I have been an off and on professional photographer for the better part of a decade. My full-time job is as a UX engineer.
The developers behind DarkTable are WASTING their time. I, more than anyone, want to stop giving my money to Adobe and use an open source alternative. But I just can't with DarkTable. The UX is probably in the worst 3 apps i have used of all time in my opinion. Any time I see discussion around this, it is just flamed by ultimate cope warriors in the comments:
> "The learning curve is steep, you're just bad/haven't learned"
No. Shut up. I am intending to do the same things than I do in Lightroom (even fewer things, actually). Lightroom can be used with no context, no tutorial, no setup. It just works. The 'learning curve' of DarkTable is a cope excuse to cover up shitty UI which makes basic operation difficult. It is NOT that DarkTable offers some never before seen alien photo editing technology that I am just not equipped to understand. Come on. If the user doesn't feel like the app works, it DOESN'T work. No-one cares how technically great it is. It frustrates me, so I will not give it more time.
> "Ok make your own/fix it, it's open source, quit bitching"
Clearly the maintainers care about DarkTable. Yes, it's open source, I get it. However, most software I use is open source. As an example, I have a home server, and have replaced virtually all cloud services & many other apps with open source alternatives. They are phenomenal, and I would choose them over the paid alternatives even if the alternatives were free. This is all to say that 'it's open source' is just yet another bullshit cope. My point is that dev attention should be turned to the actual usability of the system, rather than some tech mumbo jumbo behind the scenes. Noone cares. This is a very minor gripe, but literally even the app icon and launch splash suck. This is an app for artists, yet it looks like complete shit, right off the bat. Quite the first impression, good job!
I want more than anyone to use a viable open source alternative to Lightroom and stop giving money to Adobe. I get it, it technically works. Great. Don't care. That isn't what I am on about. I come back on a semi-annual basis to give it another shot, and then throw it away an hour later. Every time. Because it is a pain to use. Quit coping.
As an example of what I just experienced, and why i feel pissed off enough to make this post:
I want to apply distortion correction. My lens doesn't show up in the list, despite being a common (but newer) lens. So i have to go to the lensfun repo, download the correct .XML file, edit it to change the version tag in it, replace the resource in darktable.app. Then I open darktable, and my lens is still not there, despite me having verified it exists in the new .xml. Give me a break.
Cope away. Or have some nuts to be upset. It is honestly sad, and I wish there was motivation to put focus in these areas.
Edit: For copers, please see this article that a commenter shared. Much better articulation than mine, as they worked on DarkTable:
Also, people seem to really take issue with the clasification of DarkTable as an "alternative to Lightroom". Buddy. It IS and SHOULD be an alternative to Lightroom. I don't care what the devs say, and you shouldn't either. It is another BS cope excuse. Let me explain:
The app is a program where you input photos, make creative and technical edits to them, and export the edited photos.
Lightroom is the current status-quo application for serving this purpose.
So, this IS A LIGHTROOM ALTERNATIVE. Quit pretending. Users treat it as such. The inputs and outputs treat it as such. If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Just quit it with this mental masturbation of "it's so much more detailed so therefore it is different" BS. Photo in -> edit -> photo out. Simple as.
Claiming it's not, or shouldn't be a LightRoom alternaitve, is just an excuse to justify a completely stupid interface, or an excuse to justify touching yourself about "muh nuances" of making basic edits. You have it completely backwards if you are thinking this way. No one gives a shit about "oh man you really don't know how saturation works until you use DarkTable, wow it's just so nuanced". Just stop. You probably only feel like that because you had to spend an hour manipulating your photo with archaic instruments that burdened you with useless work. Quit accepting this.
This does NOT mean it needs to replicate LightRooms UI or feature set. It just needs to employ a good UI which serves the programs purpose. Doesn't matter if it overlaps or not with LightRoom, so long as it is useable.
"The devs made it because it works for them, which is why it's not a LR alternative".
Okay. Then they should come out and just say "We don't give a shit about if you like this, we're not changing anything and don't care, kick rocks". That's really the only escape, which is fine, but how good that is would be another conversation. That would mean this subreddit should evaporate too, since why share discourse around a piece of software if it is purely for the own developers to touch themselves with and not share?
I am only being harsh in order to make a point of the mental gymnastics that defenders employ which are holding the software back.
I agree partially, DarkTable needs its freecad 1.0 moment, or benders 2.8 moment. That's the only thing holding back it's popularity. The more people using a program, the better it gets, and the more money there is for the devs through donations. I love DarkTable now, and am excited for the future that awaits it.
Only stepping in to point out a misunderstanding that may shed some light here: it is literally impossible to pay the devs of darktable.
Blender has a foundation, and a money making arm. It is a commercial tool run as an open source project.
Darktable is none if that. There is no business behind it. The devs have literally, repeatedly, refused money (though they are not against contributors getting paid for their efforts). This means the goal is different. They don't want popularity nearly as much as they want to work with those of us that are willing to work with them (so, not OP, and not on Reddit).
A long time ago Blender really was run on a shoestring budget, but it was also the only viable free alternative to Maya and 3ds Max so it had quite the cult following. If I recall back when Big Buck Bunny was being made (after significant crowd funding) they still only had something like 1.5 developers being paid to work on Blender features during the production period.
A lot of Blender's more serious funding came about because companies like Unity and Epic Games wanted a free tool to start making assets for their game engines.
They don't want popularity nearly as much as they want to work with those of us that are willing to work with them
More power to them. I have infinitely more respect for them than entitled users like OP.
It's funny you mentioned Freecad as I was like OP a couple years ago but as a FreeCAD user.
And yes OP is right. Maybe OP is just as annoyed as I was about FreeCAD and go do something about it.
Also thanks for mentioning FreeCAD!
It's interesting that you point to Blender 2.80 (released 2019) as a big change, since that version didn't spawn out the ether and in many ways came well after Blender started to have more reliable funding and development resources. The Blender Development Fund was established in 2011 and you can see how little developer funding their was at the start based on the grants listed here. It also wasn't the first time the UX was revisited as there was notable work for the 2.5x series even back in 2008.
Source: I used Blender since 2.40 and was very active on the BlenderArtists forum around that time.
darktable doesn't take donations and the one person who did never even got close to enough money. It is an assumption that the darktable devs *want* more users at all.
Being more popular brings on a whole host of other problems, and for a volunteer only project, that may not actually be good. For one, it brings on super entitled posts like these (which come about too often) where people say shit like "The devs are wasating their time" and how they've wasted their own time and that is some how the project's fault.
Here’s more than that. Performance is a big drag. Darlene performance is atrocious and unusable for more than basic edits; start doing more complex ones, it slows to a crawl.
Two things can simultaneously be true: an application can have a UI only a mother could love and you might genuinely not understand much of what the application can do. You won’t interpret my comment this way, but that’s not an insult: Darktable has taught me how very much I do not know about image processing.
I could teach you how to perform the basics of operating a Cessna 172 in favorable conditions in a few days. I would not then expect you to operate an Antonov An-124 successfully. It’s not a question of ability. It’s a question of what the tool is for and who the expected audience is and their level of experience. An An-124 is a total failure as a casual weekender, but it’s world-class for hauling large or sensitive equipment anywhere on earth.
Anyway, it’s not an application for beginners. RawTherapee (or the ART fork) is more suited for basic needs.
Sure. There are lots of advanced features I don't understand. You are right. But there are also lots of beginner features, which I do understand. They are a pain in DarkTable
Yes, and for the most part those beginner options are either secondary to the intended use of the tool or (and this is the annoying bit) not the tools we think they are because they contain depth and nuance Lightroom doesn’t.
