
Darktable 3.0 - trop
https://www.darktable.org/2019/12/darktable-300-released/
======
kingbirdy
I wasn't sure what Darktable was, but they provide a good summary on their
homepage, which it seems many projects fail to do nowadays, so kudos to them.

> 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.

~~~
Ididntdothis
It should also say that it fulfills the same purpose Adobe Lightroom does. I
think this would help a lot of people. It’s not an alternative for photoshop
for example.

~~~
seanhunter
They probably specifically don't say that to avoid potential copyright issues.
Depending on jurisdiction (I'm thinking specifically UK and EU here) you can't
actually say that about a competitive product without encountering problems.

~~~
niknetniko
I'm note sure about the EU part, because in Belgium you can mention
competitors, e.g. "Darktable aims to fulfil the same need as Lightroom" is
absolutely allowed, without problems. There aren't even rules specifically for
mentioning competitors, it's about comparisons in general. For example, saying
your product is "the best on the market" counts as a comparison, and you'll
need proof to back up your statements.

~~~
brudgers
Even a lawsuit without merit would require lawyering up and suck scarce time
and energy. Adobe has deep pockets and lawyers on staff. Darktable has
volunteers.

~~~
StavrosK
You can file a lawsuit without merit about anything, you don't need merit.

~~~
brudgers
I agree. I think never mentioning Lightroom is a way of steering clear of
meritorious suits and reduces the likelihood of a frivolous one...since even a
frivolous lawsuit could be fatal. Anyway, "here is our cool thing" is probably
organizationally healthier than "us against evil corp."

------
deanclatworthy
Huge fan of DarkTable. As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo-
processing pipeline into a subscription-based model for the rest of my life
(Lightroom) it's by far the most powerful tool at my disposal.

That said, pain points for me have included:

\- Managing multiple databases across multiple machines. My use-case is I have
a central database with all photos on one machine. Generally do initial edits
on another and then move the files across. I have yet to find a workflow -
with the "Local sync" feature, or simply moving files and their edit files
across the network - that feels simple. Should be noted that dragging files +
their XLF's from temporary machine to primary machine wont import into the
"database" for you. And you have to make sure all your directory structure and
naming schemes are the same on all your machines.

\- The community around "styles" (presets) doesn't scratch the surface
compared to Lightroom's. There's one main website [1], but it's not really
curated. I'd like to see more blog posts and pros offer these.

[1] [https://dtstyle.net/](https://dtstyle.net/)

~~~
bosie
> As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo-processing pipeline into
> a subscription-based model for the rest of my life (Lightroom) it's by far
> the most powerful tool at my disposal.

Couldn't you just outright buy a Capture One license?

~~~
BeetleB
I used to pay for a photo editing software and used it for years. Then they
got bought out by another company and the SW languished. And there was no easy
way for me to migrate my photos away from it. Today I cannot even run the
version I bought - incompatible libraries, etc.

Photos will last longer than the SW used to edit them. Don't lock them in.

~~~
bosie
Neither LR nor Capture one lock in your photos though. The edits will be
locked in I suppose but I don't see a way to not lock them in. Are you saying
that Dark Table somehow doesn't lock in your edits?

~~~
Sharlin
At least LR does not lock in your edits; I'm fairly certain Capture One
doesn't either. You can export either XMP sidecar files or DNGs with the edit
history bundled in along with the RAW data. LR's centralized catalog is just
an SQLite database, I believe, but I don't think the schema is documented
publicly.

~~~
bosie
Genuine question, are those edits usable in another app though? I.e. even if
the XMP notes that I used a range mask with some color filter, if capture one
or DT aren't capable of this or aren't capable of reading the sidecar files,
isn't this a de-facto lock-in?

------
cs702
As a longtime non-professional user of Darktable on Linux, I _love_ it. It has
allowed me to turn badly exposed raw photos into usable ones more times than I
can count. Some of its tools are uniquely powerful, e.g., the equalizer. It's
amazing what the Darktable team has achieved. Kudos!

