I wasn't sure what Darktable was, but they provide a good summary on their homepage, which it seems many projects fail to do nowadays, so kudos to them.
> darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.
I was in the same position. So I looked for an about page, and found exactly the right level of detail there. I looked at the install page, and saw installers for everything (images without captions, which I did not like, but that’s the only flaw I found on the whole site).
at that point I simply began spelunking around the site out of sheer amazement, just trying to see how they communicated things. To me, it’s maybe the best presentation of a product of any kind I have ever seen. It answered all of my questions directly, without any kind of trouble navigating.
It should also say that it fulfills the same purpose Adobe Lightroom does. I think this would help a lot of people. It’s not an alternative for photoshop for example.
They probably specifically don't say that to avoid potential copyright issues. Depending on jurisdiction (I'm thinking specifically UK and EU here) you can't actually say that about a competitive product without encountering problems.
I'm note sure about the EU part, because in Belgium you can mention competitors, e.g. "Darktable aims to fulfil the same need as Lightroom" is absolutely allowed, without problems. There aren't even rules specifically for mentioning competitors, it's about comparisons in general. For example, saying your product is "the best on the market" counts as a comparison, and you'll need proof to back up your statements.
Even a lawsuit without merit would require lawyering up and suck scarce time and energy. Adobe has deep pockets and lawyers on staff. Darktable has volunteers.
I agree. I think never mentioning Lightroom is a way of steering clear of meritorious suits and reduces the likelihood of a frivolous one...since even a frivolous lawsuit could be fatal. Anyway, "here is our cool thing" is probably organizationally healthier than "us against evil corp."
The darktable guys can't just release it under American copyright law? So long as the site and source are hosted by American companies, they wouldn't have to worry about other nations' rules.
I wouldn't count on it. As long as the product is available and marketed in other countries they can get caught in legal issues for not following those countries laws relating to marketing and offering of products.
Darktable is open source, though; it's not really offering a commercial product. Besides, what will eurocrats do if they determine a copyright issue? It's not as though there will be any earnings to garnish, worst-case scenario. If I (an American) publish a software project, Euro trademark law doesn't apply to me.
Legally does it really matter what is your specific price point or development model? Also it does nor matter what is your residency, if you publish it in Europe (or country X) then at least in theory you need to follow the local laws. How/if these would be enforced is another question. And yes I know your publishing tool probably does not even give you much control to which countries you start to export your product once you click Publish. Or is there any such at all?
To me this is a big failure where you advertise a larger competitor for free while not helping the clueless visitor trying to understand what your software does.
I came to darktable website to learn what darktable does not that there is another piece software that I do not know which does a somewhat similar thing but in a different manner.
not only this is not helping the clueless visitor, but it is advertising a major competitor and shows your software as being inferior to this commercial competitor.
IMHO not mentioning lightroom is a smart move, I discovered darktable without having any knowledge of lightroom for the simple reason that adode products do not exist on Linux.
Also I should mention that I use darktable as an alternative to gimp which I chose as an alternative to photoshop 5 when I made the switch to linux.
This to point out that you should not presume of how people use software either, expecially with software that can cover some many different uses as photoshop.
I don't really agree with your point. Anyone who does photography even in passing will probably have heard of Lightroom, and the mere word tells them exactly what to expect. I'd take "like Lightroom, but FOSS and on Linux" over two paragraphs any day.
Both options also don't contradict each other. Two sentences that tell unaware people what to expect and another sentence to compare against what everyone who already uses such software already knows by name.
That would be a really bad idea - they'll be flooded with requests "because Lightroom has it". They specifically have stated they will not implement some items Lightroom has (specifically related to file/db management).
I agree and it's funny that something so basic is refreshing to see. I had assumed it was an IDE (I guess because of Light Table), but they made it clear as soon as I hit the home page.
In a sense it is an integrated development environment, just in the sense of developing a photograph instead of software :) And their names both allude to the same analog photographer's or animator's tool, the light table[1].
Huge fan of DarkTable. As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo-processing pipeline into a subscription-based model for the rest of my life (Lightroom) it's by far the most powerful tool at my disposal.
That said, pain points for me have included:
- Managing multiple databases across multiple machines. My use-case is I have a central database with all photos on one machine. Generally do initial edits on another and then move the files across. I have yet to find a workflow - with the "Local sync" feature, or simply moving files and their edit files across the network - that feels simple. Should be noted that dragging files + their XLF's from temporary machine to primary machine wont import into the "database" for you. And you have to make sure all your directory structure and naming schemes are the same on all your machines.
- The community around "styles" (presets) doesn't scratch the surface compared to Lightroom's. There's one main website [1], but it's not really curated. I'd like to see more blog posts and pros offer these.
The difficulty managing files across multiple machines is not unique to Darktable. It's anywhere the CAP theorem is relevant. Even Adobe's Cloud.