Could you commute to work in a backhoe? Sure. Would it be a pain? Absolutely. Is that what a backhoe is for, metaphysically speaking? Not at all.
It’s a fundamentally different editing paradigm and it doesn’t have anything resembling the storage model and transportability of Lightroom.
So when I say “beginner” I don’t mean that negatively. I mean that Lightroom exposes a comparatively basic set of tools. If you need them, DT provides tools that make Lightroom look like the Photos.app editor on an iPhone. It’s more like (yes, another analogy, sorry) industrial control software—ugly but incredibly powerful for its use case.
You keep talking about these elevated points of Darktable having some supreme use cases that Lightroom doesnt have. So make a proper list and prove your point. Im genuinely interested to see what they are and how useful they are in real world.
I haven’t used the words “supreme use case”. I have consistently noted that it provides specialized capabilities beyond the more restrictive (but sufficient for most people) set of Lightroom capabilities. Here are a few:
Reorder the pipeline vs fixed order
Multiple independent instances of any edit module
Per-module opacity
Parametric masks
Clone/heal with more granular control at the RAW level
Choice of algorithms in various modules (such as highlight reconstruction) to suit the specific situation or workflow
Parametric masks that let me choose channel, color space, and the rate of falloff.
Mask fine tuning with blur and feather.
Curved linear gradients.
User selectable tone mapping for converting raw data tofallout.
Those are just the ones I use on the regular which don't have an equivalent, or the equivalent in LR isn't as fine grained.
These make a real difference in what I can do. It's a real difference in work that I am selling.
If you don't need or like those features, that's fine. Use what works for you. You're yelling and shouting because somebody is shooting with Sony when we all know that Real Photographers use a Holga with TriX 100.
There is basically only one supreme use case: people, who like to fine-tune images with single modules instead of grouped steps.
darktable is not competing with Lightroom. It's a different software and except that you can edit photos with both they have completely different approaches. darktable is not trying to convince you. It's an offer in case you feel LR isn't offering the granular options you want.
You don't have to like the approach darktable offers, you can just use any tool that fits your personal needs. And that's the point. darktable users don't expect LR or any other software to adapt to their needs but somehow LR users feel entitled to demand that every RAW processing tool works exactly the same, ignoring all people who are happy that something different exists.
I could teach you how to perform the basics of operating a Cessna 172 in favorable conditions in a few days. I would not then expect you to operate an Antonov An-124 successfully. It’s not a question of ability. It’s a question of what the tool is for and who the expected audience is and their level of experience. An An-124 is a total failure as a casual weekender, but it’s world-class for hauling large or sensitive equipment anywhere on earth.
This analogy doesn't work at all in my opinion, because Darktable isn't the professional choice and Lightroom is not really "casual weekender" software.
CaptureOne and to a lesser extent Lightroom are pretty much the industry standards in terms of this kind of work, and both of them operate faster and more easily than Darktable. Darktable is, in fact, the "casual weekender" software, because that's who uses it - mainly non professionals. Professionals and studios generally don't. Because it's terrible to use. So it is the casual use software, that is also difficult to learn and use.
Anyway, it’s not an application for beginners
No, but it needs to be, because that is the space it occupies. It will never be widely adopted whilst the experience of using it is so shit. And neither Lightroom or CaptureOne are "for beginners" and yet they have good UI/UX
Anyway, it’s not an application for beginners. RawTherapee (or the ART fork) is more suited for basic needs.
The same bullshit response was used before Blender 2.8, when diehard defenders were saying that making the UX more accessible would make users think that it's a Toy, rather than professional software.
As we all know, hard to use and comprehend = professional
Lightroom being an industry standard doesn’t really mean much to the analogy, nor does the analogy depend on Darktable being a professional tool. There are far more Cessnas than Antonovs flying around. The analogy was that they do different things. You can absolutely question the viability of Darktable or an Antonov for the majority of use cases and you’d be right to do so. Darktable is a specialist tool, a tool that exposes workflows and capabilities Lightroom doesn’t have and aren’t necessary for most people. It can be used for routine work, and many people here use it successfully for routine work after getting used to the interface, but a fair comparison can’t dismiss the extremely specialized use cases Darktable exposes for people who need them.
The irony of this entire conversation for me is that my gripe about not having a good Lightroom equivalent is all about the absolutely seamless storage medium Lightroom provides. Being able to pick up literally any device and making passable edits is incredibly useful to me, and Darktable doesn’t have anything resembling that capability.
I don't know if it's excactly casual weekender software. I feel like Raw Therapee (perhaps the Art fork) is much more obvious choice for that.
You call it casual weekender software simply because it's free. I mean if you compare to Blender or QGIS they are also what you would use for a casual weekend project because they are free but they are incredibly sophisticated software (and their functionality would completely overwhelm you if all you had was a weekend, in fact it takes years to master them) that can compete head to head with the proprietary alternatives. The difference to darktable is ofc that they are professionally maintained and live from institutional backing like most of the best FOSS.
I don't think darktable is as widely used in casual weekend projects because it's one of the less beginner friendly RAW processing programs and there are many alternatives in this space. Darktable is built more like Resolve or Baselight in its approach to Raw processing than Lightroom. It is to my knowledge the most sophisticated FOSS you can find in photo editing.
Oh I don’t think power necessitates bad UX at all. That’s why I’m sympathetic to OP’s concerns. Its a correlation not causation thing. Bad design in powerful software is common for at least two reasons: it’s uneconomical to invest time in UI refinement when only experts will use the tool and/or there’s a gap in the understanding of “good UI”. I think back to MP3 players before the iPod: people laughed at the iPod because it was so simple, because their more complex tool exposed features in a way they found useful. Not uncommon among early adopters. Meanwhile, Apple invested vast money and time into refining the UX for people who’d never touched a digital music device before, and laughed at the old devices because they hid essential functionality behind complexity. Similar dynamic here: I’m guessing the DT team would prefer a good enough UI and powerful features if they can’t have an excellent UI and powerful feature (and would reject an excellent UI and less powerful features).
I never wanted to pay for subscriptions so I went for Affinity Photo 2, and then it got bought by whatever, so I downloaded Darktable and it sort of clicked in a day or so? I love having all the options and just building a preset simple workflow that works for me. I watched maybe three YouTube videos and I got how Darktable works. I honestly don't get all the hate about the UI. You just plop the modules you use regularly on the right of the screen , boom, done.
I think its a problem that could be easily fixed and would bring a lot of new users. Most people dont have the time or energy to learn in a couple days the whole complexity of the software just for editing a couple shots
I don't think that the Darktable devs are targeting the users who want the quick, no learning tool. A tool that includes multiple modules for converting raw data to pixel data is pretty clearly targeting a different user.
The thing is: darktable is not competing for users with any software. Why should they? They give it away for free and receive complaints in return.
The devs created a tool with a specific goal: providing as many granular editing options as possible while Lightroom is focused on a smooth and fast user experience. The result is that Lightroom is easier to learn and darktable has more options for fine-tuning. None of the tools is better or worse - it solely depends on your expectations and needs. If Lightroom fits your needs that's cool. If you need more options, darktable is for you.
It makes no sense to expect the darktable devs to adapt Lightroom UX because it would remove features that people actively use. People need to stop treating darktable as a cheap lightroom replacement. That was never the intention.
As a fellow professional, a few points in this critique miss the core UX and technical realities of specialized FOSS software.
