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Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.

In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.

If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.

by lionkor5 hours ago|

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Have you looked at the documentation? In Darktable you can click the questionmark, then click on any feature, and very extensive, well written documentation walks you through how, when and when not to use each module and feature.

by drdexebtjl4 hours ago|

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Intuitive UX teaches you without asking you to read the documentation.

That said I don’t think the UX of LR and Photoshop is particularly good, especially in recent years. People just expect their skills to transfer over, but I don’t think FOSS should be doomed to clone the UX of proprietary software it seeks to replace.

by throwup2385 hours ago|

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> The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.

A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.

I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).

by akersten6 hours ago|

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Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.

by 3 hours ago|

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by orbital-decay6 hours ago|

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>How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?

In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.

by drdexebtjl5 hours ago|

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I just suggested a different way. Embed the pipeline’s actual code in the metadata.

This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.

by orbital-decay4 hours ago|

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Proprietary software doesn't have any problem with embedded code, for example TTF does exactly that with fonts and they're still being licensed.

Code embedding has been considered many times but the rabbit hole is way too deep. You are embedding unverified executable code, to begin with. Then there's diversity problem: too much code, too many implementation specifics with every quirk being able to mess up the result. All of that spanning multiple generations of color science pipelines, experts, hardware, and third-party software to interact with. Since the advent of ML (for denoising and segmentation in particular) you have to also embed the weights as well, making it outright impossible.

All this leads to RAW processing code going the way of scientific and financial code: once written, it's frozen and the substrate is emulated if necessary. Even the bugs are preserved.

by drdexebtjl2 hours ago|

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I don’t think TTF is a good example. You’re usually not allowed to embed and redistribute TTF code with your projects, only the resulting geometry, which is not subject to copyright in the US.

If you embed the image pipeline’s code in the user’s raw metadata, you essentially need to give them a perpetual license to that code, which isn’t a problem for FOSS.