Ansel(ansel.photos) |
Then perhaps that's not the best choice for cross-platform GUI framework?
not super related but I made a simple tool to publish apple photos to the web.
[edit] Make that quite a lot of the changes, actually, including getting rid of some really dangerously bad bits of UI design. Still dislike the guy's attitude but I've got to admit he has a point.
To me, Darktable has a 'feel' of a highly technical editor for people who really care about colourspaces etc, and although I hardly know anything about colour I rather appreciate that. It's interesting to note that almost all the modules that contribute to that 'feel' are written by Aurélien.
[1] https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
EDIT: Am a professional photographer who frequently interacts with other pros on assignments and their own art projects. We're discussing tools constantly and have no qualms between paying for commercial tools or paying in the form of dedication to ascend the learning curve of a less friendly tool. We'll figure out a tool if it's worth it.
Source: https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/blob/master/READM...
Maybe Pierre can pull it off himself. He’s clearly knowledgeable and has strong convictions and Darktable is incredibly powerful, so I’m hoping the good bits from either camp can be reconciled into something lasting, minding the bus factor.
Darktable’s issues and lack of coherent stewardship is quite noticeable.
darktable has seen some major changes in the past few years, moving away from a "display-referred" to a "scene-referred" workflow. Aurélien contributed a lot of code to make that work, most significantly, the Filmic module. darktable is not as user friendly and as polished as other commercial tools (Lightroom, Affinity, Capture One) but it is capable if you take the time to learn it.
What is that?
Edit: they have a page about it: https://ansel.photos/en/workflows/scene-referred/
https://www.youtube.com/@AurelienPIERREphoto/videos
I had no idea he was working on this.
Having come across his rants on Darktable last year, I think he does have a point on the UX front. A lot of the filtering in the light table (where you organize your photos) is a bit of a mess of confusing buttons, options, and weird convoluted abstractions. I never liked that part of the software. I can work with it but years in, it remains counter intuitive how you get your files in there and manage them. It's just convoluted and weird all over. A lot of bad ideas layered on top of each other. Aurelian kind of freaked out when last year some pretty major changes were just pushed through without much debate. And I agree with him, it didn't really improve much things.
Anyway the magic is in the darkroom part, which is the part where you edit photos. There is a wide variety of modules aimed at different expertise levels. Scene referred mode is basically a big upgrade over what a lot of other packages do, which is to blindly apply pre-defined curves for cameras without much regard for the actual pixels in the raw image. Filmic and other modules do this a bit more intelligently by actually looking at the pixels, using some heuristics and working from the lowest levels of the pipeline all the way up to do the right things. It adds up to a lot less work when editing photos for me compared to earlier versions. Mostly photos come out pretty OK without much tweaking. I might tweak perceptive saturation a bit, add some contrast in filmic, etc.
Basically, the workflow is roughly: 1) tweak the exposure as needed for the gray point. Filmic adapts with sane settings for black and white points and you typically don't have to tweak that. 2) add some contrast in filmic 3) maybe add some local contrast 4) in the color balance module fiddle with perceptive saturation. Done. There are a few more things I do for sharpening, profiled denoise (as needed), etc. But that's pretty much it. One nice thing is being able to apply defaults based on rules to photos.
I might play with Ansel a bit if I can find some time over Christmas. Kind of curious to see what he's done to lighttable and the rest.
I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do their job right, they need to talk to the community to figure out what their needs are, and if maintainers shrug their shoulders while the few people who speak up are skeptically bikeshedding everything they say into oblivion, then we're also going to shrug our shoulders and walk away. That's what happened to me the several times I tried to contribute to various FOSS projects as a(n experienced, professional) designer rather than a(n experienced, professional, former) developer. Often, the response you get for merely intimating that something could work better if it was set up differently is like calling someone's kid ugly.
It would be like a team of civil engineers working on a restaurant design scoffing at an architect that specializes in restaurants offering to help make an effective kitchen layout. From the civil engineers' perspective, the architect's input is superfluous and would probably slow down progress. Meanwhile, everyone else that has to interact with that kitchen suffers.
