aurelienpierre

Image-processing and colour-science engineer, photographer and musician. Everything I publish is free — no account, no ads, no tracker — and stays that way.

What I have done, since 2014:

• 2014 → the photography site and its Académie: a free photography school, 118 pages, inside a site of nearly 800;
• 2016–2018 free video courses on darktable (the old YouTube channel, ~8,000 subscribers) and darktable.fr, the French community site, now archived;
• 2018–2022 darktable's scene-referred pipeline: tone equalizer (2018), filmic RGB (2019), color calibration and color balance RGB (2020), diffuse or sharpen (2021), highlight reconstruction — shipped in every release since, 8.5 million cumulative downloads;
• 2018 → 25 research articles publishing the mathematics in full, with PDF/EPUB editions;
• 2020 and 2022 the two darktable user surveys (n = 1,253 and 646), open data;
• 2022 → Ansel, a darktable fork (1,000+ stars). I handed its maintenance to Jiyoné in October 2025 but I still write for it: in 2026, the color equalizer module, scene-referred raster drawing and the Canvas atelier (layout and print), plus about 700 fixes since the handover — part of them co-written with an AI assistant I pay for out of pocket: less cognitive load, not less investment;
• 2022 → Virtual Secretary and Chantal, a documentation search engine: 47,000 pages indexed, about 1,100 questions a month, free, no account;
• 2026 the book Concevoir — 142,000 words in French, 131,000 in English — and three engraved, published compositions (MuseScore).

All of it is free. From 2018 to 2025 this work earned ≈€52,000 in total — the two best years stayed below French minimum wage, full time. That model cost me my health; I stopped it.

No future work is promised. This account funds one thing: that everything which exists stays online, available to everyone. There is nothing to unlock — you already have it all. If a module you use every week, a chapter or a score has served you, the price is yours to set.

For the Co-Op's software — Ansel, Chantal, their infrastructure: the team at liberapay.com/Ansel.