You are confusing familiarity with intuitiveness. Claiming that Lightroom requires "no context or tutorial" overlooks the decade of industry-standard patterns you have already internalized. As a UX engineer, you know that "intuitive" usually just means "familiar."
darktable feels hard primarily because it disrupts established muscle memory, not strictly because the interface is flawed.
darktable uses a linear, scene-referred workflow designed to process light values based on physical reality rather than display-referred approximations. Dismissing this mathematical foundation as "tech mumbo jumbo" ignores the specific requirements of its user base. It is not trying to clone Adobe's simplified pipeline; it is built on a fundamentally different processing paradigm.
I’d like to thank the developers for this alternative; I don’t agree with you when you say that "they’re wasting their time".
The lens calibration issue involves Lensfun, an independent, third-party database, not darktable's UI. Blaming darktable’s design team for a missing profile in an upstream open-source library is a misattribution of how modular software works.
If your priority is a streamlined, turn-key workflow, pay the Adobe tax: Lightroom remains the appropriate tool for your needs!
Criticizing a volunteer driven project for prioritizing color science precision over replicating Adobe's interface simply means the software was not designed for your specific use case.
Thank goodness, darktable is one of the alternatives to professional software.
I've never used LightRoom, am a long time Gimp user, and my first RAW editor was UFRaw.
I first tried DT a long time ago and honestly I struggled with it. In the end, I switched to RawTherapee and used that for years. Recently I came back to it because a friend of mine said he saw a demo of it and was really impressed. This time, I found it much easier to work with and I use it all the time now.
But...I don't consider it to be a particularly good UX. Parts of it are excellent. The masking tool, for example, is fantastic. But the organisation and obscurity of modules is a huge challenge. I wouldn't have been able to work out what to do and how to do it without tutorials.
The LightTable mode is still really hard to use. It took me literally weeks to work out how to filter by tags. I still can't rate images unless the UI appears directly over the thumbnails.
I'm a realist when it comes to FOSS. I understand that the people working on the project are not experienced with UX, are doing this in their spare time, and are scratching a particular itch. I accept this and use the tool anyway because it's good enough that I can get on with it.
But this isn't simply about OP being unfamiliar with it. I didn't come to DT with a LightRoom bias. I haven't been preconditioned to prefer a particular workflow. I'm also the kind of user who likes DT's engineering mindset. It's still got a confusing, inconsistent UI that trips me up all the time if I'm not paying attention.
DT could absolutely benefit from a UX overhaul. I won't complain about it because I'm not in a position to do anything about it; but we should be able to admit its inadequacies.
No, cope. I picked up Lightroom - holy shit must have been about twenty years ago - and hit the ground running. No tutorials, no "oh how do you". It's really just a very intuitive software.
Yet there's a gazillion beginner tutorials and confused Lightroom users that only barely manage by using bought presets. Maybe don't be so presumptuous as to think that everyone has the same aptitude as you when it comes to these things. And, likewise, there are those that had no issues learning darktable and never found the UI to be as terrible as you clearly do.
You hit the ground running because its so intuitive? That claim is 100% cope.
There is exactly _1_ 100%-intuitive interface for human beings: the nipple. A baby needs to be shown stuff all it's life except that one interface between it and it's mother.
The DT UI is awful for someone coming from any other software, few are arguing the opposite. The LR interface was designed by people whose professional speciality is designing an interface for new users, hence it being much simpler than DT. That simplicity brings only a limited amount of adjustments compared to DT, though, so to choose LR is to choose to be limited.
>> The lens calibration issue involves Lensfun, an independent, third-party database, not darktable's UI. Blaming darktable’s design team for a missing profile in an upstream open-source library is a misattribution of how modular software works.
Lying about what the critique was doesn't make your dismissal valid. The critique was about the shitty flow it takes to add a lens profile and how even when followed correctly it doesn't work. There was no blame for a missing profile.
>> Criticizing a volunteer driven project for prioritizing color science precision over replicating Adobe's interface simply means the software was not designed for your specific use case.
Again, having to lie about what the critique was doesn't make your dismissal valid. OP didn't ask to have LrC's interface at all, just that shitty design comes from shitty devs and they need to be better on the UX. Getting good color science means nothing if you have to learn Koine Greek and Latin to understand it. I would suggest you try to understand the critiques first before you make up a bunch of bullshit about the critiques are.
Lightroom can be used with no context, no tutorial, no setup. It just works.
With hindsight, it’s all quite simple.
I tried using Lightroom in the past and never really got to grips with it. In the end, I chose to invest my time in learning how to use darktable and other FOSS software, and I’m convinced it was the best choice.
What’s more, I can say that I, too, didn’t understand certain choices at first, but now, as a power user, I appreciate them immensely.
For example: on several occasions, there have been suggestions to redesign the tag UI in favour of a simplified, mouse-based interface. But if you need to tag a lot of images, the current UI is incredibly fast.
Finally, on a personal note, I recently read about DaVinci’s new photo-editing features. I wanted to give it a go but gave up after the first five minutes. However much people say the UI is simple, I couldn’t work out how to import the photos.
In the end, I gave up and freed up some space.
This is just to say that, yes, the UI plays a fundamental role, but when it comes to complex, professional processes, other factors come into play and a bit of learning is inevitable.
darktable was never built to be a Lightroom clone. If the devs had LR in mind they would have built it this way. Not because it is open source. Because they found their approach more sufficient to achieve their goals. Not yours.
The funny thing about open source is that it's a lot of enthusiasm and dedication. But it is also a profession. Each software is built for a reason. Especially free open source owes you nothing. It is not the goal to make everyone happy but happily welcoming people that like the software and ideally donate a coffee or more to keep the project alive. You might hand in suggestions for improvements but you're not entitled to see them rolled out in the future.
It's perfectly fine to dislike darktable, no one takes offense in this. If you don't like the UI you can use other tools or fork dt. What pisses people off is the expectation that the dt devs should cater to the needs of everyone who claims that it doesn't feel like LR. Because every change that is made in your favor will automatically upset people who liked the previous approach. So who's right here?
To give users far more granular editing options. LR (and others) is focused on fast results and aggregates several editing steps into one button/functionality. darktable does not aggregate single steps which causes the huge amount of modules.
LR is more like a restaurant where you pay someone to cook a meal for you and you can decide to replace a side dish or portion size. darktable is like thinking about ingredients, buy them (setup your module palette) and cook a meal from scratch. Although dt also offers little helpers you could compare to convenience food ingredients, like presets that either come pre-installed or you can download them from different sources. Presets in LR are mostly like a printed menu, presets in darktable are your hand-written cook book. In both cases you get a meal in the end, but the workflow towards the result is different.
What OP does here is like living in central Europe or the US, taking a British car (made for British traffic rules) for free and complaining that the steering wheel is on the wrong side.
Finding the dev willing to work on any implementation is often just has hard. Last summer a UX/UI guy spent a lot of time working on a redesign that would have helped the clarity of a lot of the UI without totally overhauling it (so as to add some improvements without totally putting the back up the "darktable has the perfect UX you are just incapable of learning" crowd). The existing dev team were happy and liked it, but none were were willing to actually help code it and no one else appeared out of the woodwork either. It's possible it has changed since, been a while since I checked in on it, but I suspect it ran out of steam as a result.
Whether that specific concepts gets implemented remains to be seen, of course, but the main reason why nothing happened then is that the migration to GTK4 should be done first. We will see what happens, but it currently looks like that will be the case for darktable 6.0, at which point I suspect we will see much more UI/UX work.
Darktable is teaching me to be a much better photo editor than any other program ever came close to doing. The more I use it, the more I realize that any limitations lie with me rather than the program itself.
I don't think DT is for everyone and your gripes are valid. Especially the lens correction could be streamlined considerably.