Darktable offers a few really powerful, generic tools that you can use in different ways to get different effects – things like equaliser, parametric masks, LAB curves, etc. It makes little sense to use it without reading up on some of those more advanced tools first.
Lightroom, in contrast, focuses more on offering a small selection of pre-defined tools for specific purposes. But once you want to do something outside of that (parametric masking is one of those things I really missed) you're shit out of luck.
But as a Darktable user, I found the implementations of strong opinions frustrating because I value actual workflow above potential technical superiority.
Display referred worked fine for me because the important work happens before the shutter is clicked. The skill I want to develop is fixing things in the lens not fixing them in post.
Breaking changes suck.
But again open source developers don’t owe me anything.
What this gives you isn't necessarily the ability to "fix" things in post, but the ability to decide how you want your image presented in a certain medium or format when "developing". Even master photogs like Ansel would take liberties when developing to realize their vision from the negatives they were able to capture.
It is, at least of I go by my dad who is a Photoshop veteran, quite different to what he used to.
The only things I could see as, if I am really really critical, are:
- sharpening, usually decent enough but SharpenAI from Topaz is another league. As I said, good enough for all except the edge cases
- de-noising, same as sharpening, astro-denoise works like a charm so
- masks, which I haven't really figure out yet, so my problem and not darktable's, Lightroom and Photoshop seem a tad more intuitive so
One thing I'd love, but again maybe I just didn't find it yet, is the possibility to export the database of picture edits. For now, I have darktable create dedicated files once a photonis edited and I make back-ups of those. I did loose edits for around 100ish photos due to some unrelated issues which required reinstallation of darktable so, which again was on me for missing darktable stopped creating said files after an update. Being to just dump the darktable database of edit data would be really nice so.
Summary, I can only recommend it. Especially for people starting post processing, the learing curve for each software is basically the same after all, and without prior knowledge they wont recognize any differences.
Shots fired!
It has so much promise but the 'lead by committee' approach just resulted in some kind of collective 'demand avoidance' from the devs who seem to revel in delivering an unusable product. And I mean unusable for those not willing to learn an entirely new paradigm of interacting with a piece of photographic software and dive into the docs for everything, including stuff as silly as a keyboard shortcut or move between modules.
I've yet to read all the Ansel blurb but I'm pretty sure this is from the guy who's made the most improvements to Darktable in recent releases. So it's incredibly exciting to see.
I doubt it'll get any DAM capability though, even for a fork that is asking too much :-)
The whole "if you don't like how a program works, you can fork it and change it" thing.
Amazing to see this actually working in practice. You might not like Ansel, but he does, and more power to his elbow!
But then I care about the results, a nice picture to print or look at on a screen, way way more than about the tools used to get that result. Goes for cameras and lenses and whatnot as well.
Anyone know what happened to the Darktable project? I've only used it a few times, but it seems nice for someone who knows how to use it (which isn't me!) but curious what drama happened.
src = fetchgit {
url = "https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel.git";
rev = "f7669af89a71882ebad15982d698b8df7e6c6ce8";
sha256 = "sha256-FI6dKUrmtTG7DIV0MmY6XdqlUpqdt7boKuXKU6CywjA=";
fetchSubmodules = true;
};
An example of friction in darktable:
- I have an external strobe which means I have to put the exposure down to its lowest when shooting, otherwise everything is washed out. Darktable in newer versions has "Compensate camera exposure" on by default, which washes out all the images until I click it off. I'm sure there's a way to make this checkbox disabled by default, but why can't it accept what comes out of the camera?
- No favourites: there used to be a way to have all your panels in a favourites tab. This was great as I usually only use a handful of modules that I use. It's gone in later versions
- The "color balance" panel, not to be confused with "color balance rgb", it's not in any of the default tabs but useful for saturation adjustments. Why are some of these useful modules hidden? Shouldn't all modules be available by default. The only way you can get to it is by searching.
- White balance: there are now two modules and it warns you if you adjust one or the other: "white balance" the standard one on the "base" tab and "color calibration" tucked away on the "color" tab. Both modules are turned on by default, but if you adjust one or the other without turning one off it has a big red warning.
- One upgrade decided to reset export settings, and so my EXIF data was stripped out when exporting. It took me way too long to figure it out.
