Photoclubalpha

I saw this posted today.

darktable 2.6.0rc0 released

https://www.darktable.org/2018/12/darkt ... -released/

This is labeled as release candidate 0 so more will be coming until the final 2.6.0. It says there is an updated manual coming too.

darktable 2.6.0 was just released:

https://www.darktable.org/2018/12/darktable-26/

I tried the newer version of Darktable and whilst it runs better it's still off the mark for me the UI is not working for a workflow perspective. They added more geeky features which doesn't interest me. Whilst I'll keep an eye on it, to me it's not even close to being a LR replacement, unless it gets a complete overhaul.

I also tried Luminar 3 which is a disaster runs like a dog even on a fast pc, missing full exif readout from images and it's catalogue takes an age to build up - another has potential if they spent as much time on development as they seem to ads/marketing it might have been worth considering.

Slightly updated version of Lightzone came out it reads some of my lossy DNG files, but not all, seems to run worse than older version was a minor update development is snail like slow on this

Raw Therapee not tried the latest one it's still missing key things I need like spot healing so I've not bothered to look at it

On1 is one that I will be trying out soon on trial so far nothing has really come close to LR for me but I keep looking. The sad thing is I don't need super fancy features or tons of options (ie Darktable) a clean UI good speed and some basic stuff like spot healing, exif information, support for lossy DNG, watermark on export that's it bar the usual dev tools you expect for raw. Looks like the Nerd brigade has taken over open source software sadly!

I agree about darktable. They have all the stuff in it and way more, but the UI could use a bit of work and mainly they need to start using names and controls that make sense to photographers. Too much technical stuff exposed and too many confusing ways to accomplish the same thing. As I said before, darktable seems to mostly be a place to implement all kinds of computer science imaging processing algorithms to try out. Since it is open source someone who has the expertise and motivation could take the code and create better naming for many of the things, hide lots of the esoteric stuff in an advanced mode, choose better defaults, etc. to make it easier to use.

I also am still using LR Classic CC. Currently on 8.1

I have the latest LR Classic CC 8.1 now. I have never used the face detection (People) function after all these years of using LR. I decided to give it a try so I let it start scanning through my 105k catalog. It has been going full tilt for 76 hours and it says it has done 82%. All 4 cores of my i7 are very busy running at Turbo Boost speed (4 physical cores, 8 logical cores). LR isn't using a lot of memory, consistently about 1.2-1.5gb during the last 76 hours. Here are some specs:

i7-3630qm (2.4ghz, Turbo Burst 3.4ghz)
256gb ssd (Win10, LR catalog and previews)
1tb hd (photos)
8gb ram

I didn't realized it would take this long. I have already seen lots of false positives and negatives. I sort of regret even starting it since it may turn out to be close to worthless.

Have you tried it?

I didn't try LR 8.1. What can you say about the editing speed? It's same like v. 7.* or better?

bakubo wrote:I have the latest LR Classic CC 8.1 now. I have never used the face detection (People) function after all these years of using LR. I decided to give it a try so I let it start scanning through my 105k catalog. It has been going full tilt for 76 hours and it says it has done 82%. All 4 cores of my i7 are very busy running at Turbo Boost speed (4 physical cores, 8 logical cores). LR isn't using a lot of memory, consistently about 1.2-1.5gb during the last 76 hours. Here are some specs:

i7-3630qm (2.4ghz, Turbo Burst 3.4ghz)
256gb ssd (Win10, LR catalog and previews)
1tb hd (photos)
8gb ram

I didn't realized it would take this long. I have already seen lots of false positives and negatives. I sort of regret even starting it since it may turn out to be close to worthless.

It finished. Took 95 hours in total. Now I need to go through thousands of the ones it found that are false positives and negatives. Jeez, why did I even start this? I saved a catalog from before starting it. I might just go back to it. I need to decide if all this effort actually produced anything of any use.

Quick update on software...
I did try ON1 and it's quite close to LR in terms of look and feel. Runs pretty well, but sadly found it wasn't very good at dealing with noise. For some reason if you're pulling up exposures the shadows get really noisy (much more so than other software) even on the FF camera which isn't that noisy, it's not great with the A77 which just has more noise to start with - so not suitable for my needs really which is a shame as it's quite good

I decided since there is nothing really ideal that I should just try the newly updated Darktable and stick with it to see if I can get used to it. Speed is now much better on Windows (just using it and exporting). You can drop files/folders in there and it's also possible to stop it writing sidecar files (and just use it's internal database) - which I have backed up.

