Darktable 2.2.0 released | Hacker News Reader

Darktable 2.2.0 released

darktable.org

208 pointsgeppetto82 comments

IMHO it's the best FOSS photo application out there. It's cross platform, fast, stable and manages the whole photo workflow (RAW developing, photo management, non destructive editing).

Thanks darktable folks!

> It's cross platform

Are there Windows builds? There was a guy that did but he stopped at 2.0.

Oops! You're right there's no official Windows port. I've run it on Mac and Linux only.

I've been able to run it on the Linux Subsystem for Windows with an X server, but there was still a few quirks I believe.

There's been renewed work on a clean Windows port in recent months: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/1327

Interesting! They almost lynched the guy at the beginning but seems that there's progress.

It is very interesting. I don't want to intrude on their thread, but if others here vouch for this technique I'll politely ask them to look into the following:

- https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...

- http://boot2docker.io/

...has anyone here ever used this approach with nix apps that need to run on Windows "natively"? Writing a powershell script to silently install boot2docker with this special docker image wouldn't be too difficult. The DarkTable folks don't seem interesting in maintaining Win builds so this may be the perfect workaround.

NOTE: I realize that `File > Open Image` may be non-trivial, but surely there's a way to mount a host<->guest folder (e.g.: When using the application, the workspace is located in `C:\Users\$whoami\Documents\DarkTable\.jpg`)

Boot2Docker is not for this purpose. Silently installing a VM on a Windows PC is a very bad idea. If the user is not proficient enough to know about and configure the VM, then what happens if

- B2D installs a Virtualbox instance, but Hyper-V is on. VBox can't run besides Hyper-V.

- How do you configure the resource usage for the VM?Something like Darktable requires a lot of resources

- How do you manage shared folders? VBox shared folder performance is really bad compared to native

- Do you install an X server as well?

Anyway -- it's just a bad idea.

Thanks sz4kerto. I'm glad I got some thoughts here before posting that in their PR (I obviously won't post it now because of the points you brought up).

I guess a user that would be comfortable with b2d or vbox would just have those running anyways!

Note: for you question about X, please check out https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...

Wow you weren't kidding.

> It may be better to go help out some other free software project that already had the misfortune of working on that platform...

I understand their points about maintenance, but telling someone to go work on something else rather than keeping an experimental branch around, sheesh.

As someone who appreciates open source and works primarily on Windows I really wish they had a better attitude. Take a look at Rust or Elixir, fantastic communities and the software is better for it. I'm sure that Darktable has some interesting things but based on what I saw in that thread I think I'll be sticking to Lightroom.

I've only read that quote, but to me that doesn't seem like a rude thing to say. I interpret it as "This windows branch is awful, it might be better for you to abandon that effort and work on something with more potential". I hear it as criticizing the code, not the person.

Edit: I read a little more, looks like the devs were upset because windows isn't a free platform, and they didn't want darktable's reputation marred by a buggy port.

> This will be very bad for darktable reputation

It was in the context of building trust, basically "go away and work on another project so we know who you are before you can touch our holy code".

That guy came in with a great attitude and approach, he pretty much got told to pack it.

I dont believe in being rude to people, but sometimes you have to make things clear. In their comment chain they asked the dev to rename the application so it didn't give the reputation a bad name. I can understand that, especially since Darktable apparently is a really good app. Open source means you can take the code and build/modify/play with it, it doesn't mean you can take the name and reputation of a product and apply it in a new direction (using the same name).

So the guy forks darktable for windows, calls it something else. Then when the project reaches a level of maturity the original devs approve of, they take his work back into darktable, produce their own windows port under their 'brand' and his project potentially dies because it doesn't carry the same weight?

I got the vibe from some of the comments that "one guy working on a windows port isn't enough, we don't want to help support it so we're going to discourage any 'one man bands' until a team appears from nowhere to do all the work" is the common view, which I sort of understand that they don't want to have to provide end user support to a platform they themselves don't use, but that attitude might ultimately go against the project.

Exactly! Thanks for summarizing much better than I could.

You can set out requirements for merging upstream while also encouraging users to contribute. They're driving off good developers who do use windows primarily and might want to contribute. Like you said, there's no "team" that's going to materialize if that's the approach that they take whenever anyone brings it up.

I dont see anything wrong with what you just described.