I wish I could use it just for the development and use something else for the management, but last time I tried that wasn't really possible. I have looked into contributing several times, but it's written in java and I really don't the have time to invest in getting up to speed first.
https://petapixel.com/2022/07/30/ansel-adamss-interview-with...
“There’s no end in sight. Electronic photography will soon be superior to anything we have now. The first advance will be the exploration of existing negatives. I believe the electronic process will enhance them. I could get superior prints from my negatives using electronics.
“Then the time will come when you will be able to make the entire photograph electronically. With the extremely high resolution and enormous control you can get from electronics, the results will be fantastic. I wish I were young again!”
Ah, the oft-repeated refrain of those who never stop learning.
My current Linux photo processing tool is Another RawTherapee [1], which is a wonderful blend of the power of RawTherapee with a UI that has a lot of similarities to Lightroom.
I wondered if that is something hard to avoid: Over time features get added, usability worsens. This might be general, but it could apply to FOSS in particular, which often takes a modular approach (cue UNIX philosophy) and rarely includes structures where potentially useful features are rejected in order to keep the whole experience simple.
``` $ sh build.sh --build-type Release --install --sudo --clean-all;
In file included from /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX14.0.sdk/usr/include/cups/http.h:39: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX14.0.sdk/usr/include/netinet/ip.h:189:2: error: unknown type name 'u_char' u_char ipt_code; /* IPOPT_TS */
```
...etc
I don’t mind a few gtk bugs.
Jeez, wish I had 1/10th of the confidence of this guy
The rawspeed lib is at github here: https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed
I'm also glad he is taking donations, since the darktable project won't take any. It gives me hope that this would give him the freedom in actually implementing his vision.
I think Aurélien's snarkiness is quite distasteful and might prevent getting some of them on board. But he has a proven track record and I believe he can execute his vision, so I will be donating as well.
About the Ansel fork, I've used Darktable for 6 years and tried Ansel the last two weeks: if you have never used Darktable, Ansel UX is better for a first time user imo, more streamlined. Keep in mind that I'm biased as I agree with most of the author's points here: https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
I sincerely hope that this is an effort that will bring the state of the art forward - the author's stance on scene referred workflows is a good premise
- UI is snappier - Integrating syncing lets me leave my laptop at home when travelling and taking photos.
Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence.
On the other hand, open-source photography and bitmap editing is still waiting for its own Blender or Godot and I applaud anyone willing to have a go at it. What's available (GIMP, RawTherapee, darktable, ...) can mostly sort of get the job done, but if you're the kind of person who seeks relaxation, pleasure and aesthetics in photography, the open-source software feels just too geeky, too unfocused, too unrefined.
I'm currently on DxO + Affinity and even though they cost quite a lot of money, I'd probably shoot and enjoy the whole thing significantly less if I had darktable and GIMP waiting at home.
It's pretty common with open source projects. The people with time, energy, and an "itch to scratch" and the people who really know an area aren't disjoint sets, but people who fit in both are rare. Lot's of projects like e.g. GIMP start off making mistakes that would have been obvious to someone who understood the domain well, but the team makes them because they are learning as they go.
The amount of control and physics-based editing you're doing is very unique.
This wasn't what darktable was like a few years ago, but this guy has been making incredible strides to implement his vision.
He means well and is deeply passionate about this stuff. He's worked his ass off in Darktable for many years. One of the few (only?) developers that was trying to do this full time on donations, etc. He's the closest thing Darktable had to a benevolent dictator style leader (like Linus Torvalds). Big loss for the project to not have him around. I hope they can reconcile their differences somehow. Would be best for all.
Basically, what happened is somebody pushed through something that in Aurelian's mind were some severely misguided, low quality changes without much debate or process. It just showed up and he flipped out and did not appreciate being bypassed/ignored like happened.
Nikon "High-efficiency RAW" support is missing. This is IMHO the fault of Nikon and their vendor TicoRAW. If you're going to come up with a new RAW format, then it is your responsibility to commit the decoder to open-source libraries! Sure, patent and license the encoder, but if you keep the decoder closed-source and proprietary, then you're a <insert expletive>.
