a social group is absent from a crowd is in any way racist. We don’t have Indian, Asian or African contributors. In the dt users survey I ran, there were none either. So the current snapshot of FLOSS users and contributors is educated white guys, and that’s all. And I question the fact that people who are not white and rich are interested into something else than Adobe.
@anon41087856 I feel like that your statement is overly generalized here about developing countries and about the user of FLOSS softwares. I understand that the limited sample size you’re referring here from some survey may have been giving skewed results. I am Indian and I have been trying to learn/use DT/RT type software. If I look at the DT fork, I find a lot of Indian (or at least origin) users just by looking at the name. I cant speak for other countries but I would think that it would be true for them as well.
I cant comment on why there are not any Indian developers of DT, maybe we missed the invitation 
!! I cannot speak for a whole country and definitely cannot generalize for them simply because I myself is an Indian. I personally want to try changes in the DT code but that would be down the road and would require me to learn and experiment. However that is the beauty of opensource software.
I dont think the users for the cracked version of a software are bounded by locality. I also do not think that everyone in US or Europe can afford Adobe Suites based on the pricing and the business model. I use Affinity and Topaz Denoise because it made sense to me to purchase them based on the utility and my budget. A lot of universities and businesses provide a wide range of legal software for the users.
Now for the FLOSS softwares, I love github. Its a source of inspiration and knowledge to me as well as a place where I know the software can be ripped apart to make sure there is no funny business going on. For the DT users, I can say its wonderful software. In my honest opinion, for new user it is very daunting and highly confusing. I know that there is manual, but for amateur photographer that may be a bit daunting. With so many modules as well as the fact that many modules are not recommended while still exist adds on top of the confusion. In terms of learning, I can see old videos of people using a module, later to find out that that module is not recommended without a clear instruction on how to replicate it with the new recommended module, can once again (at least for me) can become confusing.
There are many software around for photo editing but we mainly hear Lightroom/photoshop because of large internet libraries (text, videos, books) providing guidance to amateurs who with practice improve. One of the challenges I feel sometimes that I do not know what is the equivalent of a LR module in darktable, to apply and follow a LR tutorial.
All this being said, I also have to admit that the developers are in it merely based on their interest and spend their valuable time in doing all this to benefit others. I cannot and do not expect anyone to create software based on my need, but I need to adapt myself to learn to work with what I get. Alternative is creating one based on my interest, with help/inspiration from available softwares.
Anyways, thanks for creating and making such wonderful software available to us
That is pretty much (camera) photography in general. And why does it matter anyway? And how does that relate to the tutorials?
And face it, people use FLOSS because it’s free, and in many cases it does the job.
I‘m pretty sure that this doesn’t need to be read as a racist statement: it’s simply a fact, that floss is something driven by people living in privileged conditions. Those ‚educated white people‘ might also have coloured skin - it’s more a social group sharing a comparable way of life - they can afford to spend time on something that doesn’t pay their bills…
We should not digress into a racism debate here. The original argument was that video tutorials require more bandwidth and that tutorials with text and images are therefore more accessible to people in poorer countries. I agree with @anon41087856 that people who are interested in digital photography in RAW format (!) and want to work with FOSS software tend not to have too many problems with internet access.
Personally, I think that video tutorials for RAW development are good, because they are about the visual content and the tutorials are more playful and less exact. When it comes to IT issues, especially on Unix based systems, I hate video tutorials. 10 minutes of babble to specify a command line 
.
I matters if you want to adapt the content to the audience, and more precisely if you want to spare you the trouble of adapting it towards an audience that is not interested in your product.
It is of course best if people can do that, but instead of speculating about the audience based on covariates that may or may not even strongly correlate with their preference, it may be easiest just to ask.
Eg do a poll… but this is premature at this point because non-video tutorials are rare for Darktable, so it is hard to judge. Would be great to have a few and then see how it goes.
In any case, I am now redesigning my blog infrastructure and plan to do some screenshot-based tutorials, setting up some Hugo scripts for that.
Exactly. I did that last year. Problem is you still need an entry point to reach out to those people otherwise you get skewed stats. And like this we are back to square one.