Darktable's database is not the single source of truth. Functionally, it's an index over the XMP sidecar files. When it's deleted, rebuilding is 'simply' a matter of reimporting all the files. The XMP sidecar files are the actual data records...well ok, so are the images but they're immutable.
Local-sync's is inherently mutable state semantics. That's probably never what I want in my workflow. Disk space is cheap enough that I don't find an append only workflow cost prohibitive. Particularly since duplicating a Darktable image only consists of a new XMP file there's little point in overwriting an existing one to save a few bytes. [1]
Practically speaking, local-sync doesn't work for me because it munges filenames. This breaks my tiered backup logic...or rather complicates reasoning about it beyond the number of brain cells I can commit to it.
What I think I want is more tooling for operating outside of Darktable (I already ingest images from my camera with Rapid-Photo-Downloader). Two tools in particular. One which takes a list of XMP files and generates new XMP files based on Darktable's duplicate semantics. The other an inverted index of all the XMP documents. The goal is to move file operations outside of Darktable where they can be automated in the shell.
[1]; XMP files could be versioned with Git if duplicate files are a problem. They aren't for me.
As for styles, I noticed it too, but this got a huge boost with the addition of 3D LUT support in darktable 2.7. Here’s a site with free LUT’s: https://freshluts.com
Regarding databases across machines, would not Syncthing [1] work for this? Storage is fairly cheap these days, so having an exact copy of everything on two machines would not be that bad.
On a personal note, I desperately want to get into using darktable as Lightroom is the last piece proprietary software that I rely on. However, it seems Leica M8 support is still “not there” [2]. They do link to how to help out by adding support at the top of the page, but as mine was stolen two years ago I am not much help and I do want to be able to support my range of cameras dating back to 2006.
The three things on the list are conveniences not necessities. They are features of individual modules that provide a UI over several pixel pipeline operations that can be done in other ways. White balance can be done without using the presets (that's mostly how I do it). Denoising can be done with tools besides "profiled denoise." I do use it. I often shoot slow lenses at high ISO's (1600-12800) and it was the easiest tool to learn without understanding what I was doing. I've never used custom matrix because my camera isn't supported. I don't miss it. You might I guess.
But none of these are core features. And none are the only way to accomplish the things they do.
> As someone who doesn't want to lock my whole photo-processing pipeline into a subscription-based model for the rest of my life (Lightroom) it's by far the most powerful tool at my disposal.
Couldn't you just outright buy a Capture One license?
I used to pay for a photo editing software and used it for years. Then they got bought out by another company and the SW languished. And there was no easy way for me to migrate my photos away from it. Today I cannot even run the version I bought - incompatible libraries, etc.
Photos will last longer than the SW used to edit them. Don't lock them in.
Neither LR nor Capture one lock in your photos though. The edits will be locked in I suppose but I don't see a way to not lock them in. Are you saying that Dark Table somehow doesn't lock in your edits?
At least LR does not lock in your edits; I'm fairly certain Capture One doesn't either. You can export either XMP sidecar files or DNGs with the edit history bundled in along with the RAW data. LR's centralized catalog is just an SQLite database, I believe, but I don't think the schema is documented publicly.
Genuine question, are those edits usable in another app though? I.e. even if the XMP notes that I used a range mask with some color filter, if capture one or DT aren't capable of this or aren't capable of reading the sidecar files, isn't this a de-facto lock-in?
DT is open source, so even if it is abandoned, you have hope of still getting your edits. You have hope that if the original authors decide to abandon the project, someone else will take it on, etc.
I once bought a Lightroom license. Then they ditched all updates and moved to a subscription model and slowly made it unusable. Won't make that mistake again.
As a longtime non-professional user of Darktable on Linux, I love it. It has allowed me to turn badly exposed raw photos into usable ones more times than I can count. Some of its tools are uniquely powerful, e.g., the equalizer. It's amazing what the Darktable team has achieved. Kudos!
I have licenses for some higher-end photo post-processing software on macOS but, I always return to Darktable because, it's fast, extremely flexible and the results are terrific.
It's a really good piece of software. Kudos to them for keeping up the good work.
I'm guessing you mean Bruce Williams ;-). But yes, he has a very extensive set of tutorials on everything related to Darktable (40+ videos at this point) and he's busy adding some on Darktable 3. Also, he's a photographer with a lot of experience so a lot of what he presents is from the point of view of a photographer trying to get sensible results.
I use an antiquated version of Lightroom on Windows that I shelled out for years ago, but I seem to recall that Darktable got Windows support 1-2 years back - I'd love to see a direct comparison to see if it's worth making the switch.
Feature-wise, Lightroom is great - my main beefs with Lightroom are performance and stability: it's slow, and crashes occasionally.
What royally pisses me off with Adobe is that I now have pay them monthly to maintain access to my photo catalogue (edits/keywords/etc), but they don't use my moneys to improve their products.
I don't even remember when was the last useful new feature to either Photoshop or Lightroom, but I doubt it was within this decade.