The installer is an EXE instead of an MSI. Publish an MSI! Use the "wix" tool in your build pipeline, it's not that complex.
The installer and the deployed app are not digitally signed, which throws up a litany of scary warnings and errors. Other open-source developers have gone to the effort of signing their builds.
On first launch the app flashed a command-prompt window up and then disappeared.
The "Exposure" tool has an automatic setting to compensate for the camera offset. Okay... then why did I bother to offset the exposure just to have ansel undo my intent by default? Then... it layers on a default +.7 EV for like no reason...
The overall GUI is completely non-standard and bizarre. I've never seen anything even vaguely like most of the UI controls in this application anywhere else... ever. It's like someone who's never seen a GUI in their entire lives invented everything from scratch.
The non-standard UI elements like the combo boxes aren't just weird, they're buggy too: they don't work consistently with the mouse. I can see the option being highlighted, I can click it... and then it'll pick something else! They only work reliably with the keyboard. In general the "selected item highlight" appears to be off-by-one, but not consistently. It's bizarre.
Colour management is a mess. On a HDR OLED monitor, Lightroom can display wide-gamut and HDR images correctly if the desktop is set to HDR. E.g.: if toggle an image from SDR mode to HDR mode then the only difference is that highlights get brighter and some extreme colours become more saturated. Everything is correct by default and SDR tones don't "shift". In ansel, the colours look wrong and any setting I choose in the menu makes them even more incorrect.
There's a lot of talk of HDR support on the site, and the menus even "suggest" that PQ/HLG support is there... but not really. The export formats are all from the 1990s and modern HDR formats like HEIC, AV1F, JPEG XL, etc... are missing in action.
A lot of the options/alternatives seem like developers being too reluctant to get rid of old, bad code. For example, if a new superior demosaicing algorithm is added, then it's usually best to just drop the worse ones! I tried every option available, and all but one was broken, to the point of returning super-green results or just all-black. Lightroom for example just uses a really good demosaicing algorithm and doesn't burden users with a choice of a bunch of bad alternatives.
In general, the same criticisms apply to ansel that applied to Darktable: over-complicated, too many options, most of which are either wrong or useless. Internal details exposed to the end-user in the UI that should be debug traces for developers, not permanent GUI elements. Easy to inadvertently "break" the whole thing by reordering pipeline elements by dragging and dropping something accidentally.
I suspect that on top of the ~30K lines of code Aurélien Pierre deleted from Darktable 4.0, another 60K should be deleted...
https://chantal.aurelienpierre.com
might be the real hidden gem here. It's neat!
Tried the reverse: One related keyword for "bokeh" is "out-of-focus". I typed "out of focus" into both Google and Chantal. Google: first result mentions bokeh. Chantal: Also mentioned somewhere, but not as a related keyword.
Interestingly, using it as an exact keyword seems to improve some of the links but just empties the related keywords list.
This feels like an approach that can work really well for topic-specific searches (despite the hole you spotted) but that probably won't ever generalize. Still... I'd have liked to have it for a couple of topics that I used to patrol forums and post basic answers for.
My camera can send raw files to my phone wirelessly, with an ios app I can edit them on site and have a draft ready instantly. This is especially useful for events or anything time sensitive - but convenient in other use cases as well.
Still, I have good memories of Darktable and the author’s filmic module, I hope to try Ansel anyway at some point.
It is good to see some other alternatives out there.
I couldn't get over the steep learning curve of darktable, along with what I perceived to be bloated ui and function
So much pent up anger - and I understand! Darktable has a strange approach to evolving their software. They somehow keep everything old and bad as they add improved versions and you end up with tons of ways to do very similar things, and to add to this mess, Darktable often uses its own nomenclature, or a very very technical one. If you're coming from Lightroom or Capture One, you feel like taking your first steps on a new planet. For no reason!
So, I'm sold! I'll definitely take a look at this. He gets it!
Personally, I really like a number of the features that this fork removed (like the timeline). The software does have a bit more of a learning curve than the commercial variants out there, but darktable is impressively capable and I personally jive more with its theory-based approach.