The bad side remains in that it is not easy to pick up, you have to tweak it to get some basic stuff working right. Such as when opening files apply a tone curve. The "many ways" to do similar things issue is still there, but you can adjust what you have in favorites tab.
After about a week of intensively using it - it's usable as a semi LR replacement. I also downloaded some pre-sets to speed things up. NR is much improved again various ways of doing that.
Good points include can add watermarks, borders, spot healing basic things which are important, working map module and you can also drag images onto the map to tag the GPS location (it doesn't add it to files but to the database still useful). Also has decent distortion/perspective correction and CA removal is fine again once you force yourself to learn it.

There are some oddities basic ones include small sliders which are fiddly, there is no compare view (just snapshot) I sometimes compare different images (also for the videos reviews I do) so I will have to use LR for that, exif shoes most information but not all (ie exp comp is one missing) You can't at the moment strip exif which I sometimes need for web (ie remove GPS etc). Hopefully over time those problem areas will get looked at - right now LR is still faster in terms of workflow, I can get similar results with DT with a bit more time put in. One hopes that these problems over time get looked at, it does need streamlining with the UI

I read a tip somewhere about the small, fiddly sliders. My recollection is that you can just place the mouse cursor over one and then use the scroll wheel to make adjustments and that is much easier. I hope my recollection is correct. I still have 2.4 on my computer, but I haven't played with it in a long time. By the way, a few minutes ago a new version was released:

darktable 2.6.1 released

https://www.darktable.org/2019/03/darkt ... -released/

I installed it some bug fixes and tweaks thanks for the heads up..
DT's sliders well they are on the small size, the difference say between DT and LR is when you have the pointer near a slider the shade changes so you know it's active, no so DT does nothing! You don't have to be exactly on it, though it's less intuitive. There is a wave type system you can bring up with a right click that allows fine tune control which is quite good (lower down less change higher up more)

Most of DT's problems are usability - it's pretty intimidating to start with and it shouldn't be. Sometimes it's simple thing like making a quick adjustment or crop I see wasted space where most software has shortcuts for spot WB or crop. Likewise you can for some reason re-size the film strip at the bottom dragging it up or down,can't with the side panels you have to go into the settings, and then you have to keep them the same size! Silly small things that add up and need looking at I can pull up the exposure and change the shadows on the histogram, but can't adjust the highlights that way nor is there a value for areas ie 0-100 as there is in LR. I've not found a way to re-organise the fav tab it just puts them as you add them. You have to double click thumbnails to open the image, and use the mouse scroll..I know some would prefer a choice on things like that

Then you have to spend time to get it to do what you want by default ie tone curve etc. It is pretty good on making presets, that helps once you have got them how you want (ie NR etc). Having spent more time with it def has improved quite a lot (first Windows version was not good speed wise) - if they can work that area more tweaking/settings/GUI it would appeal to a lot more people. Software can deliver very good results and has plenty of powerful options - shame a lot of folks will be put off with the less than great initial experiences. Most of these can be worked out if the devs concentrate more on this and less on new swanky features - there are certainly some bits in there that probably are not needed, or could be rolled into another area simplifying it a bit.

Mind you having used most of the alternatives to LR it seems quite a few miss what made that software popular too - ease of use

Guys! I regularly read what you do with RAW converters like DarkTable. I am sure that this is a very good editor, if you have a plan to switch from Windows to Linux (I often use Linux) Darktable is even better - RAW Therapy works fine. But for Windows, I don't think so. It is based on the old graphical interface, not very suitable for Windows 10 or Windows 7 (8). Try this http://www.faststone.org - a very fast and accurate viewer, and he is not only a viewer, but also an editor who does not have a standard interface, but if you spend some time studying the labels, you will be very surprised. After converting RAW to C1, I always do the final work in Faststone. As an example, in labels, I have the letter “E” under the external editor Adobe Photoshop Elements for accurate portraits editing. It will save a lot of time.

darktable 2.6.2 released

https://www.darktable.org/2019/03/darkt ... -released/

I am still using Lightroom Classic CC, but I watch what is going on with darktable with interest. Someone has posted some noise reduction info here:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/60569097

I found this wonderful discussion about darktable that includes developers:

https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-sp ... rs/12002/7

It is about speed, usability, etc. See the posts by aadm and aurelienpierre, in particular.

One of the developers shows his work on an updated user interface to be in version 2.7 (current is 2.6.2):

https://discuss.pixls.us/t/new-interfac ... -dev/12106