    * Yes it's ok for the *owners* of the project to reject buggy code.
    * Yes it's ok for the owners of the project to accept working code.
    * Yes it's ok for the owners to "take" someones work when said person volunteered to it. 
    Thats what "contributing to open source" means.
    * Yes it's ok for the owners to use a working contribution to better their project for each and 
    every one of the users.
    * Yes its ok for someones fork to die.  Thats the fork maintainer's problem. 
    Is there anything preventing him from checking out the latest version of the code (serious question, 
    I dont know), the one that the owners incorporated and improved ?

Also, it's not "his" (the windows dev's) project. It's his contribution, which is to port the original owners' project to windows.

I dont see anything wrong here, other than the owners weren't exactly welcoming, encouraging, or perhaps helpful. That sucks, sounds like they were rude (or perhaps they turned rude when the original "dont call this fork Darktable, please" didn't get heeded ?).

What a shame, I've heard similar stories about people who try to contribute to open source and get treated badly. But again, other than being crass, I dont see any problem. It's great that windows dev contributed so much and improved. He deserves a big Thank You from everyone, especially the owners (and maybe they did ?). But the bottom line is he volunteered. He isn't owed anything.

It's an unfortunate situation, but the way _they_ put it (two sides to every fight) is that they don't know if he'll drop out in a week and all those who downloaded it will come screaming "Were's our updates!!"

It works in Windows 10 using the Linux for Windows feature, and then using a suitable windows X server.

http://i.imgur.com/MxadCpg.png

Agree. I would add three more qualities to your list:

* Fully programmable, via a nicely document Lua interface: http://www.darktable.org/lua-api/index.html.php -- you can automate all kinds of workflows.

* Truly innovative, with clever new features unavailable in other applications, including Lightroom. For example, five years ago they added a powerful new "equalizer" module: http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/ (google "darktable equazlier" for usage examples).

* Always improving: I've been using it for years and the developers keep finding ways to make it better all the time.

Congratulations on another great release!

Definitely agree!

I make a substantial part of my income (just enough to pay rent) selling photography, and I recently dropped ps and lightroom in favor of Darktable. The change didn't happen in a day, but Darktable is so good I don't think I'll ever need to come back to Adobe. Notable plus, I can now spend most of my time on Linux, no more need to use my Macbook for photo work.

The interface is not really good for smaller displays and resolutions (adobe stuff was better on my 11 inch mba), but on anything with more than 1280 x 960 px, it's great.

Congratulations to the Darktable team for this 2.2 release!

Any experience using RawTherapee also? Just an hobbyist myself and moving away from the Mac platform so figuring out the best alternatives.

Never tried RawTherapee, won't be able to help here sorry!

I don't make a living via photography, but I do receive income from taking pictures of escorts, and pets. (Strange how you find your niche!)

I've been using RawTherapee, on Linux, for the past few years. For my needs of marking images, doing post-processing, and mass-operations, it works perfectly.

I'm always reluctant to allow a tool to manage the layout/tagging of my images. So for that I have a strictly sorted hierarchy:

    ~/Images/
    ~/Images/2016
    ~/Images/2016/12/04-Hannah
    ~/Images/2016/12/12-Tiffany

Inside each "event"-folder I store:

    RAW/
    JPG/
    JPG/thumbs/
    Teasers/
    Teasers/thumbs/

Then I write out a meta-data file, ".meta", with detail such as:

    Location=Studio|MyPlace|Their Hotel|Whatever
    Contact-Details=+44...
    Tags=lingerie,nude,shillouette,monochrome
    ..

It works well, and allows me to find files years later via a simple `grep`.

I am also a hobbyist and I use Darktable. I've experimented with RawTherapee. I like RawTherapee's editing controls and love that its sidecar files are somewhat human readable (Darktable's are not).

What Rawtherapee lacks is the 'light table' feature for handling bulk photographs. I'll often shoot several hundred images in a day (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes). Darktable lets me triage those photos and filter them for processing without managing a file system... well now that my workflow uses RapidPhotoDownloader on the front end. It reads off the memory card and renames files and directories to a standard format.

A few months ago, I brought many years worth of sorted directories of images into Darktable and went to bed and when I woke up it had added everything to the database and I could sort by name and remove duplicates and look at thumbnails and remove junk that had been saved alongside stuff I wanted during bulk operations.

Anyway, since Darktable runs on Mac, there's not a drop dead reason not to give it a spin alongside whatever you're currently using.