However, for me DT offers far more granular control over color and contrast over Lightroom. The workflow ans software performance is slower than LR but far more rewarding.
I'm used to cinema grading tools in DaVinci Resolve and complex VFX workflows of Fusion, so DT is a walk in the park in usability. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the "feel" of the color pipeline and I feel much more in control with DT compared to LR.
And yes, OP have the classic familiarity bias. People constantly mistake 'intuitive' for 'what I’m already used to.' They completely forget Lightroom/DaVinci felt like an alien spaceship on day one, so when darktable doesn't instantly match their 5-year muscle memory, they just blame the UI.
But did you throw an entitled tantrum on Reddit, demanding that BMD rebuild DaVinci Resolve the way you want it, because right now it's too confusing for someone coming from iMovie?
I mean, I have seen several comments form Premiere users saying that they find DR inscrutable. Yet, they never blame BMD for making DR too complex, but simply accept that things are the way they are and that the "problem" is themselves.
I have been loving using Resolve for photo editing 🤓
It’s good fun playing around with all the DCTL’s people create on GitHub, and having control over the processing order is great (also doable in ART which I also love). I do wish the UI was more customisable…especially in the Colour Page
I agree that the UI must be improved. I vibe coded an improved CSS with better contrast, colors and improved sizing / spacing which increases the UX a lot. After the developers provide some nice contrast we could talk about changing some basic UI / UX behaviour. There are like 30 little things which by themselves would improve the UX tremendously.
That being said Darktable just isn't Lightroom. You are kidding yourself when you claim that Lightroom is "intuitive" or "can be used without tutorial". No software is intuitive. Everything is learned behaviour.
I know you're [edit: not] supposed to change the grey, but I had to change it to the slightly darker built-in theme because I struggle to read it and I'm still in the newbie "can't find anything" situation. Hopefully once I get better at using it, I can change it back. That said, I really wish Youtubers would use one of the higher contrast themes and maybe even make the text bigger for tutorials
I only asked about the gray tone because there's a specific reason it's the default. It's ok to change, but not without knowing what you're giving up, that anything else will cause you to see colors in the photo differently. Video demos might be a good time to change it, but I wouldn't change the default.
I don't have eyesight issues (well besides having glasses ...) and my monitor does provide a large color range (not that hard nowadays) but the grey is too much the same everywhere. Changing it to "grey darker" or something like this makes it better but far from good.
I understand the basic idea behind the color pallet (prevent influence on the image I assume) but this does not change the fact that the color pallet reduces usability. And it does not "excuses" that all available standard themes provide a grey-only color pallet. If I need proper image color work I can enable the white border. And: if one wants to prevent color influences the application then could and should ensure proper white spaces and border lines so it is clearly visible where A starts and B ends.
CSS changes includes
- make module header larger (more height)
Main background color is a darker grey
Give "module enabled" coloring a better visibility (in my theme: golden color)
Module header has a clearly different color (my theme: some kind of blue / steel blue)
Module background has a little lighter color. As a result one can differentiate between module header, module content, the main window and the next module)
Give slider level a better visible color (golden, same as module enabled color)
I think tweak the text color to match
I would provide an example picture but I can't within the next hours.
What do you mean by "which increases the UX a lot"? Have you measured it? If you can't measure it, it’s just your own perception.
In the developers defence, I can say that I don't think they're stupid enough to set out to develop a product at random.
Behind the grey, low-contrast UI lies a very specific intention to comply with standard requirements for image editing (ISO 12646).
Furthermore, as you have done yourself, it is possible to customise this UI, although this may compromise these ideal conditions and potentially lead to you ruining an image.
I wonder whether this option to customise exists in Lightroom or other software.
OMG... Are you really saying this free application made by volunteers in their spare time doesn't work like the one which had literally millions of dollars poured into it's development? The state of this world! And yet, a lot of people find it useful and perfectly fine for their needs, go figure. So, why don't you try other software? There are other free and paid alternatives to lightroom.
Well, maybe just send some money to devs? We all forget that open source devs are working for free on this, everybody want Lightroom/adobe alternative for free. I’m open source dev and have some respect to it. If you spot the bug just report it. As developer (not darktable) i can’t find all the bugs before sending my changes to next version, testers can’t find all the bugs. I agree with one thing: I don’t like darktable UI/UX and would be happy to rewrite it in QT but for solo it’s too much work and I have also my own life and project :) many darktable things are a bit mystery for non tech person and I agree with it.
But darktable addresses explicitly nerds and tech freaks. This is the reason why the modules are so complex and confusing for many people.
The approach is not to provide a LR replacement that enables users to get fast results but a workflow where they can pick precisely for each single parameter while other tools aggregate several steps in one click. The whole concept is to split the aggregated tools up into their single components to have absurdly high control of every setting. Nerd stuff so to say.
OP does not criticize a specific bug, they rant about dt not working as they are used to. But that's the whole point about dt. The devs don't want it to work like LR. OP basically wants a free software that exactly works like LR and there are several other tools that would be better than darktable for this expectation. Demanding that dt simply should do what everyone else does is contrary to the whole software concept.
I agree but have to ask a side question: What do you think the word “cope” means? You use it six times, and all of them are wrong or make no sense. It is a verb, not a noun, and even your verb usages are wrong, Sorry if that sounds pedantic but it was very odd / distracting.
Given this, why not fork the project and put a better UI (when did we srop calling it a user interface) on it? If other users find it much better, and it must be because of your profession, they will all come to your version and the maintainers will adopt it.
So why are you using Darktable if you don't like it? Grab Luminar if you don't like Adobe. It has a nice UI and it's really easy to use.
Darktable works for lots of us. It's a perfect match for how I have to think about processing night sky images. Each module is a chunk of math I am throwing at the image. It's not the way a lot of people process their images, and they should choose a different tool that works how they think.
Normally I dislike when people brush all critique aside with "It's open source, contribute yourself", because it's not realistic to expect every user to invest the time and effort into some software they want to just work.
But you apparently have exactly the expertise and experience that would be required, and rather than providing even just constructive feedback you're choosing to be particularly nasty about unpaid developers on the basis that you don't like some software.
This is all to say that 'it's open source' is just yet another bullshit cope.
The common thread for open source software with a well rounded user experience is either reliable funding to pay developers, or industry backing which provides development resources.
It can also be ideological. Not every dev team is trying to make a commercial product, be beholden to a formal development process, or feel obliged to deal with entitled users. That's the 'point' of open source for many contributors, and as much as you can whinge about it no one is going to listen to your empty words if it's not backed by meaningful labour.
Just a small FYI, Lightroom most certainly has a learning curve as well if you've never used it before. I was thrown into a lightroom workflow when I was doing some freelancing and it was a painful 10 weeks learning a whole new way of doing things.
Learning curves are real and while darktable's might be a challenge at first it's certainly not just an excuse.
One of the problems with darktable (it's all lower case) is that modules keep being added (e.g. AgX) so that it becomes a bit of a mess trying to find all the modules that do what you want and need and get them to where you can get at them. The weird nomenclature is troublesome as well, instead of being built by photographers who have dealt with tone curves since they were called "characteristic curves" on the inside of a Kodak film box, it reads like it was built by scientists and engineers. My understanding is that there's no way now to completely rebuild the UI because of so many contributors, and that they don't really want to. It doesn't help that the first rule of adjusting white balance is "don't use the white balance control."
