LightZone VS ansel

LightZone is still very much being maintained - albeit by one developer.

There's an effort underway to recover the original web site, but the domain name owner disappeared a while ago, which complicated things.

Agreed on the paradigms around stacking / ordering & non-destructive workflows used in Lightzone. It's my preferred photo touching-up software for similar reasons.

https://github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone

My original post can be found here on GitHub.

LightZone

Once you're on that page > https://github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone/releases/tag/4.2.4 scroll down the page

Also consider lightzone. Their website is down, but it's actively maintained on GitHub. Open source re-release of the first software to do nondestructive editing.

Gimp is powerful. But because its edits are destructive, it's not a tool I choose to use anymore. I was using LightZone but switched to DT because of the light table.

LightZone is a medium-level program that's fairly intuitive, and can achieve some nice results with presets. Website is down, but the github repo is still active the last release was less than two weeks ago.

Personally, I'm planning to convert LightZone from Java to Kotlin, but haven't started yet. It uses old Java Advanced Imaging inside, and Eclipse ImageN is compatible with JAI, so I think that to create Kotlin wrapper/extension functions for Imagen is the best way to go.

Just try Ansel. I saw this topic a while ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38390914

I am only familiar with his YouTube, and then this topic. https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel Here are his examples.

It seems 1:1 compatible when I switched.

FWIW, here is the recent merged pull requests from darktable:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i...

At the moment, this is about a week's work by eight authors. Others cycle/in out, of course -- this is a spot sample. They range from bugfixes to performance improvements to documentation to translation work. All what one would hope for in a software project headed to its bi-annual release next month.

There are many ways to develop, and it may be a bit cruel to compare a one-man show to a long-term international collaboration. But here are the recently merged pull requests from the software which is posted about in the blog post:

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i...

On the first page, I see about five authors offering PR's over the course of all of 2023 -- a much slower pace of community development.

It appears that Ansel is being developed more by direct commits from its main author. So let's compare the recent commits:

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/commits/master

Page 1 of Ansel commits is by its mono-author from the last week. Page 2 takes us back to August. Page 3 back to June. I totally understand that good developers need to work carefully and sit on things, then release them in due time.

Here goes for darktable commits:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/commits/master

If we take a moment to page back to page 3, one can note that we're back to two weeks ago (rather than June). Steady work by a committed community matters. The log of work done is may be quite worth looking at, rather than incendiary blog posts.

I tried for about 15 minutes and didn't get it to build. And even if it did, it would probably not be stable enough to use for anything productively.

[0] https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel#os-support

After writing this post, I realized there has been a little bit of drama regarding the new release, with a forked version on 4.0 by one of the main developers. This is sad but to the best of my judgement, this guy may have some valid points. I don't want to open a can of worms, but I guess I had to comment. I do wonder if it's worth trying the alternative.

and ansel version: https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/commits/color-EQ

I didn't know that, thank you for the info. The fork is now called Ansel ( https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel )

Respect is a two way street. If you're ok with the tone in his video where he insults all the other darktable developers, but you're not ok with him being called an asshole, ask yourself why. If you need more reading, you can see https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/13159#issuecomment-1356478876 or many of the other insulting comments. Or you can have a look at the history of https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/ which contains even more insluting comments. He's an asshole, this is a statement of fact. He can change, sure, but he won't, sadly.

Yes. Sometimes I think I should have learned programming a bit more, but it's just not my kind of thing. Although, because of recent changes in darktable a developer made a fork. Had some valid points. https://github.com/Aurelien-Pierre/R-Darktable

Also see the wiki of the fork on Githb