I'm sure you're sick of getting asked this, since it's asked every time someone who makes some money from photography mentions it, as there are many wannabe photogs out there, but how do you monetize your photos? Stock photo marketplaces like Dreamtime? Event photography (i.e., getting paid to take photos and provide prints of said photos, not getting paid for photos directly)? Online marketplaces for more artistic-oriented photos like 500px?

Personally my photos provide indirect value. People don't pay for them, but they drive traffic to a property that people pay to use. I've dabbled with the concept of selling them directly or taking more stock-style photos, but never really gotten serious about it.

Again, I know this question is annoying, so if you don't wanna answer, no biggie. :)

Many people ask the question indeed!

I sell prints and license photos to a small list of corporate clients I slowly grew with time. I haven't been lucky with marketplaces so far, and I'm doubtful it would be worth the effort with my type of photography (abstract/achitecture).

Any monetization strategy is probably too tied to the corresponding style of photography for any generic advice to make sense. A few of my friends have their income coming mostly (or 100%) from photography, and not three of them monetize the same way. None of them use any marketplace though. Artists, fashion photographers, event photographers, social media content producers, all have a different business model which more often than not looks like classic b2b.

A lot of this comes down to your niche. As you say there are many people who are "photographers", and many many many more who would never pay and take their own with their phones.

I accidentally found a niche when I took some fun pictures of a friend who was an escort. She shared them, for advertising purposes, and that lead to my name being mentioned on an escort discussion forum. Since then people get in touch every now and again and I arrange to shoot them in exchange for cash.

Finding people willing to pay is definitely hard, but sadly my own route is pretty hard to generalise.

I regret that I haven't really had the opportunity to explore Darktable very thoroughly. Every time I would try to point it at my library folder it would choke to death. Perhaps I should re-organize around Darktable, but right now I have other components of my workflow that are hard to imagine replacing, primarily DxO -- this was the main driver that got me to switch to a Windows host running a Linux VM and doing all my real work over SSH to the local VM, after years of struggling through painfully slow editing in a Windows VM on a Linux host. I resent that Windows's bad, less flexible behavior has forced me to make it my host OS. :'(

At the moment I don't have a good library app, I just browse the directory structure. I've tried Lightroom but it too struggles with my library folder, although unlike Darktable, it is marginally usable. I've tried Digikam, and while it's the only one that seems to handle the library in a semi-respectable fashion (with the experimental, now-deprecated MySQL backend enabled, which iirc took some manual massaging to even make compile anymore), it's hard to get the components I really wanted to work reliably (it's very important the my camera's GPS tags can be mapped and sorted; this is my main interest in a library manager and as of now, all such programs are too overloaded to do this competently or half-broken like Digikam's integration, and when I need GPS-based information I guess I will have to try to write a script that reads the coords out manually with exiftool instead of trying out Yet Another Library Manager).

Adobe is absolutely that 1k lb gorilla in the room that everyone is afraid to compete with. Add to that that photography programs are very difficult and complex work and it makes the field, particularly the field of volunteer developers who make contributions to a FOSS project, pretty limited.

For the record, the current size of my library:

    [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.CR2" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n"
    97,596
    [me@my_host photos]$ find . -name .snapshots -prune -o -iname "*.JPG" -print | wc -l | xargs printf "%'d\n"
    177,785
    [me@my_host photos]$ du -sh --exclude=./.snapshots
    2.8T    .

.snapshots being the btrfs snapshot tree, which makes these numbers about 16x higher, but is a relatively recent addition (around the time I moved to a Windows host) so isn't the reason everything has choked historically. Hopefully stuff like Lightroom isn't trying to parse these directories as well. I guess I could blacklist them from sharing in Samba to try to get around it.

Open to any tips others may have.

http://www.fastrawviewer.com/ or On1 Browse are good fast raw viewers on windows. I use them to 'manage' my library as I use a mix of raw processors and don't want to be tied to them for my workflow.

Took 5k pictures today so I'll try them out now. Thanks!

Can someone compare it to Adobe Lightroom? Is it truly usable, is it quick enough?

I am stuck on classic dilemma "apple fucked up, what should I do", so I am planning moving back to Linux, but Lightroom is the only application keeping me back (however, I thought of OSX in VM on Linux for running just LR).

I agree with you - Lightroom is the sizzle. But if you happen to convert Fujifilm RAF files on a regular basis, then there are image quality issues with ACP that might make the switchover decision easier for you.

