darktable: A Powerful Open Source Photography Workflow Tool for Photographers
I present darktable, an open source application designed by photographers for photographers to manage digital negatives and develop raw images. This virtual darkroom ensures non-destructive editing with professional color management and GPU acceleration. You can join our community through forums, mailing lists, or by contributing code on GitHub without needing programming skills.
You do not need to write code to be involved in the darktable community!
- lionkor
I've been using darktable for a while to edit my RAW photos. The amount of features, viable workflows, and in general the quality of the software is baffling for a free product. I would happily pay 200 bucks or something per year to use this, it makes all other RAW editing software obsolete.
I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.
Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.
I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.
With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.
I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
- erksa
Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE.
If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.
Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
- randomstate
Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.
- thatxliner
I found Darktable absolutely amazing, although the learning curve is incredibly steep.
Some ex-maintainers hated the direction of Darktable and thus made their own fork, namely https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
- kkukshtel
I highly recommend people try out Capture One. After using Lightroom for years, switching to Capture One a few years ago felt like someone turned the lights on. Far and away the best photo and media mangement software I've ever used by at least two orders of magnitude, and reasonalbe license cost and generous free tier.
- datadrivenangel
Darktable is great. Very powerful for editing RAWs. A few places where you have to learn plugins to do things that lightroom makes a little easier, but not paying hundreds of dollars a year for abusive cloud upsells is great.
- redmaple892
I don't edit RAW too often so haven't invested the time and effort into Darktable. I have been very impressed by digiKam for organization and catalog management though. I refuse to be sucked into another proprietary database (e.g. Lightroom) and utilities like osxphotos made it easy to turn Apple photos into regular files that digiKam serves up nicely. My goal is to have access to the entire 'archive' on my NAS.
I do miss macOS system controls like zooming in and out via touchpad. In general though, I'm not doing a ton of editing and for my large library, digiKam is working nicely. I tried capture1 for editing but it was more than I needed. I'm glad Darktable exists for folks needing raw editing. I wonder if it produces the Fujifilm specific colors as well as C1?
- kyrofa
My wife is a professional photographer and Darktable is a critical part of her editing workflow. It's a truly outstanding piece of software.