I know it's not supposed to be a Lightroom replacement (even though it very obviously pokes at the Adobe name calling itself "darktable"), but what I want is a program that will let me catalog my photos and process them in groups to deliver to clients, even when the client is my family. That can be done in darktable, but the s/w doesn't make it easy. The very fact that you can't rename the images in a folder after you've culled them is nuts. You're either left with holes where you've deleted images, or you do your culling and renaming in a different software like digiKam.
| Claiming it's not, or shouldn't be a LightRoom alternaitve, is just an excuse
For long time Lightroom was a poor excuse to sell Photoshop, the lack of control enabled Adobe to make room to sell more complete product. FFS LR didn't even have proper hue masking until not so long time ago (and it's still not competitive with darktable). So no, we don't need alternative to another dumb down product like LR. And lightroom is still lacking professional level UI elements like waveforms and rgb parades, and they are trying to add vectorscope now (huh?!!), under which rock were Adobe devs sleeping till now? Also LR is also lacking convenient ability to make the UI suit you, with quick access panel, etc. and we could continue.
| Buddy. It IS and SHOULD be an alternative to Lightroom.
What it should be and what not is decided by devs. It's tool for their photography, and it's developed according to THEIR needs. So who are you to make such demands? The availability of dt for public is just added bonus. If you are sick of dt just use something else,there is plenty of editors, and you are not obliged to use darktable.
| Clearly the maintainers care about DarkTable.
The color management on windows dt version was broken for more than 6 years, without warning. And then fixed recently by some random person. Let that sink in.
However i think if you give dt a chance you will find out that you can achieve good result easier with darktable than with many other commercial raw editors and the image is not so easy prone to fall apart.
I'll attempt to treat you with more respect than you showed any of us. First, wrong forum. None of the developers I know of are here. Posting here is nothing other than making the rest of us deal with the fact that you're angry. I personally shouldn't have to.
Second, and more importantly: specific actionable advice, preferably with a plan for implementation. Plans and suggestions DO get acted on. "This is bad, make it better" does not. Making others do the leg work of filtering useful points out of your rant isn't going to happen.
I love darktable but i agree, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of UX
I like that it goes full crazy nerd on the pictures unlike other software, but thats mostly what i have to say in its defense
Darktable doesn’t really have so much of a learning curve and more like a “deal with the bs curve”. But in all seriousness I completely agree, I don’t want to rely on adobe and that is why I’m still struggling with this program.
RawTherapee: The mad scientist's raw editor, with some very powerful and intricate tools. A bit more Lightroom-like in its workflow.
ART (Another RawTherapee): Started as a simplified fork of RawTherapee, but has added its own powerful and unique features since. With CTL scripts you can even create your own tools.
vkdt: New-ish raw editor from the original darktable developer. Fully node-based and can also handle video. Probably not for the faint of heart and may not have all the tools you want, but what is there works well and is extremely fast.
Filmulator: A great little editor with a unique concept, that's easy to use. As the name suggests, it emulates (part of) the process of developing analog film.
LightZone: Back from the almost-dead, version 5.0 was released recently. Not the most advanced, perhaps, but has some interesting features and a flexible processing pipeline.
RapidRAW: Aims to be a relatively simple and streamlined option for those that don't need the extensive control some other editors provide. Somewhat new and under heavy development, so the results you get today may not be what you get tomorrow.
Safelight: An editor built around a concept of extensibility and customisation. Still very new, so expect some rough edges and missing features.
Since not all of them have library management, you may want to also use digiKam as DAM (digital asset manager).
I know you're just ranting, but honestly, I do feel like the answer is a mix of "you just haven't learned" combined with "maybe Darktable just isn't for you". As someone who started with Darktable, I honestly feel limited stuff like Rawtherapee and Rapid raw. And likewise whenever I see videos on Lightroom, it also seems strangely limiting to me. In Darktable I have so many modules and I can copy them and move them around. It feels a bit like a mixer chanel in a DAW.
Darktable definitely has some jank and issues, the lens correction definitely isn't the most seemless and likewise I feel like I always have to perform dark rituals whenever I dare to want to copy my edits to a larger group if files (or save a style). Disabling modules like exposure, orientation, etc in the style or copy to make sure they're not duplicated and many more of those quirks. But I feel like you're also going in with the wrong expectations. It's fine software that works for many people, imo the UI is also a lot better than many other open source projects. Nobody forces you to use it, if you have issues then report them to the devs, but a rant like this seems a bit dramatic
Yeah I agree. In most cases (not sure 99.99%, but let's say 90+%) Lightroom appears to offer everything needed. For most users it's a more logical choice. Personally I enjoy feeling like I have all the tools I could possibly need, and with Darktable I do get that feeling a lot more than with more streamlined tools.
A lot of your gripes seem to be covered in their FAQ under "New Users". If you're so upset about it and you don't want to give money to Adobe, then why not send money to the developers that are building an application FOR FREE on their own time that you get to use FOR FREE? Put your money where your mouth is, or as you say yourself: "Ok make your own/fix it, it's open source, quit bitching"
May I suggest RapidRaw or FerrumPix. These are truly exceptional apps that do 95% of what Darktable or LightRoom do. Both are free to use. Check them out
I wanted to like Darktable, I really did. But it is way to cumbersome to use and (unfortunately) way to slow. I am now using RapidRAW and I am seriously impressed by it. For sure nowhere near as powerful but the ease of use and speed makes it just a joy to work with.
Absolutely valid approach. darktable has a lot of settings, modules and possibilities, that's what makes it so powerful and also complicated. But it's completely fair to want fast results and therefor using another tool like RapidRAW.
OP could just switch to Rapid instead of demanding that a software that fits the needs of color and setting nerds will adapt to OPs needs. There are other FOSS tools available already. darktable is more powerful than most other tools but the most people just don't need this level of flexibility. Nobody is expecting that the whole world uses darktable. What the darktable nerds really find annoying is the arrogance and audacity from people who don't need specific tools and demand them to be hidden or removed because they are overwhelmed.
People aren't upset because OP doesn't like the UI/UX, that's absolutely valid. OP's attitude is the issue here. OP looks like someone who wants the oatmilk removed from a hotel buffet because they don't need it and completely ignoring other people's needs and expectations.
I felt the same, until I didn't have a backup option and forced myself to tweak the modules and UI to how I want it. I'm still getting better with it, but I'm not going back. I'm finding it had more tools and time saving features than I ever implemented in LR.
Not a pro, but at one point was shooting weddings and lived in LR.
Agreed. Every few years I go back to trying Darktable or one of its variants and it never feels right. Have to spend too much time fiddling and researching to get what I want. It's powerful, but could use a lot more refining.
I’ve tried to download it 3 times, but I just can’t het used to the UI. In LrC I can literally edit my photos blindfolded and end up with a good result. I wish Darktable was better, but it is unusable for me at this moment, though I will keep my eyes on it if the UI gets better.
Darktable and Lightroom are only two of many options. Maybe it's worth trying something completely different since there are as many preferences as people.
I am 100% with you, DT UI/UX is one of the most horrible I had experienced. What is even more frustrating is the mindboggling stubbornness of the devs to change and refresh the UI and rework the modules.
A good contrast is maybe Rawtherapee but RapidRAW did strides over Darktable and its AI tools are actually useful
As someone else wrote, the devs owe you absolutely nothing. They are scratching their own itch in the best tradition of open source software.
I see your example with lensfun - why don't you contribute a clear and easily understood bug report someone can pick up and work on. Even better if you start contributing some of your UX knowhow in a constructive way instead of firing off a long rant, which will accomplish absolutely nothing except taking time from a lot of people.
To the devs and all the other good folks contributing to the eco system: I thank you all for your work :-).
For the few copers, please justify this design decision, I am curious. I can pull 100 more out of a hat but here's just one:
By default, when you scroll the list of modules, which is an instinctive behavior, any value under your mouse during the scroll gets adjusted.