~~~
acidburnNSA
Me too. Thanks especially to the awesome YouTube tutorials of people like
harry, I have taken my photography yo absolutely the next level.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-
zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAs...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-
zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl)

I love the concept of this being a digital darkroom where much artistic
expression occurs long after taking an exposure.

~~~
brudgers
Bruce Willis's _Learning Darktable_ is pretty good, too.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF-
rFQw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF-rFQw)

~~~
jillesvangurp
I'm guessing you mean Bruce Williams ;-). But yes, he has a very extensive set
of tutorials on everything related to Darktable (40+ videos at this point) and
he's busy adding some on Darktable 3. Also, he's a photographer with a lot of
experience so a lot of what he presents is from the point of view of a
photographer trying to get sensible results.

------
dang
Thread from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499)

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849)

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753)

(for the curious)

~~~
trop
Indeed! The annual Christmas release. I do think it matters to note darktable
yet again. This is a major release, of what has become a key piece of
photographic software. It's also a wonderful example of some people deep into
imaging math getting together to put some current thinking into nicely put
together open source code, and a community of committed users showing up to
try to understand and use the thing. One could think of it as the Dwarf
Fortress of open source imaging software...

------
HenriNext
Looks great. I might ditch Lightroom for this and donate the subscription
moneys to you instead, as a matter of principle.

But everybody is and forever will be comparing Darktable to Lightroom, so how
about:

\- Add to website a clear comparison vs Lightroom.

\- Add to website how to import Lighroom catalogue.

~~~
GordonS
I use an antiquated version of Lightroom on Windows that I shelled out for
years ago, but I seem to recall that Darktable got Windows support 1-2 years
back - I'd love to see a direct comparison to see if it's worth making the
switch.

Feature-wise, Lightroom is great - my main beefs with Lightroom are
performance and stability: it's slow, and crashes occasionally.

~~~
HenriNext
I'm not exactly against paying subscription fees.

What royally pisses me off with Adobe is that I now have pay them monthly to
maintain access to my photo catalogue (edits/keywords/etc), but they don't use
my moneys to improve their products.

I don't even remember when was the last useful new feature to either Photoshop
or Lightroom, but I doubt it was within this decade.

------
jillesvangurp
I upgraded yesterday and have been using this for several years. I'm running
this on a mac which is not ideal from a performance point of view but am
loving the UI refresh and the two new tools: filmic rgb and the tone
equalizer. The developer of these two new tools (Aurelien Pierre) has a few
nice very technical videos about how these tools and the Darktable rendering
pipeline works on his youtube channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/videos)

If you don't know it, Darktable is awesome and unique. It often gets compared
to Lightroom but it goes way beyond what that can do in many ways. It's main
weakness is really that it maybe offers too many ways to do things. In
addition to some easy to use filters it also offers many specialized filters
and tools. Also, masking and parametric masking is vastly superior and that
works on pretty much any tool.

------
kilroy123
What an odd coincidence, I was just looking up if there was a new version of
Darktable available.

Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all
your pictures from different sources? (macOS)

I have pictures on Dropbox, Facebook, and a huge removable drive. I want to
view all of these pictures in one place in chronological order. I have 50,000+
pictures and it is so overwhelming where to even begin. :-/

I can't seem to get darktable to do this do smoothly for me.

~~~
mceachen
Solving this exact situation of disarray is why I built my company.
[https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-
photostructure/](https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/)

~~~
kilroy123
This looks like _exactly_ what I want. Is this an open-source project?

~~~
mceachen
See this: [https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-
photostructure/...](https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-
photostructure/#how-else-is-photostructure-different)

~~~
roryokane
TL;DR: Not open-source, but the author promises to open-source it if the
company fails. Parts are already open-source:
[https://github.com/photostructure](https://github.com/photostructure). Also,
the app is free while it’s in beta, but will eventually cost money.

------
algorithm314
I personally use Rawtherapee which seems more advanced(but a little more
difficult to use for beginners) than Darktable. Ιs there any reason to use
Darktable apart from ease of use?

~~~
CharlesW
Just based on looking at the sites, Rawtherapee appears to focus on RAW
"developing", while Darktable appears to also do photo management and
Lightroom-style non-destructive editing.

~~~
tagrun
RawTherapee does photo management and is non-destructive as well.

Darktable supports masks and parametric masks for almost all operations.
RawTherapee on the other hand has a wider range of tools and support for
profiles and raw formats.

~~~
CharlesW
Helpful, thanks!

