[secstate]

Which creates shallow artists who just want it to "look pretty now." Not saying there isn't a place in the world for that, but there are always trade offs with tools that manipulate your human vision of art, and to say "there are too many denoise filters, just pick one for me" will be severely limiting when you realize that what you really wanted was grain removal, but that's not how your AI denoise filter works.

Again, there's room in the world for all manner of software uses. But to argue that Darktable is bad because it gives too many options, misses the goals of a great many artists, which is to understand what's happening to the pixels they captured in the field.

[snapetom]

You're arguing that software makes or breaks artistry, and it doesn't. Composition, subject, and lighting still get you 90% there. Software just comes in at post and it plays less of a role than the HN crowd thinks it does.

Maybe it's my circles (photojournalists) but none of them care about different algorithms in post. Their artistry comes from a complete mastery of layers and masks along with old fashioned tone and color sliders. Those tools are far more powerful than knowing the difference between method 1 and method 2 of a Gaussian Blur filter that have no discernible visual difference anyway.

[mcdeltat]

Hard agree - you probably aren't making great art from learning a different denoise algorithm, but you certainly are by learning composition skills. There are great photographers out there who barely even touch the adjustments in software. And when they are touching the adjustments, it's probably not so technical focused as choosing a different algorithm. It'll be "creative" adjustments like tone mapping and colour LUTs.

[inferiorhuman]

The problem with DT isn't just that it presents too many options, it's that the interface itself is bad and the options are presented poorly. Providing a million knobs to fine tune things is not a substitute for smarter, more coarse adjustments. The vast majority of end users don't want to have to manually set the TCP flags for each network request in a web browser. Darktable is better if you're wanking about with an academic paper, but it's just a plain bad experience for photo editing.

With your example, the multitude of denoise filters is appropriate because one of them is actually the grain removal. When in fact grain and noise are two separate issues.

How about demosiacing? There are nine different algorithms to choose from. Great if you're writing a research paper, useless if you're actually working on a photo.

How about white balance? If you thought that twiddling the knobs in the "white balance" was the way to go, boy are you in for a surprise. That'll just trigger warnings and errors. What you really wanted was "color calibration". You didn't want to change the color temperature, you wanted to worry about gamut compression and illuminant.

Now let's say you're working on a photo and have already narrowed down some settings you'd like to commonly apply. Well. First you have to drop out of the "darkroom" module and go to the "lighttable" module. Then you have to accept that your edit history is going to get fucked because darktable doesn't store a history of individual changes but rather aggregates them often by module. So if you hit undo, you potentially undo more than just the "style" you just applied. But what style did you just apply? Darktable (intentionally) doesn't keep that information around at all. You can have the style add an instance name, but Darktable eventually gets confused if you go back and forth between different presets.

To add insult to injury, there's no A/B view in Darktable. Nine different demosiacing algorithms but no easy way to compare them.

Darktable misses the forest for the trees.

[lolc]

Not to detract from the entirely justified criticism, but in case it helps somebody: The "Snapshot" feature in Darktable can be used to compare two renderings. It is a bit clumsy but this can be used to compare output of two algos.

[inferiorhuman]

That pretty well underscores my point, however. Darktable can do much of what Lightroom does, just in a more tedious manner. When confronted with this the DT devs respond with a "DT is just too powerful for most users". The biggest problem with DT isn't that it's too powerful it's that the interface is just dreadful.

[washadjeffmad]

Auto modes have their places, as does retaining specificity of features. I don't think they're exclusive to each other.

And I don't think simple choices create shallow artists (or that the goal of Darktable is to create artists). Someone who doesn't have any arts education already doesn't have the technical understanding or vocabulary to really know what they're doing, so maintain the extra barrier? How many professional grade tools can you think of that have simple or guided modes?

The great part about software is that done well, it's often designed to be functional without a depth of specialty or expert knowledge, at least no more than a homeowner telling the builder "make my driveway to here" needs to know how to source and formulate concrete so that the end product looks good and doesn't crack or weather.