I _do_ agree that deprecating the display-referred mutations is a good thing, but the darktable documentation is already pretty adamant about scene-referred being the future; though there's no way people are going to go through their entire library and update their past tweaks from display to scene-referred, so I don't know that those modules can ever be removed.
I guess if I was going to be as petty as the author of this fork, I'd say that the Ansel logo looks awful.
That's a far cry from what I'd find acceptable in any project.
As I said in my other comment, Aurélien has strong opinions. He felt he could not effectively work with the other darktable devs and decided to fork the project.
Are you referring to the fact of there being no releases in the last year or so?
Edit: Ignore the above - it's incorrect.
4.4 was released in June 2023: https://www.darktable.org/2023/06/darktable-4.4.0-released/
4.6 is slated for December 2023: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/blob/master/RELEA...
Their release schedule has been remarkably consistent.
The documentation actually has a pretty good example workflow that flows through mutations in an order that makes sense for most cases. Though it's not really that simple, and so you'll find yourself trying to relearn each time if it's something you do only on occasion.
You can organize modules into profiles and simply hide all the ones you don't use. The default profile hides some of the deprecated or display referred modules. You can change this.
White balance indeed has a deprecated variant for display referred and a scene referred one that works completely different that you typically use together with color calibration (which is where you should do most of your color correction, including color temperature changes). The reasons are mathematical and beyond me to explain properly (Aurelian does a great job on his Youtube channel). It boils down to not throwing away the baby with the bath water in terms of rounding errors accumulating and switching color model (to the one used by your display) too early in the pipeline. It might look pleasing but then it bites you when you want to tweak tone or do other things. This is the whole point of working with the scene referred modules.
Having all the legacy modules around is indeed somewhat confusing and Aurelian solves this in Ansel by hiding all the deprecated modules now. They are there for legacy files still.
I mean since you mentioned Adams, for Adams the print was what mattered…the print is the title of the last of his three books series.
Kodak doesn’t change HC-110 every six months because doing so destroys value.
But again it’s his software. I just wish he weren’t so bored as to invent problems to cleverly solve and solutions for which he may argue.
Maybe I could have done a bunch of customization to get it back.
But it would not have been back because my workflow didn’t involve a bunch of customization.
The changes force imposed a mass of non-artistic complexity into my workflow.
The changes didn’t improve my pictures because my results were already good enough for my artistic intent.
Nobody ever looked at a print and wept because it was developed with scene referenced workflow…
The winners were electronics companies (notably Sony and Panasonic). The losers were the photographic companies who were really chemical companies. Fujifilm was one of the few that survived because they went into (amongst other things) cosmetics and coating films for LCD screens, both of which leveraged expertise they already.
for(char relative[] = "-2"; (relative[0] ^= '+' ^ '-') == '-' || ++relative[1] <= '9'; )
gtk_list_store_insert_with_values(instances, NULL, -1, 0, relative, -1);
#define NUM_INSTANCES 5 // or 3, but change char relative[] = "-2" to "-1"
I’ve never seen XOR used as an in-place alternation operator like that in a for loop. I’ve only ever seen it used as a swap function not an inline expression.
I’ve also never seen a for loop that uses a mutable string updated char-by-char like that.
It’s just… special.
> However you put it, there is no valid reason for a software left open without touching it to turn the computer into a toaster, especially since we don’t buy Russian gas anymore.
* https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/3.8/en/darkroom/maskin...
This is one of the most powerful feature in this software.
That said, Lightroom now let's you mask the sky with a single click.
Maybe I will never migrate off LR and just create a new catalog on some other computer with Ansel or something.
I use the last version of LR6 one could purchase outright, and I dragged it kicking and screaming all the way into Ventura, but I’m sure the party well end pretty soon.
This only worked because the founding developer was the benevolent dictator for life and I had one guy that I needed to convince. And that guy clearly was a genius in what he did and accepted that I was better than him in what I did.
Now I don't know the Darktable project's organizational structure, but given the grievances aired here I assume there is no clear shared vision and nobody feels responsible for being really in charge of the software as a tool that solves problems.
Now I am a nerd myself, but there is a kind of open source nerddom, where the people are in it for the coding first and not primarily for creating an elegant and nice to use tool. This can be okay, if there is someone in a deciding position of the project that at least cares about that aspect. If all contributers are just fiddling away in their own corners of the software you will get a patchwork of a software where different parts feel completely different.