RawPedia's "Features" page
([http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features](http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features))
doesn't mention photo management, and I didn't find anything by searching for
"catalog" (Lightroom's name for a collection of managed photos), etc. It'd be
great if the site had more info about that aspect of the app.

~~~
tagrun
The equivalent functionality is the File Browser tab when you open RawTherape.
You can filter images, assign ranks/color labels, create queues, do batch
edits, assign a dark frame, etc etc.

It doesn't have "collections" or "catalogs" per se, if that's what you're
specifically looking for.

------
seabass
Huge fan of Darktable. For such a gui-centric set of updates, though, how
could they not include a single screenshot?

~~~
ygra
I think developers should really take note of VS Code's release notes (e.g.
[https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41](https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41))
which include lots of screenshots and animations of new features or
improvements. Makes it very easy to see at a glance what has changed. But it's
a lot more work than just dumping the git commit log, of course.

~~~
trop
There are screenshots (though not animations!) in the announcement for
darktable 3.0 at
[https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-3-0/15384](https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-3-0/15384).
The images do really help to get a sense of the new features. It's a good
point that it would be great to have such images accompanying the release
announcement on the main darktable site.

~~~
ygra
That's indeed a lot better.

------
stunpix
Once a year I'm installing the darkroom and giving it another chance, but
usually half hour later I'm deleting it.

It's slow as a hell. I don't understand why changing exposure on my 16 core i9
macbook takes up to 2-3 seconds for 24 mpix image. Same with zoom: 24 mpix
image takes 3-4 seconds to zoom in/out! Really? How this software is written
that simple actions are taking so much time? Enabling OpenCL helps, but not so
much: changing exposure takes up to second (yes, 3-4 times faster) and zoom
still 3-4. Meanwhile devs are spending time on css driven UI...

But UI is also unusable: it's very compact and many elements on a retina
display are very close to each other, so I'm constantly miss-clicking them.
Slider knobs are ridiculously small and hard to grab and drag. Numbers on
controls can't be entered manually, so if you need some exact value you should
spend seconds on dragging sliders until you get what you want.

Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and
performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention.

~~~
dbrgn
"Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and
performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention."

Can you name a few open source ones? I'm not aware of any open source RAW
development software that comes close.

~~~
stunpix
If we are talking only about open source, then RawTherapee. It's faster than
the darkroom. Better UI. But unfortunately they both lose to a commercial
software which is usually much faster in most processing/decoding scenarios.
Personally I prefer to pay for a software which does its job well. Why not?
Image editing isn't that tool which must be only open source. :)

------
devit
How does it compare to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom?

~~~
trop
Like Lightroom, darktable handles collections of images and allows applying a
recipe of alterations to tune up each image. But it is like Photoshop in that
it allows a great deal of volition in what happens to the image. This is
especially true in darkatable v3, which allows re-ordering of of the various
algorithms (also known as the pixel pipe) which work on an image.

Unlike Photoshop, which is primarily a pixel-based editor, both Lightroom and
darktable tend to work on the image in aggregate, with tools which are
particularly useful to images created via a lens and digital sensor. Lightroom
has a lot of its choice/sequence of tools "pre-baked", and there's a lot of
wisdom in its choices.

The tools in darktable are more esoteric. They're based on a variety of
traditional and recent mathematical work in image processing. It takes a bit
more knowledge and taste to choose the best tools, and set their parameters
well for a particular image.

Depending on hardware, you may find that the Adobe tools are a bit faster.

As a sibling poster mentions, of course darktable is open source, and not
subscription-based. It has an active development community. As Pascal Obry,
who managed the current release, writes in an email to the darktable list: "It
is also an important release as new developers have shined in and proposed
some amazing features." There's also active community of darktable users who
help each other to understand how to use it to work on a variety of images. I
find these discussions enlightening in order to gain a more general sense of
ways to think about image processing. One home of this community is
[https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable](https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable).

------
JeremyNT
This is a great piece of software and is a crucial tool for anybody looking to
manage a RAW photo processing workflow using OSS. I've used it for years and
am really excited to try the new release. What a great Christmas present!

------
darthcoder1011
Darktable is amazing! Can't wait to try this new version!

------
thawaway1837
How good is Darktable as a tool for a non professional simply looking to
organize all their photos? Maybe apply some automated improvements, and do
some deduping?

