
Darktable 2.4.0 released - trop
https://www.darktable.org/2017/12/darktable-240-released/
======
acidburnNSA
The big news with this release is that it's the first to support Windows. I've
been using this on linux for a year as a hobbyist Photographer and it's
exceedingly glorious. Have not tried out the Windows build but apparently you
can do that now [1].

Also if you want to learn a lot about "developing" digital photographs (it
really is a digital darkroom), I learned a lot from this youtube list of 42
Darktable tutorial edit sessions [2]. Very powerful and fun stuff.

[1] [https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-
windows/](https://www.darktable.org/2017/08/darktable-for-windows/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-
zRRM1...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUVNDxXhIA&list=PLsks-
zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl)

~~~
old-gregg
What kind of camera are you using? I've been trying _hard_ to switch from
Lightroom to Darktable and so far I have been failing to even match the output
of in-camera JPEG engine of my Canon 5D Mk4... The skin tone is just not
there... like it knows what highlights are and what shadows are but loses
something in the middle. Well-lit RAW are fine, but when the light is
challenging I always get better results in Lightroom or Canon's RAW converter
(or even in-camera JPEGs) although that's actually when RAW is supposed to
help the most.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I'm using a Canon Rebel T5i with Magic Lantern. It gets tones really well for
me. Sorry it's not performing for you well.

~~~
deftturtle
I tried installing ML on my T5, but then it was stolen by roommates. How long
have they supported T5i? It seemed to be a very convoluted process, and I had
no luck, but also mine was T5, not T5i.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Not sure how long it's been supported. At least 2 years! For me it was
surprisingly easy actually. I just copied the files over to the SD card,
inserted it, and ran Firmware Upgrade from the camera menu. It worked great
and I love the intervalometer and other neat features.

[http://builds.magiclantern.fm/700D-115.html](http://builds.magiclantern.fm/700D-115.html)

------
pmoriarty
As a long time GIMP user, coming to Darktable has been a revelation. I'm super
impressed with how powerful and polished Darktable is, and overall I really
love it.

On the other hand, Darktable has some serious issues that make it less than
ideal for me.

First, on my old laptop Darktable is super, super slow... especially when the
image I'm editing has lots of operations performed on it. In that case,
performing a simple operation on top of the existing ones or just zooming in
or out could take a full minute, and exporting a single image could take 30
minutes or more (compared to GIMP, which takes less than a minute). Just going
from lighttable to darkroom or back could take multiple minutes.

Second, some operations are just much easier and more intuitive to do in GIMP.
For example, making perspective changes in GIMP using the perspective tool --
you just drag the corners of the image where you want them. In Darktable
you're limited to moving sliders around, which is far more annoying.

Finally, Darktable is mostly geared towards improving photograph quality,
while GIMP is more of an all-around image editor and drawing/painting program
which can improve the quality of photographs but is not limited to that but
can do much more.

~~~
unixhero
Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old laptop
handles a modern software, even a brand new version, with shitty performance.
Media processing be it images or video isn't made for old laptops.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Sorry. You cannot come to a software release and complain that your old
laptop handles a modern software with a shitty performance."_

Well, GIMP has new software releases all the time, and works quickly on my old
laptop.

You can't blame the fact that Darktable is slow on it being new.

------
ComputerGuru
For those that (like me) have never heard of it before (since the info isn’t
on the linked page):

 _darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw
developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages
your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable
lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them._

------
contravariant
Is the home page supposed to contain placeholder like phrases? Such as:

>Mention that having (photographer) developers as part of the target audience
is good for understanding the real world problems, challenges, and workflows.

>Something about capability - highlight about some big important features!
Maybe mention flexibility here (ease of writing new modules).

>Something about community, mailing list, maybe discuss forum, and the Flickr
page? Number of contributors (indicate health of the project and users). Some
other metric of vitality of the community (possibly how to get involved)?

