Re: Why it's time to move away from Lightroom
Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2020 3:37 am
Version 4 of the filmic module was introduced in darktable 3.2.1. As I said, I don't use darktable, but I sort of follow it because I would love for it get to the point where I could use it with the ease that we can use programs such as Lightroom Classic, ACDSee, On1, etc. It seems that the internal technology is in many cases quite good, but the user experience needs serious work. IMO, to ease the stubborn resistance to that from the geeks who use it and the developers it would make sense to have 2 modes of operation. The names of the modes aren't important. Calling them Geek and Photographer, while accurate, might not be met with accolades by many of the current people so maybe Expert and Photographer or something like that.
There is an Australian guy named Bruce Williams who does a very good job trying to explain and make sense of darktable. Because of the ridiculous complexity of so many of the darktable development modules you can't blame him that his explanations and demonstrations are long, complex, and tedious. He does a better job than many others. Anyway, here is a new one on the filmic 4 module. I have it cued up to the 13:30 mark where he starts talking about the new, improved highlight reconstruction (which definitely needed improvement):
darktable ep 067 - Filmic v4
https://youtu.be/qVnuqbR7Z-M?t=810
Watch for the next 9 minutes or so as he explains the mind-boggling complexity of how to do highlight reconstruction. It takes your breath away that Aurélien Pierre and the others released this as it is without any simpler, more automatic way with a simple slider such as Highlights in Lightroom. Again, I understand that using the crazy number of controls that interact with each other in this highlight reconstruction module that you have to set manually you can probably get the best of the best results if you have hours to play with it for each image and know what you are doing, but why not have a simpler way that does as well or close to as well with a simple automatic control? Many of the things Bruce describes are things that darktable already knows internally and it is what computers are good at. As just one example, he describes a long, convoluted process to create a mask to target the blown pixels before you move to the next step and it is clear that darktable could/should have created that mask automatically since the process to create it involves what darktable already knows.
I was a software engineer for a few decades. I know that this is stuff that they could do and the fact that they don't is probably because of a serious lack of vision. Mental blinders. Obvious stuff.
And the whole filmic module, I gather from comments I have read and heard in videos, is meant as a replacement for the base curve module and some of the other modules. They say it is the recommended module to use now. A different way of processing images. They say some of the other modules are not meant to be used with the filmic module and vice versa. Yet all the modules appear and nothing prevents you from using them together. It is up to you to know which of the dozens and dozens of modules should or should not be used together. A total clusterf*k -- as we used to say in the USMC. This is also something that is blindingly obvious, but not obvious to the developers. The whole filmic module is an extremely complex thing. A solution in search of a problem.
Oh well, I wish it would get better, but I don't care enough to spend years of my life learning the internals of the code, studying color science, etc. to fix it myself. I have Lightroom, ACDSee Pro, and other programs that are quite good.
There is an Australian guy named Bruce Williams who does a very good job trying to explain and make sense of darktable. Because of the ridiculous complexity of so many of the darktable development modules you can't blame him that his explanations and demonstrations are long, complex, and tedious. He does a better job than many others. Anyway, here is a new one on the filmic 4 module. I have it cued up to the 13:30 mark where he starts talking about the new, improved highlight reconstruction (which definitely needed improvement):
darktable ep 067 - Filmic v4
https://youtu.be/qVnuqbR7Z-M?t=810
Watch for the next 9 minutes or so as he explains the mind-boggling complexity of how to do highlight reconstruction. It takes your breath away that Aurélien Pierre and the others released this as it is without any simpler, more automatic way with a simple slider such as Highlights in Lightroom. Again, I understand that using the crazy number of controls that interact with each other in this highlight reconstruction module that you have to set manually you can probably get the best of the best results if you have hours to play with it for each image and know what you are doing, but why not have a simpler way that does as well or close to as well with a simple automatic control? Many of the things Bruce describes are things that darktable already knows internally and it is what computers are good at. As just one example, he describes a long, convoluted process to create a mask to target the blown pixels before you move to the next step and it is clear that darktable could/should have created that mask automatically since the process to create it involves what darktable already knows.
I was a software engineer for a few decades. I know that this is stuff that they could do and the fact that they don't is probably because of a serious lack of vision. Mental blinders. Obvious stuff.
And the whole filmic module, I gather from comments I have read and heard in videos, is meant as a replacement for the base curve module and some of the other modules. They say it is the recommended module to use now. A different way of processing images. They say some of the other modules are not meant to be used with the filmic module and vice versa. Yet all the modules appear and nothing prevents you from using them together. It is up to you to know which of the dozens and dozens of modules should or should not be used together. A total clusterf*k -- as we used to say in the USMC. This is also something that is blindingly obvious, but not obvious to the developers. The whole filmic module is an extremely complex thing. A solution in search of a problem.
Oh well, I wish it would get better, but I don't care enough to spend years of my life learning the internals of the code, studying color science, etc. to fix it myself. I have Lightroom, ACDSee Pro, and other programs that are quite good.