~~~
BeetleB
Although I and many others use DT to organize photos, the developers are
fairly open about not wanting DT to do too much of that.

[https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-
files](https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files)
[https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-
filemanager](https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-filemanager)

They even make it their April Fool's joke:

[https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file-
management/](https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file-management/)

~~~
caseyf7
What do DT users use for file/digital asset management?

~~~
BeetleB
Can't speak for others, but what I do:

I copy the photos from my camera to my PC. I then use rapid-photo-downloader
to bulk rename and move the files to where I store all my DT files. I then
import the directory using DT.

DT _does_ have some DAM capabilities (tagging, etc). Just don't use it to
copy/rename/move.

~~~
LandR
This is pretty much my workflow too, manually copy from camera to PC, then
import them into Darktable.

Edit and delete from within darktable.

------
Jeaye
Gah, I would love to be able to use Darktable, but it doesn't yet support the
CR3 files my camera outputs (since I opt not to use JPG). Once that's
supported, Darktable will have a couple more users in my household.

[https://github.com/darktable-
org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type...](https://github.com/darktable-
org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type=Issues)

Congrats on the release!

~~~
microcolonel
Pretty ridiculous that manufacturers are still leaving ISVs to rely on reverse
engineering in order to support their products. It's not like the formats are
"protected" somehow by not being documented; they inevitably end up well
documented.

------
lolc
Great news! Happy casual user here.

Just the other day I decided to include Darktable in my yearly donations. Not
a chance. They don't take donations :-)

------
notyourday
My biggest issue with Lightroom is that it is dog slow with large catalogs >
100k images. It is as if it kept everything in memory. Can Darktable be used
to store the data in mysql or postgresql?

~~~
jillesvangurp
It uses sqllite. If you work directory by directory, it's fine. Most of the
relevant data is in sidecar files. Apparently it can migrate lightroom meta
data to its internal DB (haven't tried this).

------
vassy
Does it support presets similar to Lightroom? My workflow is pretty basic, I
got about 10 presets I use on 90% of the photos I take, depending on the lens
exposure, etc.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Yes. They are called "styles".

------
m0zg
Not sure why the post by user "norlywtf" was flagged, I'm having the same
issue: on macOS Catalina the UI comes up in Russian. I can read Russian, so
it's not such a huge issue for me, but for someone who doesn't it'll be very
non-trivial to find where to set the UI language because it's a tiny gray gear
icon on a gray background, an the program does not use the Mac menus, nor does
it respond to Cmd+, shortcut.

Interestingly, one of the most annoying UI aspects of the program, the lack of
label capitalization, is not present in the Russian translation. Everything is
properly capitalized there.

------
deepspace
I love the Darktable user interface and feature set, but for my camera, the
default import profile for RAW images is way off, resulting in bland, flat
images lacking colour depth and needing extensive tweaking to look
presentable.

The same images look great after importing into Lightroom and require very
little post-processing.

I would love to drop my $expensive Adobe subscription, but this is the one
issue that prevents me from doing so.

~~~
jillesvangurp
It varies per camera model. With the latest version, you can at least turn off
the default application of the base_curve, which IMHO is quite horrible in
that it consistently blows out highlights. I default to using filmic now.
Also, you can develop some default styles and presets to speed up initial
processing.

------
bedros
any darktable expert here knows how to compare two photos side by side in
darktable

Also, can we use magnifying glass, instead of zooming in and scrolling the
photo

ideally, would be select two photos to compare, click on compare side by side,
and the two photos viewed on screen

~~~
trop
Culling mode, new in v3.0, allows comparing two (or more) photos side-by-side.
The new version also allows for zooming in on images in lighttable mode
(control-shift-scroll) when in culling mode or when images are "previewed"
(full screen via the "w" key).

------
GiorgioG
The Santa hat app icon offends me! (I'm joking.) This looks like an
interesting app, it's not as polished as LR, but it's functional and free -
great work!

------
Railsify
But does it work on windows?

~~~
thawaway1837
There’s a windows installer available. Any reason to believe that it doesn’t
work well on Windows?

~~~
kqr
I think it was meant as a joke -- for a long time, there was no official
Windows build because no contributor was using Windows so there was nobody
around to maintain that buikd. I think that has changed now.