~~~
randoaccount108
Can't say, but it actually seems pretty forced, like a joke. All of those
placeholders actually link to the resources they'd want. I'd guess it's a poke
at regular start-up style "We are awesome because X" statements on their home
page.

~~~
coppolaemilio
It is a joke :)

~~~
randoaccount108
I actually appreciate it, it seemed a little too curated for placeholders :p

------
kyriakos
First Time User on Windows, its a bit slow during import compared to lightroom
(you can't see thumbnails unless you highlight the image file name - maybe I
am doing this wrong so I am not sure).

a couple of UI/UX issues I found:

= When I open a tool panel from the "more modules" the panel is added to the
tools but its collapsed instead of expanded.

= some filters should be toned down (the sliders have very extreme results
with minor movements, this makes it hard to fine tune)

its a much more polished effort than gimp though. I'll keep an eye on
darktable!

------
IgorPartola
I only started using darktable recently. It’s been great with the exception of
speed and the MacOS UI having tiny controls. I have a reasonably powerful
MacBook Pro and would have expected it to handle things like changing exposure
levels pretty quickly.

But honestly I can’t complain because this thing allows me to make decent
photos fantastic.

~~~
sowbug
Since you recently climbed the learning curve and might have this fresh in
your mind, how do you understand the history function? Sometimes do something
and then want to undo it. This isn't easy for me in darktable -- it seems
control-z does nothing, there are no standard menus, and every time I've
touched the history section on the left side of the application, I end up
destroying much more work than I intended.

In case that is an X-Y question, how do I undo in darktable?

~~~
ePierre
> it seems control-z does nothing

Normally v2.4.0 improves this. As stated in their release notes: “Add undo
support for masks and more intelligent grouping of undo steps”.

Basically, in v2.2, even low-level operations that didn't have a visible
impact were in the undo list, so when you pressed Ctrl+Z it would undo
something, but you wouldn't see any change. You would actually have to press
Ctrl+Z several times to finally see something on the screen.

This was changed and should be more human-friendly :)

> how do you understand the history function?

This is indeed a little bit more complicated that just a list of things to
undo. You can read a bit more about it in the user manual:
[https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.ht...](https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/darkroom_concepts.html#pixelpipe)

------
wishinghand
It's been said on Darktable's site and in here that it's not an option for
maintaining a catalogue of photos. What would be a good companion app then?

Until I figure something out, I'm waiting for Luminar or whatever Lightroom
competitor that Affinity Software is going to come out with later in 2018.

~~~
bakoo
Love the Affinity products, just wish they'd support linux.

------
rcarmo
This is great news. I’ve been using 2.2.5 for the past year on Mac and Linux,
and it Is a great RAW editing tool. It does take some getting used to UI-wise
(hopefully this release lets me use the trackpad more intuitively), but the
non-destructive editing and effect masking are awesome.

------
phkahler
One thing I really want DarkTable to allow is deletion of images. They say
that any kind of file manager features will not be implemented, but IMHO it's
a great preview tool and the ability to just delete poor shots would make it
much better for triaging a new batch of photos.

~~~
kqr
Darktable does deletion. If you press "delete" instead of "remove", files are
deleted from the file system as well as the library.

------
bitL
As Adobe has released the very last non-cloud Lightroom, I guess it's time to
move to its "negative" \- Darktable.

~~~
kyriakos
Thats not true. There are two versions of Lightroom, the cloud one and
Lightroom Classic. The Classic is the continuation of the regular desktop
version and from what I understand its not going anywhere. Adobe cannot afford
to take the desktop version away from photographers cause unlike photoshop
there is good (or even better) competitors (e.g. Capture One is chewing up
Lightroom's market share being faster and according to a lot of photographers
gives better results).

~~~
bitL
I guess you are going to weep:

[https://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/12/6-14-now-
av...](https://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/12/6-14-now-available-
last-perpetual-update-of-lightroom.html)

~~~
PuffinBlue
I'm fine thanks. That's lightroom 6. Lightroom 7 (lightroom CC Classic) will
be continuing just fine as a non-cloud product.

~~~
bitL
It's subscription, rent-seeking based now. I won't call that non-cloud. Cloud
is useless anyway as it doesn't allow to upload RAWs and they obviously
slapped it on Lr to justify switch to their individual user hostile model.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
So, is this a good replacement for Picasa on windows?