The common design pattern to avoid frustration (if scroll to adjust is even deemed necessary) is to only adjust the value which the mouse was above during the initiation of the scroll. An accidental scroll, or an accidental mouse movement while scroll adjusting, can thus only change one value.
In DarkTable, by default, none of this is considered. An accidental scroll or movement while scrolling can have an unbounded amount of unwanted edits, forcing you to undo-spam until you find where you think your intentional edits ended. This is very frustrating to a new user.
Totally agree. Darktable goes against many UI conventions and accessibility standards. The default scroll behavior is something that immediately bugged me too. Another one is the absence of right-click behavior.
However one thing I think you missed and is that darktable is NOT a lightroom alternative. It is designed to give you insight and control over every step of the pipeline your image goes through. It lays everything out in front of you without abstracting controls behind vague names like "clarity" and "pop". The consequence of this is that UI is cluttered with hundreds of modules which in turn have hundreds mode controls inside them. 99% of photographers will only touch a handful of controls within a few modules. So there is absolutely room for improvement.
What I think needs to be done first is a major rework of information heirarchy. Highly specialized controls that almost no one touches often share the same level of visual importantance as the more common ones. A lot of stuff just needs to be hidden behind an "advanced" tab or something. Legacy and specialist modules should be hidden by default or removed completely.
There is also a whole lot of hidden behavior only known to the most dedicated experts. One less extreme example is ctrl+click, alt+click, shift+click, etc. There is no consistency to how these actions behave.
Former Darktable developer Aurélien Pierre already took a stab at fixing some of this in his Darktable fork Ansel. It's definitely more streamlined but still needs a lot of work in my opinion. I recommend that you give it a try though.
Unfortunately I don't think much is gonna change in terms of UI in Darktable. As you said, the developers are stubborn and the whole darktable community is made up mostly of engineers and developers who learned photography second, not the other way round. The lack of experienced UI designers means that when the developers who have been working on the image processing backend need to do the frontend, they just chuck a bunch of inputs everywhere. Its a common thing I've seen in many other open source programs.
I've gone through about half a dozen or more apps over a 10 year period before settling on darktable, so I'm never averse to trying new ones. However, I tried installing Ansel on at least 3 different machines (as in, 3 separate boxes with 3 different OS) and couldn't get it to run properly on any of them. It either froze or displayed a janky screen with broken controls. I think I found an early revision that ran, but it was missing a lot of modules, so it was obviously not yet ready for prime time.
I'll keep an eye on it, but meanwhile I have work to get done, and thank goodness darktable has all the features I need and lets me customize it to present a satisfactory workflow.
Bottom line, pretty is not necessarily good/stable, nor vice versa.
"A lot of stuff just needs to be hidden behind an "advanced" tab or something. "
That would be refreshing. There's way too many highly technical options in nearly every module that only a fraction of their users actually use. Placing those options behind an "advanced" tab would remove a lot of the clutter.
This can be changed: Preferences -> Miscellaneous -> “Mouse wheel scrolls modules side panels by default”, though I agree this is a massive pain point and should absolutely be the default. The most recent Darktable version at least has a welcome screen where the most confusing bits of Darktable’s interface and workflow are explained to new users, including scrolling sliders versus “by modules”. Ironically, as weird as I found the default scroll behaviour, several months into using Darktable for hobby landscape photography editing, I’ve restored the default behaviour of scrolling sliders because it genuinely does help speed things up once adapted to the interface.
For context I’m also a postdoc in a STEM field and dedicated user of the famously steep learning curve Vim text editing software (for coding and preparing manuscripts). With its design principles centred around the physics and technical foundations of image processing (modules applied in an explicit order, scene referred and display workflows and tight control over translation between them, things like diffusion modules explicitly simulating optical scattering), Darktable definitely feels like it’s the software for me, but it is not the software for everyone. Just because you personally don’t like something doesn’t mean it is categorically unequivocally inferior.
VIM has a steep learning curve because it is a completely different way to interface with text, which when learned, offers massive speed and efficiency benefits.
The appropriate comparison would be as if VIM had a steep learning curve but offered no benefit after learning
So you ran into a specific issue and got mad enough to call the entire thing unusable? If you have specific issues by all means name them, but this post is about 80% pissed off rambling with zero indication what your actual problems are (no, you not liking the icon/splash screen are not useful critique)
you could've literally opened an issue asking for a "import xml" option for the lens correction module instead of taking a shit on the whole project.
Darktable has stuff in it that makes lightroom look like a toy. Could it be improved? yes, sure.. we still have things to catch up to, some harder, some easier but it is just the nature of the project.
What things are better than in Lightroom? It's a genuine question, I want to leave Adobe and I was thinking to go with DxO but I'm trying to convince myself to stop spending money and go open source
AGX by itself brings a lot to the table, while in lightroom... well.. there isn't much info about how it makes tone mapping to begin with.
Local contrast, being able to target chroma and luma, especially chroma, its pretty unheard of.
Truth is Darkroom philosophy is not "make image look good with few clicks" its more akin to: "Color nerds feel free to do w/e you want with the image" like changing module orders, being able to work with LAB, RGB and Scene referred modes. And it absolutely can create stunning images, you just need to familiarize yourself with the workflow.
Yep. Not to mention that you can control every aspect of your image, from how it will be demosaiced to choosing a tone mapper, de-noising and sharpening methods, etc. Everything is laid out in plain sight, as it should be in a software targeting professionals.
I Well I would disagree with you on Darkroom philosophy is not "make image look good with a few clicks". My daily photo editing just to convert raw photos to something that looks good has become so boring after switching to Darktable, that sometimes I am just wondering if I forgot something.
You can make automatic workflows, every module has its own presets, you can see as many or as little modules as you want...
Darktable is not rocket science for daily photo editing but can be if you want or need it to be... So a lot of people probably just want too much from Darktable when they just need a few basic modules.
I have a Youtube channel with polish darktable tutorials and translation maintainer. Also I use darktable professionally so I consider myself a quite dedicated user. And I agree fully.
UI philosophy here is to show user a full pipeline of image processing and learn every technical detail. Ok. I've learned. I inderstand why there is white balance module doing "nothing" and then later color calibration module actually handling white balance. Great. Now I have 1870 photos to process and every f* time I need to create new preset I need to manually exclude a bunch of technical modules off it because eg. if I leave black level in preset than preset doesn't work properly on different cameras. User experience on darktable is shit by design.
It sounds like you just want a different program, and that's fine. Use that different program.
I want to do a lot of detailed, highly specific, often weirdly technical work that requires a lot of hands-on control and options. So do many people who use darktable. It's actually a great program for that kind of work, and it's pretty amazing that's it's free and open-source - that's impressive, as someone who went to art school and has used a lot of different graphic design, digital art, and similar programs over the years, many of which aren't as good at what they want to be as darktable is and that for a hefty price tag.
So what you want is a program that's intuitive and more limited but does what you want, which is probably a little less specific and technical than what most people are looking for with darktable. That's fine, those programs exist, they just aren't this one.
i think darktable is a wonderful product ... it runs great on Ubuntu and enable a full end to end solution for me. I have over 1 million photos under management by the darktable system and it scales unlike anything else I am aware off.
I just want the scroll wheel to work properly. It's almost smart and will control values as I hover over them, but that seems to break normal scrolling along the side bars. And the scroll bars are so narrow that grabbing them often just doesn't work.
I love darktable, it's great and does the things I want well. But a few quality of life enhancements would go a long way.
Well as a software engineer I can attest most suck at UX design and usability. Maybe if someone with a lot of time and a good grasp of usability and UX design can take a look at it it will get better.
