Darktable
darktable.org
darktable.org
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.
I get being against AI, but Darktable is very responsible about it according to their release notes. Local only, opt-in only, no nagging. It's not like Adobe trying to push AI on you when you don't want it.
Another way to get the up-to-date version on Debian would be to use Nix (install nix, add the stable or unstable channel or whatnot, and make darktable installable)
Darktable also cannot correctly color any of my DJI Mini Pro imagery. None. They all have really bad greenish hues. I haven't been able to publish any of my DJI images for 4 years now because Darktable won't fix it, and it's a known issue that they explicitly plan to not fix (https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/13319).
I'm currently starting to love RapidRAW (https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw); the developer is super active and releases new features every couple of weeks. I'm also able to add a few minor nitpick features I want quite easily with AI code tools. I have a good feeling I can get AI to fix the DJI issue on RapidRAW since the code is quite nicely organized.
Shame that the new workflow doesn't work well for your particular camera and setup - but I would encourage other people to try it, because it works great for mine.
We know :-) It very much seems there is no dt developer currently interested in this sort of correction, i suppose none are using such devices.
Just two reminders:
Such "missing support for my camera" started me to get into darktable code. A lot of code to be reused is there, there are already some hints, just go ahead :-)
Some comments above i suggested something ... :-)
Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the open-source software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow, and automatically updated it over time? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream, fixes any conflicts, does the rebuild, hosts the build, etc... This justifies a cost) This incompatibility with DJI images that the Darktable devs #wontfix is a perfect example use-case.
Needless to say this would be for professional use, with professional expectations, but if your business depends on having that slightly-tweaked tool, then it may be worth it; just exploring the idea, here
There is a huge overlap between (OSS users, people who can code) and an even bigger overlap between (OSS users, people who can use coding AI tools)
The people who can't even use coding AI tools almost universally use closed-source software like Adobe Lightroom that you can't fork easily.
If you're talking about color calibration and color balance rgb you can disable them and use darktable exactly as before.
There is a pr they are trying to merge, last comment was...10 hours ago. I'm not sure how this is 'actively plans not to fix'
But more practically - I've been using darktable for well over a decade, and it's remained backward compatible with my old styles. If you like the older modules, they should still be there, and you should still be able to apply your old styles the same as always.
My own problem is that darktable keeps improving, so much so that I want to reprocess all my old photos again :/
I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
The documentation for it is dense. It’s like you need to know the inner workings of the software to be able to do things like basic color correction. And even basic masking was just awkward as hell. When I quit it did not have smart object detection either so removing things from the background required editing the photo in external software.
Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast, it is intuitive, and it does not expose modules that the documentation says to never use.
I really wish I could use open source software for this. But I have yet to find a good alternative that lets me do what I want (which is fairly basic, I don’t go crazy with my editing) that doesn’t require me to get a Masters degree in its usage.
I'm not a Lightroom user myself, but my mom is a photographer and uses Lightroom for all of her photos and at least on her PC, it became extremely slow and painful to use. And it's not like it's a super outdated system either, it has a Ryzen 5600G, RTX 4060, 32GB RAM, nothing too ancient...
We even tried contacting Adobe support, and they claimed that the catalog was corrupted, took the catalog file, and later retured a "fixed" version which had no effect.
They then blamed Windows 10 and suggested we upgrade to 11. Does anyone here have any better tips to get it running more smoothly?
What I found was crippling bugs and a piss-poor UI. I've even gone back to it after a few years to see if I'd soften my stance, but nope: It blows.
Part of my beef with it is discussed below; people are acknowledging that it sucks at organizing (and, I submit, browsing). But it purports to do it, so you waste time wrestling with its ineptitude.
The lack of good open-source image browsers has, oddly enough, become a major problem. Only recently did someone float a pretty good one for Mac (FlowVision). I don't know what options there are on other OSes at the moment.
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.
It has a very clunky UX for this. But it actually has a lot of useful features for organizing large amounts of photos. There's a guy Bruce Williams on Youtube who has been doing tutorials on Youtube for Darktable for many years that has many relevant videos on this topic. But you can do rule based collections with filters on tags, camera type, and whatever other meta data is there.
It's probably a bit different from what you are used to and IMHO it's over engineered and there are some bad ideas for usability that never really got addressed and are made worse by the developers just putting buttons and controls in all the wrong places. But once you get over that, it actually does have a lot of powerful features for getting organized.