In my case, mainly for viewing and editing Canon raw format photos?

~~~
Andrenid
It's nowhere near as good as Picasa or Lightroom for bulk editing, sharing,
and general photo library management. But it absolutely destroys Picasa for
the actual editing of raw files. I'd say if post processing is your focus,
it's without a doubt worth the switch. If you're more of a "shoot lots and
manage in bulk", then no.

I personally find the file/library management aspect of Darktable so lacking
that it's personally useless to me. I absolutely despise Adobe and would pay
double what I give them for a decent Lightroom alternative, but it just
doesn't exist yet and won't anytime soon.

~~~
k2enemy
I'm in the same boat as you. I tried Darktable, Capture One, On1, AfterShot
Pro, etc. None of them were close to Lightroom. Then, with low expectations I
tried Exposure X3
([https://www.alienskin.com/exposure/](https://www.alienskin.com/exposure/))
and now I've completely replaced Lightroom with it. It might not work for you,
but I was pleasantly surprised.

------
distagon
Does it support Mac Os for current version? the display on my Linux box is not
as good as on Imac.

~~~
bartvk
Yes:
[https://www.darktable.org/install/#macos](https://www.darktable.org/install/#macos)

------
bedros
I wish they support photo management, at least import photos into organized
folders by date

~~~
jonathankoren
Serious question: Is there any good photo management software? I’m not even a
hobbiest photographer but I’ve got 300GB of photos over 15 years, and it’s a
pain in the ass to manage these.

I tried Lightroom, but that was excruciatingly slow to import the photos, and
on top of that it had very counter intuitive controls. It was also not cheap
at all, and subscription based.

I tried Google Photos (my current setup), but while cloud storage is nice,
it’s UI sucks (it is Google after all), but most annoyingly you can’t actually
name people in photos. Instead you have to wait for the face to get processed,
then peruse 1000 faces of strangers just to find the face (hopefully) and then
assign a name for it. Seriously, I can’t name my daughter in any picture taken
in the last 2 years because of this.

Apple Photos seems like the product I most want, but it insists that all the
photos get stored locally, which is a nonstarter. Its cloud storage doesn’t
make any sense because it seems like sync, which never what I want. Finally,
it barfs if you try to import too many pictures at once.

I’ve been using python scripts to manages my photos, but I’d really like good
graphical manager that supports geo and face tagging, maybe some of the event
stuff like Google Photos. Does anyone else have this problem? I can’t believe
I’m the only one with these problems, but at the same time it’s hard for me to
see a niche market for this. Any thought?

~~~
melicerte
I forgot to mention that DT support lua scripting[1] which might help you to
further automate some steps of your photo management process.The Lua API is
fairly complete.

You can also grap some existing lua plugin like the one who can export/import
to GIMP.

[1] [https://www.darktable.org/lua-api/](https://www.darktable.org/lua-api/)
and [https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-
scripts](https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts)

------
pvdebbe
I slowly warmed up to Darktable as I began to shoot raw in the summer. During
the holidays I had access to a Winblows machine and tried the hyped Capture
One... doesn't seem to hold candle for DT!

------
dysoco
I somehow confused this with 'Lighttable' and was really confused about why
printing was such an important issue.

------
jaaames
It's a shame open source projects with great features still have astoundingly
bad copywriting.

No one cares about it having a database behind the scenes or the
upgrade/downgrade process, tell me what it can do and how it compares to the
real alternative, Adobe Lightroom.

~~~
philliphaydon
HN links to the news article so I was confused as to what Darktable was, I
clicked on a few of the links in the menu and couldn't figure out quickly what
it was, I then googled to find out it was an alternative to lightroom, so I
googled darktable and clicked on the link to find out there's a homepage with
the information I was looking for initially... But there's no menu item to get
to the homepage?

~~~
feikname
There's a link to the homepage in every single page of the website, it's the
image of the logo.

While I agree that it's not obvious, that's a common practice (Hacker News
does the same) so you should probably keep that in mind.

~~~
philliphaydon
Hah, didn't even think of clicking the logo.