The Fuji issue has mostly been solved. I used to use Irident Developer for my RAFs but since switching to the X-T2 and the latest LR updates the old issues are gone. I've compared IR to LR a few times and there's no real difference if you know how to use the sharpening tool in LR properly. The older sensors still exhibit the issue a bit though.

Glad to hear. Naturally Lightroom doesn't fit my Linux workhorse very well but it has the best workflow. Nice to hear it has improved -- many attributed Fujifilm's poor image detail to how ACP made the conversions early on.

It is very usable for editing photos. When I used to use it (a few versions ago), there were a few issues with library management, so I switched to Lightroom. Lightroom's workflow seems more "integrated", but I think Darktable has more photo-editing features. I would definitely recommend taking it for a spin.

Since I moved to Linux as my daily driver, I've been using Darktable as prefered editor. I do have to say that I'm not a high demanding user, so you'll have to take my experience with a grain of salt. Coming from Lightroom there's a slight learning curve and it's not as refined as Lightroom. But once you get the hang of things, it's really a great editor. Definitely quick but also really usable. The interface can sometimes be somewhat confusing, I can recall several occasions at which I didn't really know how to use a tool or preset. Luckily I'm better at googling than photography. I don't miss Lightroom at all and as of yet have not encountered any missing features.

Well, on Linux, darktable is incredibly much quicker than LR-in-wine ;-)

I also find DT more intuitive, which seems a bit weird considering the interface is so heavily inspired by LR (or did they just learn from LR's mistakes?).

The main reason to use LR is if you buy filter packs/plugins that are LR-only

I think Darktable fits the mold of a lot of other good free software in that it's well features and probably does what you need it too, but the proprietary equivalent(Lightroom in this case) is a more polished and easier to jump into, or at that's what I got from trying to introduce both(along with I think LightZone and a couple others) to my wife and she was just better able to pickup Lightroom. But if you want to move to Linux and take the time to get to know Darktable, I think it'll ultimately be a good replacement.

As a quick guide to trying it for yourself (it's cross-platform, free software) have a look at these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/harrydurgin/videos

He has the topics and modules covered in each video cross-referenced over at his website:

http://weeklyedit.com/

You're bound to find something useful.

I've just given it a hammering today and while I'd love to love it, DT is not going to give the LR team sleepless nights. It feels quick, but the interface lacks the silky refinement and there's a lack of coherence in the workflow. Plus the correction effects work poorly, such as shadow correction which affects regions outside shadows in one direction, not all shadows in another. The workflow coherence is based on the old Adobe RAW flow, which meant that all controls were to be applied from the top down in the order, starting with white balance and moving down. That coherence was diluted somewhat in newer versions of LR, but it is still good.

I too am shackled to OS X by LR, but I am a very demanding, heavy user of LR.

I too am shackled to LR and OSX. I've tried DT a few times, but it just does not quite hit the ease of use of my current LR workflow. Plus, I do not want to recreate/buy the filter packs I have made/bought. I also do not want to lose years of edits across thousands of pictures.

I run OSX in VM just for RAW Photo Processor, which in my opinion the best RAW converter out there developed by photographers for photographers. http://www.raw-photo-processor.com/RPP/Overview.html

I was facing the same dilemma, and photo is a source of income to me. I made the jump, use Linux and Darktable every day, and experienced no frustration at all. I didn't try to run macOS in a vm though.

To answer your questions : it is quick, and I find it to be a very good replacement for lightroom. To me, it's actually easier to extend than adobe software, mostly because Lua is very simple and the documentation is crystal clear.

The best advice I could give here would be to give yourself a good dozen of hours of deliberate practice on Darktable, maybe more if you're into very advanced editing, but no more than a week.

Great, thanks for sharing your experience :)

Fwiw lightroom is mainly written in lua

Just found the plugin doc thanks to your comment. I'm kind of ashamed I didn't know that...

If you go the VM route consider a Win7 guest instead. Much smoother experience than OSX.

I use Darktable daily since switching from iPhotos/Photos. Re-organizing my Darktable library has been difficult, though, because it purposely doesn't manage files. This user's python script that updates file locations in the SQLite catalogue has helped (https://chrigl.de/posts/2011/12/28/moving-around-darktable-m...).

I'm a huge fan - congrats on 2.2!

Here's a tutorial I wrote up on trying out Darktable recently:

https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-get-starte...