There's actually a fork of Darktable called Ansel that addresses a lot of the UX issues that has been in the works for a few years. The creator of the fork got annoyed with the level of indifference on this topic. There were other reasons as well (he was the creator of the filmic module in Darktable). But most of his UX work at least looks to me as something that the Darktable people might consider adopting.
--library ':memory:'It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE.
And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.
Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.
This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).
The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.
I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.
But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.
I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*
(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).
In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.
For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.
Some ex-maintainers hated the direction of Darktable and thus made their own fork, namely https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt
* Vulkan instead of OpenCL has way better performance.
* Graph-based editing akin to Blender. This fixes the issue of it being annoying and weird to reorder modules in darktable
It is, of course, still early on in its development and way less mature and featureful than Darktable.
lol
>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.
What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.
But yes, the library features could do with some improvements.
I had folders based on dates YYYY.MM.DD - Eventname. No need for cli.
I still do the same now for CaptureOne to be honest.
"If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.
People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available. I still would say Firefox can be a chrome replacement.
My images are also stored in date-based folders, but C1/Lightroom allow me to very quickly move between folders and identify the file I want, search for files I've rated highly or tagged with keywords/colors, and more.
OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.
Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.
The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?
If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pipeline in the metadata for each file such that it could be reproduced reliably across software versions and even forks. Like a sequence of shaders.
In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.
If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.
That said I don’t think the UX of LR and Photoshop is particularly good, especially in recent years. People just expect their skills to transfer over, but I don’t think FOSS should be doomed to clone the UX of proprietary software it seeks to replace.
A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.
I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).
Darktable keeps the old modules around but hides them, opening a file processed years ago will still go through the pipeline with the base curve module and come out the same. As a bonus, it is possible to use "obsolete" modules that may handle certain images better, achieving a particular look, or you are comfortable with the older module and prefer not to use the new replacement.
In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.
This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.
Code embedding has been considered many times but the rabbit hole is way too deep. You are embedding unverified executable code, to begin with. Then there's diversity problem: too much code, too many implementation specifics with every quirk being able to mess up the result. All of that spanning multiple generations of color science pipelines, experts, hardware, and third-party software to interact with. Since the advent of ML (for denoising and segmentation in particular) you have to also embed the weights as well, making it outright impossible.
All this leads to RAW processing code going the way of scientific and financial code: once written, it's frozen and the substrate is emulated if necessary. Even the bugs are preserved.
If you embed the image pipeline’s code in the user’s raw metadata, you essentially need to give them a perpetual license to that code, which isn’t a problem for FOSS.
For example, increasing exposure in poorly lit adds noise, so you might counteract with a noise removal filter. Later on, the developers come up with a better exposure boosting algorithms that takes more sensor characteristics into account, and produces less noise.
Ideally, you’ll get this new algorithm on all new photos, but not the old ones. It’s unreasonable to expect you to go through all images you already processed and decrease the effects of the noise removal filters.
Or maybe you liked the noise on those pictures, and now it’s gone, and you need to add it back.
It’s a very reasonable to expect your photos to look the same long term.
I struggle with Darktable's workflow, but it works without issue on Fedora with Wayland (including with my monitor's color calibration), so I'm sticking with it for now.
Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)
Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.
Good, ergonomic, efficient tools are worth their weight in gold. C1 is one of them. Importing/triage, editing, color profiles, tethered shooting - it's an incredibly powerful suite and works well.
For particularly problematic noisy/dark shots I'll do manual editing in DXO, but I do everything else in C1.
Media management though is IMO much worse than Lightroom? No keyword search, the catalog gets extremely slow over 10k images, and no filters for different cameras or lenses, as far as I know. I use peakto instead to manage and search my 40k RAWs then open them for editing only in C1.
(Yes, still better than Krita).
But this is all a digression, as Lightroom/Darktable are not Photoshop/Gimp replacements. Not even the same category.
??? Krita is painting/raster image creation software, why would you use it for photo editing?
Krita's better for painting. Gimp's better for photo editing.
https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
I was super into darktable and had fun using it. The UI and UX was not an issue for me. Loved the masks. But over time it got harder and harder for me to get decent color grading from it. I don't know what changed. When I tried to communicate that on forum and git I got rather harsh responses.
Maybe I should try it again.
Got it from an invite only torrent side, but yes, there is still a risk. But I don't want to pay 390 EUR (and not get any updates)
I agree that it's a lot better than Darktable and RawTherapee, but if you don't want to pay for it you should settle for one of the open source tools. They're not so bad they're unusable, and editing RAW photos isn't exactly something you need to do.
Extra shame if you're using it commercially.