Oh man, you are not wrong there. The amount of pull requests and contributions I have seen that basically amount to a bit of refactoring for the sake of refactoring in FOSS certainly is higher than in non FOSS environments. Which likely has to do with there being more checks and balances in corporate software development.
Also, anybody who's been to art school or mentored junior developers knows that we get most defensive about the things we're least confident in. Unfortunately, that comes out when trying to address UI problems in FOSS projects.
I think you've captured the crux of the issue and the same applies to designers too.
Say I just spent the last eight hours trying to convince a stubborn front-end developer that the reason customers complain about our UI and the product keeps failing usability tests is that it needs a UI overhaul and that telling people to "just RTFM" will not win us any new contracts.
Getting home and having a similar debate with a FOSS dev team where I have even less sway does not sound like a rewarding way to spend my free time.
> chefandy
Name checks out :-)
And here lies the rub. I have tried soliciting help in the past . Most ui UX ppl only want to work on successful projects, but successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people.
If you've written further on this subject, I'd like to read it.
B) The number of successful FOSS projects with interfaces good enough for people who don't have a working mental model of the way software operates is vanishingly small. Firefox... though they actually have a formidable team of designers. Inkscape I'd say. But almost every successful FOSS project caught hold in the technical community, and no further. Sometimes it's barely good enough for that... I mean hell... look at Eclipse. Compare its features on paper to what you get in commercial editors and then see how many developers use it voluntarily.
C) One thing few developers understand about interface design is that adding features here and there to make things better doesn't really work like it does with, say, an API. It involves analysis, talking to people who use the software, coming up with a strategy, and implementing that strategy. Usually that strategy isn't the sort of thing you can implement piecemeal, which is why most significant UI updates today involve making a completely new design, and letting users enable the entire thing as they see fit.
This was not an assumption. You are stating a fact. I simply can't find as many UI UX ppl who are willing to work on open source..
Those I have asked reply with the answer above.
I don't know what b and c have to do with what I said though.
'Art' and UI/UX design are as different as fiction writers and technical writing. Someone might be good at both, but they're definitely not the same thing. Interfaces are a communication medium, and reasoning about the best way to communicate something is a process that often doesn't even touch aesthetics. These types of designers working for larger companies probably don't even get invited to the meetings where aesthetic decisions get made, and they definitely don't work for the art director who'd be involved in that.
The first step is figuring out what problems your users are trying to solve, and the next step is working with them to figure out the most effective way to do that. It's pretty pointless when the users are insanely defensive about the status quo, as is the case in most FOSS projects.
Nonprofit org websites, event posters, flyers, t-shirts, illustrations, small utility apps, WordPress themes, unsolicited redesigns of well-known applications on Dribble, etc.
I spend my days convincing developers to make UI changes. Spending my nights and weekends doing the same thing but with even less authority does not sound like fun.
Is GIMP the exception that proves the rule?
Imagine encountering a genuinely useful open source software project run by designers that spaghetti coded it in some node-based "nocode" monstrosity. As a competent developer, you know that you could move it to another more capable node-based system that would make it easier for them to use, maintain, and expand upon.
-----------------
a) Start asking questions to get a sense of how things worked and where they could be simplified conceptually. GO TO SCENARIO 1.
b) Fully implement a brand new architecture and submit it in a pull request. GO TO SCENARIO 3.
c) Come up with a complete refactoring proposal that shows them how your changes would affect the project in the end and make people's lives easier, and post it in an issue so you can collaborate with the existing folks. GO TO SCENARIO 2.
----------------------
SCENARIO 1: Unfortunately, that triggers the maintainers' defensiveness about their technical decisions because they're not confident in them. Then the people who have developed workflows around the shittiness get even more defensive. The real problem is that they don't have the technical depth to see how it would work in the end. Say that and good luck getting any responses for anything ever. THE END.
----------------------
SCENARIO 2: Damnit. GO TO SCENARIO 1.