I am going to tentatively give this a go after ten years or so of Lightroom. The major problem apart from learning a new application is of course dealing with ten years of Lightroom catalogues and the metadata they contain. Further updates as events unfold ;)

Maybe that could work:

"Allow to import/export tags from Lightroom keyword files"

(Release notes)

Then we just need

"Full support for DNG files"

Tags should be simple to transfer, but actual image corrections do not move over. That's the real issue, a decade of corrections being lost :)

It's really not that bad, you open your photo and it has a list of plugins you can use. Lightroom isn't the most complicated in the world either, I guess, so it's not going to be a very steep learning curve.

Darktable stores 'catalogs' in SQLite tables. When I poked around for fun with sqlite3, the schemas seemed relatively straightforward. If the catalog data from lightroom can be wrangled into a reasonable format, it may be possible to convert it (famous last words).

Lightroom catalogs are SQLite tables too, although using convoluted schemas.

Would be nice to add state of the art AI for auto tagging people, places, objects, etc.

And just to dream: Multimaster database exists local, cloud, other machines, etc. Optional auto cloud sync, or partial, or just proxies.

I use Darktable to do basic edits to RAW files from my Nikon D3100 and it's incredibly satisfying to understand and adjust exposure, lens correction, perspective, and a few other things. Darktable has module presets for many cameras, which helps. I still don't understand levels, color correction, and other more advanced modules, but there are many great videos on YouTube, and my final JPEGs often end up looking better than the camera's (I shoot in RAW+JPEG just in case).

I'm looking into moving up from Photos.app to Darktable. One of the nice features of Photos.app is that through iCloud I can run Photos.app on my MBP which doesn't have space for my whole library and it will automatically pull down and cache the parts of my library I'm using at the moment. Are there any sort of storage hooks in Darktable that would allow for building something like that with a homegrown photos server?

If the storage is recognized at the operating system level then Darktable should be fine with it. Because it maintains a database, Darktable doesn't need a constant connection. On the other hand, it won't mount a network drive all on its own since it doesn't expect to be running as root.

Or to put it another way, if there's a photo server on your network and the machine running Darktable knows about it, then it shouldn't be a problem.

It's a pity most compare it to Lightroom, whereas there are more sound competitors - take a look at RawTherapee, Capture One, ON1 Photo RAW or SilkyPix.

All of them have ups and downs, Rawtherapee is fast bug buggy as hell and has no adjustment layers, Capture One is marvellous but has political problems with supporting files from the medium-format Pentax, ON1 Photo RAW is a freshly released piece of software and it managed to crash on my images.

> It's a pity most compare it to Lightroom

I don't think I can agree that it's a pity. Lightroom is the standard for photographers right now for pretty much everything but fashion photography (Capture One) and perhaps architecture photography (DXO Optics Pro). Everything, including the competitors you mentioned, is compared to Lightroom.

I think these applications (including DarkTable) need to be compared to Lightroom because the point at which they're competitive with Lightroom is the point at which they become seriously viable to many photographers (the kind that don't necessarily hang out on HN).

It's a shame that most software can't seem to keep a focus. Lightroom became a RAW development platform as well as a photo manager, etc. I'd really like just a fast, inobtrusive, and performant photo manager to help index my photos. I haven't found anything worthwhile yet.

I use DxO for all of my photography. Because Lightroom slows to a crawl on my imports, I haven't really tried it for RAW development. I guess I should give it a go. However, at this juncture I fully believe that DxO is miracle software. I've gotten far better results with it than I have with anything else. DxO can take a trash shot and make it 80% and it can take a good shot and make it 500%. Far more impressed with it than ufraw and the other RAW development suites I've tinkered with in the past.

Let me chime in with another vote for DxO. The entry cost is reasonable for the base version (discounted every year around Xmas) and it's not a subscription model like Adobe.

The lens/sensor RAW optimizations are fantastic (provided your camera has a bayer type sensor -- sorry, Fuji X users) and it can definitely make your photos punch above their weight. Depending on what you do, it might be worth spending more on the Elite edition -- most people don't need it, IMO. There are paid upgrades yearly, but if you don't need the new features, you can choose to skip a version (or two).

There are a couple of sister products, DxO Viewpoint for perspective fixes and DxO Filmpack (filters). IMO, Filmpack isn't worth paying for, but if you do a lot of architectural/wide angle work, Viewpoint is pretty good.

Also worth looking at is Affinity Photo - it's half the price of DxO. I bought it as a cheap alternative to PS for PSD editing, but it does RAW processing too.

I find that while most alternatives produce better quality output than Lightroom, none come close to it when it comes to organising and managing your photos.