I'm not proud of it. But I'm also not really ashamed.
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?
Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it.
If you're coming from the likes of Lightroom or Capture One you will have to learn a very different way of working, but in return you get a lot of control over the edit.
Awesome because if you set the right debayering algorithm and fine tune ondelette, you can get way better result than anything else, especially in rought situation.
Complex because if i don't practice often (like have a kid) i end up watching niche tutorial and reading the wiki for VNG4 vs AMAZE which is a bit frightning.
It make me want to test dark table or one of the clone
It has improved vastly over the years. I love the new additions like AgX!
However I tried out the new AI denoise and it still isn't great. I also wish there was a way to manually correct barrel distortion (eg for vintage lenses) -- currently it only supports embedded metadata or lensfun profiles.
I also find the OpenCL implementation to be rather slow. It would be better if it were something more modern like Vulkan.
I have very simple needs. I'm a hobby photographer who now has a bunch of kids. I want to shoot JPEG, I want to cull photos and maybe touch the exposure meter, and then upload my selected photos to Google Photos (aiming to replace this with Immich but not there yet).
And I want to do it on Linux. I can't believe this workflow is so wild that there simply isn't a single reliable option...
(Fwiw, digikam would allow me to import the photos and I could locate them via Finder. But through Digikam they never showed up - only the folders containing the photos. No filters were applied)
I've been liking Darktable
Makes me admire Linus Thorvalds even more. He is super smart, opinionated by also was able to keep a huge community on track for decades.
Aurelien Pierre was the main developer of filmic and several related modules and a key driver of that whole transition. A few versions ago there were some other developers that forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX. He argued against that and people ignored him and he basically decided to do it properly with Ansel and strip away all the stuff he never liked as well as beat some sense into especially the lightroom part of Darktable which is where you organize your photos. IMHO he did a great job on that from what I've seen so far.
Since the fork, a lot of stuff happened of course and there are now several competing alternatives to filmic in Darktable (Sigmoid and Agx). They each have their pros and cons and the differences can be very subtle; especially if you are new to the topic. There's a lot of complexity here. Which is why UX matters. And a point of criticism with especially Filmic is that it is a very complex module. But I'm still on Darktable and Ansel is actually not compatible with the newer Darktable versions.
No subscription cost either.
>Ansel has not published a stable release yet and there is no ETA for one : a new release is published when the list of all bugs have been cleared, so we know the software and stable. So far, Ansel only publishes revisions, which are intermediate states of the sourcecode.
Instant pass.
Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.
Under Chantal, there use to be Word2Vec, now replaced by FastText. Aka a shallow neural network building a language model that understand synonyms and some EN/FR translations, by embedding words as vectors in a vector space built so cosine distance represent semantic distance. It was called AI when Google published Word2Vec and Facebook FastText, I didn't made it up.
I mean, I wrote 2 articles on the topic explaining how it's built. Each page in the index is represented by the centroid of all the word vectors it contains, then it computes the cosine distance between the centroids of the pages and the centroid of the request and returns the closest matches. Aka not your regular grep.
Overly dramatic yourself, Internet minion. All opinions and zero substance.
Edit: I finally found a reference. It's a separate project that has nothing to do with the photography stuff. Right?
It's a way to search the docs?
So Chantal is the missing link in all that, it lets users be autonomous while researching their questions while aggregating various sources of knowledge on photography software, color science, bugs and docs. It's Ansel docs and much more (ICC, CIE, academic journals, forums, etc.)
I switched to it from Lightroom and made a little Python script to copy photos based on their exif data, into the same file structure as Lightroom.
Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep .
Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare.
Refreshing breath of honest air, imnho. I don't agree with the author in all things, but I enjoy how well and directly they express their viewpoints.
> This is basically admitting that the design is so terrible that it’s verging on unsable without reading the doc. But wait, what are we doing again ? We are copying pictures. We are copying pictures ? So did you pass your picture-copying exam and got your picture-copying degree ? If you didn’t, you should. Watch out, they might turn this into a quizz in a future version and disable the feature if you fail it.
As a software engineer, I understand this, but the tone also deeply bothers me. I want to use tools made by people who enjoy working on it, not by people working on it out of spite and hate for upstream.
Just make a better product. I don't understand the need to constantly shit on darktable.
I struggled a little to get this import workflow setup nicely, any tips on settings and config to achieve nice import workflow?
Once I’m dealing with duplicates I start to wigg out!
* Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name. * over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.
Another issue is that the overblown highlight reconstruction is much worse than in DarkTable.