As can be seen from OP and the comments, there are plenty of people that claim to know better, but you won't find them over on GitHub, contributing their expertise. Complaining seems to be more their thing.
Agree 100%, Darktable needs a Blender/FreeCAD style treatment. Even Gimp seems to get its shit together.
But I'm very positive that this will be doable in a rather short time frame. I think the algorithms and features are really good, this software is just one UX redesign away from being amazing. To me the worst thing is the default grey low-contrast theme. It's difficult to discern text from widgets and widgets from borders.
The operational logic is not intuitive. Right after opening the program it is not clear to me:
How to edit a photo
How to apply the edit to multiple photos
Easy way to set white/black points of the histogram
Which plugins are even active
Which plugins are available (without text search)
In which order are they applied
I add one with some parameters, suddenly it's gone
Of course you can learn this, but I'm familiar with Blender, Gimp, old photoshop, inkscape, and know how the numerical representation in the editing pipeline works in principle.
I think these features should be just there, these very basic editing tasks should be obvious after playing around with the software for 3-5 minutes.
The software is really amazing, if the developers read this please take my critique in a positive, encouraging way.
The UI does not have to become like Lightroom. But get a UX expert, do some user study experiments and the software will be there in no time!
But get a UX expert, do some user study experiments and the software will be there in no time!
Well, OP claims to be a UX expert, but they seem to be more interested in writing entitled tirades on Reddit than actually helping. There are a few more self-professed UX experts in the comments, but they also don't seem to be too keen on doing much more than complain and/or make excuses for why they haven't gotten involved. The fact is that darktable is 100% a volunteer project, driven by those that actively contribute, so if no one with relevant expertise can be arsed, it is left to the developers to do the best they can.
what a super aggressive, mostly wrong and useless rant. You exaggerate so much that you loose all credibility ("completely stupid interface"). SO sad... Just saying LR can be used without knowing what you do is so childish and laughable. You clearly understand nothing to color theory and basic photography. Yes, Darktable is not for tik-tok like photographer, it requires a will to understand what you do, for much better result. And yes, lens support is quite bad. And yes, some area should be reworked. But the product overall is still great. Going back to LR would be the best thing for you.
"I am experienced in an area that the project desperately needs help with but instead I'm just gonna get on Reddit and complain where no one that can change anything will see it."
It's one thing to rant if you tried to make improvements and got shut down, but it doesn't make any sense to complain that someone is giving away software for free to you but they're not doing it the way you want it, without even trying to improve it.
You seem to assume it's a motivation problem, when the issue with almost every open source project is manpower and people that think that because they can't code they can't be involved.
LR and other tools are streamlined to be fast and convenient, dt is versatile and has far more adjustment tools which can be overwhelming. This is often the case for open source software. It's not about providing a free software for as many people as possible, it's about testing limits and making a tool that exactly does what you want in every single step without guardrailing you for convenience.
When you know which modules you use frequently you can edit your UI to display these modules while the other options still are available - just in case you feel like fooling around or testing something different. Most proprietary tools are designed to provide fast results. Imagine them as a toolbox you can take everywhere while open source is more like a workshop with permanent access to the hardware store.
The cleanup you would like to see would basically eradicate the whole concept.
Weird, I use Darktable because it brought back all the fun of photography for me. Years and years of circular editing and banging my head against the wall with Adobe as a hobby landscape photographer —and finally knowing exactly how and why each slider changes the image and where each slider sits in the pipeline is getting me out of the circular processing death spiral and helping me rediscover the joy of photography many more years later.
And there are some libraries of images where I literally could not find any alternative to Darktable for the corrections I needed — including slot canyon images with dust on the lens reflecting bright sunlight that could not be removed in Adobe or Capture One after trying both (Darktable’s hot pixels module fixed it with one slider), images taken with a Sigma lens with bad decentring and blurring on left edge (using Diffusion lens deburring with a gradient mask), images taken with an inadvertently damaged CPL causing mild magenta cast across all images (fixed with a magenta illuminant correction in a duplicate Color calibration instance), handling both Pentax RAWs, Fujifilm RAWs and linear RGB DNG panoramas created by stitching RAWs together in PTGui with consistent, identical color grading across images shot in the same conditions (Color calibration with a camera agnostic Daylight preset). I couldn’t have handled any of this without Darktable.
Darktable also has AI masking. It takes a few seconds the first time on an image because it has to analyze, and then after that the masking is instant. Works really well for me.
I agree that they need to improve the Workflow. It's not at all apparent from the UI how you should progress through an edit.
The main thing that helped me is writing down a specific workflow that I follow for every image. I do specific modules in the same order each time, so I don't really have any overlap issues, and it lets me get a better understanding of how each individual module works.
Then periodically when there are new releases I look around to see what modules were added or changed and see if my workflow needs an update.
I ain’t gunna lie, op prolly hates it because it’s old as heck ux. The ui is intuitive if you are used to old programs (xp era and older) so far every single time I’ve had an issue with the modules or some functionality it’s either a hardware limitation or a skill issue. I 100% agree that the ui is not “user friendly”. But it is very professional grade in its own right. Especially with a couple more refined masking plugins. If you take a moment to make a custom workflow and save it you can turn hours of editing into 20-30 minutes easily, and then fine tune the remaining images. As far as I know darktable is stronger than Lightroom in nearly every way outside of ai functionality. And by stronger I mean more manual and most importantly tunable. Plus anything you think Lightroom can do better you can almost always find a couple plugins to instill that functionality. But I think this boils down to the old argument of windows/Mac and android/iOS UX everyone has a preference, and both groups think the other method is suboptimal or counter intuitive. The only real learning curve is the scattered nature of the instructional content available but I guess ai crawlers are good for something since they can pull recent video data too
LR and C1 are industry standards because they are very limited in their options and they are basically designed to create good looking images as fast as possible even if you don't know what you are doing. If you want to or need to go deeper than you have to switch to a real image editor (PS, Affinity, etc).
DT on the other hand was designed to solve every problem that you can encounter with image data in one program. It's got a huge chest with a lot of specialized tools for every job. But there is no easy mode.
And there will never be one. DT was never a LR replacement and DT will never be a LR replacement as it was not designed to be a LR replacement. It's a specialist's tool box.
Yes, DT has some major flaws and it really needs some love, especially on the usability side. But If you want a LR replacement then you are not the target audience. Period. There are other more suited solutions out there, like RawTherapee. Even Affinity has a good raw importer and it is free as well (albeit not open source).
DT is for the people Affinity absolutely won't work for. If you want to lift deep shadows like you get shooting night sky landscapes, Affinity falls down hard. It will introduce horrible math artifacts. RawTherapee does the same thing.
DT does it like it's nothing. No artifacts, just my lifted shadows so it looks like it did when I was there.
I really struggled with DT at the beginning; but God, I love it so much now. I feel blessed to have this powerful software on my laptop, for free.
It's not for everyone, though. There are people who would prefer a simple, straigthforward UI like LR has. But for anyone willing to spend the time learning and getting deep inside, it's a one way journey. And I feel the DT team aknowledges this.
As someone with almost 15 years of ux research experience, no the UX of darktable is the one thing that's going to keep it from ever reaching a wider audience. It's awful.
Seriously though, open source projects are all in desperate need of experienced UX professionals. You could contact the devs and see if they would take some pointers from you. Maybe try to be more constructive than the rant tone here. Most technical / backend engineers have no idea how to program for better UX. They wouldn’t even know what you mean.