I also find that when I process with Capture One Pro, I nearly always get better results than when I use DXO, RawTherapee or Darktable. Maybe it's just me but it is consistent.

I gave Capture One Pro a try due to this comment. There are definitely things to like about it. It is much faster than DxO at everything I tried and appears to include some very convenient features, like an effect clipboard that makes it easy to pick and choose which alterations should be copied between images instead of being forced to use the all-or-nothing approach of DxO's "Copy Correction Settings" / "Apply Correction Settings".

However, IMO DxO's output is leaps and bounds better. I'm sure it's due to the profile of the image, and specifically DxO's PRIME noise filtering since this was a handheld shot at nighttime, meaning high ISO (3200). The noise filtering from DxO is hugely superior to that from Capture One. Without PRIME (i.e., marking "high quality" noise filtration instead of PRIME), the noise filtering is at least in the same ballpark, but DxO maintains a very sizable lead with far less color damage. I did try to set the filtering configuration settings to similar quantities, though the options are a little different in each program.

I may make a blog post with images on this subject soon.

Ah yeah, I definitely found that in the past, especially with noisy sensors.

Since getting a full frame camera though, I find noise isn't nearly as much of a problem and Capture One's noise reduction is fine. Certainly not as good as DxO but I don't do much low light shooting.

Can anyone compare DarkTable to RawTherapee ?

http://rawtherapee.com/

RT has no real workflow, more a set of tools that you might apply somehow, GUI reflects that, seems unorganized. DT seems to have more advanced algorithms and tools. Both are excellent. Does not hurt to have both in your toolbelt.

RT has more controls for finetuning (some of which is very necessary for Fujifilm RAF files still) while DT has never crashed on me. CLUT support is nice, I play with it when I happen to develop from raw data.

I should probably participate in DT's tracker and try to get the few shortcomings fixed... that should do for a new year's resolution: more participation in OS communities. :)

Can you expand on that? I'm a Fuji and Darktable user. What am I missing?

The pixel readout is frankly poor on both apps: false color here and there. Probably both apps use the same library behind the scenes. On RT I can crank up the demosaic algorithms to reduce the effect. DT has no similar filter available.

DT also used to not do a good job on lens corrections (I have an X100T). Perhaps this new version does better since there was a mention in the changelog about lens data.

The best pictures are still the SOOC JPEGs -- too bad if I want to adjust the shadows or highlights.

On the X100 you can at least convert the raw files to jpeg on camera.

I generally just stick to a couple of jpeg presets.

I just tried out the new version. While I suspect the older ones also had the options there but now I confirmed that the demosaic controls in DT are as good as in RT.

I've tried Rawtherapee a few times and I haven't really learned to use it but I can easily recommend its documentation site (rawpedia) even if you don't use Rawtherapee itself.

When I used RawTherapee I liked it, but I found the interface a bit opaque. The exported jpegs were not what I saw in the application, which in turn was not what I expected to see given the source and the modifications I had performed. I am absolutely sure there were good reasons for this, but I never took the time to figure out what they were.

In contrast, with Darktable, only once have the final output not matched my expectations, and then it was immediately obvious that I had accidentally changed the colour space of the output and my image viewer assumed sRGB – this was a two-click fix in the export tab.

I'm not too familiar with Darktable, but one of my biggest Lightroom complaints is that it's not readily usable with generic cloud storage providers. Does Darktable have a good answer for this? I'd very much like to be liberated from buying ever larger hard disks.

As far as I can tell, file management is mostly beyond the scope of Darktable. You point it at a folder of photos, it stores the metadata in that same folder, and you export the edited photos somewhere else (another folder, or upload to services like flickr). Darktable doesn't do anything to take ownership of the original photos: no renaming or relocating.

I tried Darktable but the lack of basic undo functionality kept me on Lightroom. Looks like this release has basic undo functionality. I'll give this one another try.

> I tried Darktable but the lack of basic undo functionality kept me on Lightroom. Looks like this release has basic undo functionality. I'll give this one another try.

It's had undo functionality (on an individual-image basis) for a long time, albeit perhaps not in an obvious fashion. In the "darkroom" view, on the left sidebar there's a "History" widget. If you click on earlier numbers, it reverts the image to those, undoing whatever previous edits you've done.

does it have a lens profile database? these are tedious to do manually.

It uses lensfun. See http://www.darktable.org/2015/02/on-lens-detection-and-corre... and http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04s04.html.php#lens....

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