----------------------
SCENARIO 3: Despite the significant amount of effort you expended, your work just sits and collects dust. You ask why, and someone who isn't the primary maintainer responds saying something about their deciding it was too much work to generating new icon sizes. You offer to automate the process. GO TO SCENARIO 1.
----------------------
Fundamentally, designers and developers have the same goal with different concerns, approaches, and areas of expertise. It's pretty ridiculous that we haven't figured this out yet.
As a professional UX designer/researcher I've found that option C is pretty common. I'll file tickets for egregious usability issues with trivial fixes, but if an interface needs to be rethought from the ground up it's not worth getting involved.
Firstly, are you saying that your initial statement was solely about your own experience and not intended as a statement about designers in general? Because when you say things like "Most ui UX ppl only want to" preceeded by "I have tried soliciting help in the past" I'm not really sure how you'd expect anyone else to reach that conclusion.
> successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people
Yes, they do. Even most successful independent FOSS projects have dumpster fire UI/UX. I can't think of a single one that isn't funded and professionally managed with paid designers that has an interface or overall flow/experience that doesn't need serious design intervention. If there's an independent, volunteer-only FOSS project with functioning all-around UX that's attracting all of the design talent willing to put up with the hassle, I sure haven't seen it-- hence point b.
Indeed, point C was not a direct response to anything you said. It was a continuation of point B which described how a designer would need to be involved in a project to offer substantial contributions, and that is very clearly not the case even with many successful FOSS projects.
None of the other designers + experienced coders I know contributes design to FOSS projects because the process is just so miserable. You constantly have to justify the very basic value of design contributions only to have it rejected, or completely chopped up by someone else who has no understanding of what you conceptually contributed. It's completely demoralizing.
And as a long-time developer, I get the frustration with design. Sometimes design choices seem completely arbitrary or superfluous to developers... though the root of that is developers often a) assume they know enough about design to critique it, and b) assume that design is purely aesthetic when UI/UX designers often don't even consider aesthetic concerns even if they have related training-- it's all about workflows, telling users what they need to know to solve their problems while keeping the cognitive and visual load low enough to not slow them down, and giving them the appropriate controls to do what they need to do. If your crowd is developers, then the interfaces might even look like what the developers would make-- their mental model essentially equates the GUI to a thin wrapper around a back-end API which actually does the work. To the 95% of other potential users, the interface is the tool. Interfaces are all about communication, and much the same way technical writers are way better at making end-user tutorials than developers are, designers are way better at figuring out how to communicate functionality, intent, and information to non-technical users.
As someone who also jumped from development to design I agree with your description of the friction between developers and designers.
I'll also add that compromise is especially difficult when everyone involved is a volunteer, many of whom seem to be attracted to FOSS partly to reclaim some of the autonomy missing from their day jobs. And when projects become popular many maintainers are petrified of making hard choices that might anger existing users.
Given that, it's not surprising how many FOSS projects fall back to tinkering with icons and colors but otherwise recreate workflows from proprietary competitors.
Similarly, people get used to bad interfaces. While we are always going to be most productive using interfaces that we're used to, that often mistakenly leads them to believe that they're objectively good. If you ask nearly any group of professional photographers how many hate Adobe, most will raise their hands. Ask them how many have used Gimp, they'll almost all raise their hand. If you ask them how many used Gimp more than once, they'll almost all lower them. Ask them why, and they will almost guaranteed cite the poor interface. While many dedicated and experienced FOSS developers (which I am) will cite Adobe's marketing practices as the reason people use Photoshop instead of Gimp, I call bullshit. You'll find many more photographers using Affinity Photo than Gimp, and considering Gimp is free, that says a lot. Who will you find using Gimp? Developers that need a photo editor. Why? They're so used to holding on the faucet that they don't even recognize when they see a properly working one. (And they'll often get really mad for even implying it needs to be fixed.) You also don't see that split with Inkscape. Most people who professionally work with vector art choose Illustrator as their primary tool, but most of them cite exactly the reasons developers assume people continue to use photoshop: overall smoothness, ecosystem integration, file type compatibility, etc. There are some legitimate shortcomings in Inkscape-- the type tools are just not as good which matters for graphic designers, for example. But lots of people who do vector art professionally do use inkscape.