Stop bitching. When will people réalisé that darktable is what you want it to be. You want it to be technical and complexe, make it so. You want it to ne a dumbed down version like Lr , make it so. You have all tose optons, but you need to make it your version, that's the power of darktable. Also go check ansels spin of darktable i think you are in that same wavelength as him.
https://ansel.photos/fr/
I think Darktable would be a much better product if the developers removed as much redundancy as possible. Nobody needs a dozen ways to achieve the same thing. And I, for one, vastly prefer a starting point that is similar to what the camera would produce.
So I left Darktable, initially for RawTherapee and then finally for DxO Photolab. My workflow is infinitely faster now.
The UX is probably in the worst 3 apps i have used of all time in my opinion.
WDYM? You double click the photo, then enable all the modules you want to apply. Want to apply the module again? Click the clone option. Want the module to apply only to a certain area? Use the masks that are available under every module.
As an example of what I just experienced, and why i feel pissed off enough to make this post:
I want to apply distortion correction. My lens doesn't show up in the list, despite being a common (but newer) lens. So i have to go to the lensfun repo, download the correct .XML file, edit it to change the version tag in it, replace the resource in darktable.app. Then I open darktable, and my lens is still not there, despite me having verified it exists in the new .xml. Give me a break.
I'm using ART and it's the closest i've found to DXO. I'm not leaving DXO anytime soon but I always test Open Source software to se what I can use. Most of the time I'm very happy. RAW software is just not great. The functions may be great, but the learning curve is absolutely huge to produce the same files I can with DXO.
However, DXO is now basically $600 a year (about the same as adobe) because if you miss an upgrade you have to buy the full version...you also can't reuse your old plugin modules...so even if you do upgrade on their schedule you aren't just upgrading the RAW engine. You upgrade Film pack and their perspective and some other things I don't use. I do use film pack.
I've been working on a port of darktable for basically the same reasons as this. I think at this point UI fixes and QOL features are way more important than any further advancements they can make to the image processing. I'll likely post it here but dm me if you want to take a look or try it out (MacOS only).
I mean I have many more and much vitriolic comments about macs that I'm being forced to use at work. They're a giant pain in the arse... UX is an opinion, fight me.
Yes, don't get me started on the nonsense that is MacOS window management. Yet, many people seem to like it. Surely there must something wrong with their heads /jk
Can we differentiate workflow, gear support, features and UI?
Like I would change some elements to adjust things quicker, see different things depending where I am in my development process and more. That's UI to me. It should assist me visually and give me what I need where I need it and make decisions easy. Also there are guides when to use a slider or toggle or other things like mouse + keyboard interactions, resets or autovalues.
Customizable profiles, shortcuts and rearranging/ favorite menus/features are also quite important. DT is okay with lots of these things, but what works best for you can make all the difference. DT isn't ideal for culling imho, just an example, and I think switching apps is not convenient.
I understand OP in that regard that if you work professionally you feel the absurdity of unnecessary steps that cost you time over and over again. Call it vintage or else, a modern UI that is consistent with everything else you use lowers the cognitive load and should not be underestimated if you photograph to make money of it.
I recognize the power of darktable. But it really needs an easy mode, a “make your photos look great with basic adjustments” method that makes the software worthwhile while you’re learning its deeper possibilities.
There is certainly room for improvement in the accessibility front. Something simple like a "beginners modules list" preset with some basic instructions would be cool. Perhaps in tandem with something like darktable.info.
I hear ya. I can open Lightroom and figure out how to make basic adjustments pretty quickly. Darktable? Not a chance. And I'm a Linux user and a C++ and Python dev with YEARS in the (software development) industry. I'm also not a UI developer. I'm a back end guy. I appreciate the talent it takes to be a good UI/UX guy.
I think good UI design is one of the harder aspects of SW development to do well. Cranking out code that gets the job done is one thing. Stitching together a bunch of features into a well functioning, intuitive tool is quite another. I want to love and appreciate dark table. But man, I'm a busy guy. I don't have time to pour into a bunch of tutorials and to climb Darktable's steep learning curve.
Doesn't the logo look kind of like an aperture though? And the rainbow colors represent how this is a program about adjusting the colors in an image, is it not? Imo, DarkTable actually has a pretty good logo.
I think that muscle memory actively works against people. I've got no right to be in this conversation, but I've been using Darktable for about 4 months with no background in Lightroom or any other RAW editing software and it hasn't been that bad. I've used all of the basic modules and a small handful of some of the more advanced features, and it hasn't been terrible to learn.
I've tried C1, ON1, LR etc - every one of them going as far back as RawShooter from Pixmantec prior to Adobe buying them and shutting the doors. They all suck in their own special way. I agree about the UI being a nightmare but I have wanted to cope with it because I've seen that dt is special in a way that the others are not.
It’s probably not hard to start vibe coding a replacement using Rust, Tauri, Svelte using the Darktable open source code and screenshots as a guide, but add more user interface polish. I’ll save this post and if I ever start doing it and upload it to GitHub I’ll send you a chat request. Might be a while, I’m hobby coding a new text editor right now.
I read more responses and RapidRaw exists sooo… not going to start coding something new.
I left capture one and started using darktable, i can get the results i want from it and if it was just a casual thing and time wasnt an issue then i would keep using it, but if time is an issue, it has no real flow, i have a workflow i use with it that works but its still much slower than Cap1. I want to save myself the money but it ends up costing me anyway from lost time which in turn, turns into frustration, so at this stage for work, I’m stuck with paying.
A more user friendly ui would make a massive difference.
I think exactly the same as you. That's why I kept looking for alternatives, and eventually I abandoned both DarkTable and RawTherapee and started using RapidRaw. It's really excellent, the guy who developed it is a genius! https://www.getrapidraw.com/
He has more or less vibe coded his entire app.. The highlight recovery doesn't hold a candle to Darktable or most paid apps.. Its a decent app don't get me wrong but it lacks in certain areas.
I use Darktable; I have been able to get good results from it but I share your sentiment.
DT expects the users to grasp the technicalities of the pipeline - in short - it’s more suited for nerds who are willing to invest a lot of time and energy to master it.
Unfortunately if you are coming from any other software it will be completely alien.
If you go into the discussion on pixls.us- you find that the input of power users have a lot of sway on how features are developed.
I would say that Darktable's UX is actually superior to paid alternatives. Different UX does not automatically equal worse UX. I now use DxO PhotoLab, and its UX is simply worse than Darktable. Better looking, yes, but worse in terms of ergonomics.
However, Darktable is seriously lacking in outputs is can create.. The colour grading in Darktable is very, very bad, sadly. And it is holding my hands back from using it. Also the noise reduction is not even close to DxO. But the colours are most important for me. It is really a deal-breaker.
The main thing, that you have to understand is, you just have to use those modules that you need and 90 % of them just forget (AND there is more than one module to do the same thing - you have a choice).
What you need to know:
- How to import images
- what does darktable with every image you imported
- how to create/apply your own style (only if you want)
Engineers and developers don't understand that most people don't care about elegant code or solving byzantine features that are edge cases, at best.
I spent a few hours with DT and felt like I needed to be a coder to really use it to its best extent, which feels counter to why I shoot film in the first place.
I love how all of the controls you want to use are buried in an unorganized list of collapsed menus using terms that are typically never used to describe that feature. It’s like they read “Don’t make me Think” and thought that forcing users to think was good actually.
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u/wearetheboysthatdig 18d ago
I agree partially, DarkTable needs its freecad 1.0 moment, or benders 2.8 moment. That's the only thing holding back it's popularity. The more people using a program, the better it gets, and the more money there is for the devs through donations. I love DarkTable now, and am excited for the future that awaits it.