Yeah. I can see myself switching from LR to this if I could import my catalogue. I wouldn't expect the develop settings to be exact but it would still be a big help.
Indeed! The annual Christmas release. I do think it matters to note darktable yet again. This is a major release, of what has become a key piece of photographic software. It's also a wonderful example of some people deep into imaging math getting together to put some current thinking into nicely put together open source code, and a community of committed users showing up to try to understand and use the thing. One could think of it as the Dwarf Fortress of open source imaging software...
I upgraded yesterday and have been using this for several years. I'm running this on a mac which is not ideal from a performance point of view but am loving the UI refresh and the two new tools: filmic rgb and the tone equalizer. The developer of these two new tools (Aurelien Pierre) has a few nice very technical videos about how these tools and the Darktable rendering pipeline works on his youtube channel:
If you don't know it, Darktable is awesome and unique. It often gets compared to Lightroom but it goes way beyond what that can do in many ways. It's main weakness is really that it maybe offers too many ways to do things. In addition to some easy to use filters it also offers many specialized filters and tools. Also, masking and parametric masking is vastly superior and that works on pretty much any tool.
What an odd coincidence, I was just looking up if there was a new version of Darktable available.
Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all your pictures from different sources? (macOS)
I have pictures on Dropbox, Facebook, and a huge removable drive. I want to view all of these pictures in one place in chronological order. I have 50,000+ pictures and it is so overwhelming where to even begin. :-/
I can't seem to get darktable to do this do smoothly for me.
Don't select Pictures with the recursive option. The import will run in a single thread. Instead select dir1,dir2,dir3...dirn all at once. Then the import will run in as many threads as are available. The number of available threads Darktable can use is set by the config menu.
You can select more directories than you have threads available. I saw several orders of magnitude speedup in the import. All those threads kept the CPU running. All that running CPU kept the IO flowing.
+ Advice: Work in two stages. Get all the images locally first. Download from Dropbox and Facebook onto that big disk. Then import them. Once they are local, you can manage them, back them up, etc.
TL;DR: Not open-source, but the author promises to open-source it if the company fails. Parts are already open-source: https://github.com/photostructure. Also, the app is free while it’s in beta, but will eventually cost money.
Looks interesting. No price information? It's a little unclear; do you provide hosting/backup of image data (not just metadata/previews) on your servers?
> can anyone recommend a good app for consolidating all your pictures from different sources? (macOS)
If you’re under 2TB, iCloud Photos supports all formats including RAW. If you’re over 2TB, Flickr Pro.
// It’s not there yet, but third party tools that integrate with Photos and use non-destructive “edits” are now approaching the usability of Aperture, barring the ability to have 5 levels of selectivity (e.g. marking photos in multiple passes from 1 - 5 stars, for rapidly paring down a large shoot).
I’m not familiar with Darkroom, but also wanted to avoid the Adobe rented software scene. I’ve been using Luminar, which is excellent for photo organisation, Raw develop with wide camera support, and advanced editing. It’s a traditional pricing model rather than a subscription.
Same but I’m willing to copy them all to one place. Bonus if it ingests sources and does the copying for me, but in some kind of sane or simply flat file layout. Difficulty: must support live photos, and videos, too, and no cloud crap (or I’d just put it all in iCloud).
I don't have a ready answer - but in general the type of software you're looking for is digital asset management (DAM).
There are some open source solutions in this space, but AFAIK no really great ones.
You could just use bitkeeper (now ope source) for just kerping track of files - it's said to handle binary files better than git.
I suppose you already have a Mac or two - I'm curious if anyone use icloud with only free software? Is it possible without any Apple devices - and would it even make sense to try?
I’m a happy user of iCloud Photos for this exact reason, 40k+ photos from 2005 to today. Having the ability to access all of them from any of my devices is just great.
I personally use Rawtherapee which seems more advanced(but a little more difficult to use for beginners) than Darktable. Ιs there any reason to use Darktable apart from ease of use?
I haven't used Rawtherapee much. I liked the creative opportunities it offered.
Darktable's workflow better met my needs at the time I was picking between them. In particular, Darktable was better for processing a few hundred images in a couple of hours right after shooting. Darktable's integrated image management was the key difference. Darktable's ability to offload processing onto GPU's was also a factor. GPU's make Darktable much much faster than without.
Rawtherapee is what I use too. I like tools that I can just point at a random directory, and get to work on. There are a lot of photography/image-management tools which insist on importing images into a "library", which ruins my filing-system.
I've got a photoshoot booked for tomorrow, so I'll try this out and see how it compares. (An average shoot for me results in 200-400 CR2 images to examine/reject/process.)
Just based on looking at the sites, Rawtherapee appears to focus on RAW "developing", while Darktable appears to also do photo management and Lightroom-style non-destructive editing.
RawTherapee does photo management and is non-destructive as well.
Darktable supports masks and parametric masks for almost all operations. RawTherapee on the other hand has a wider range of tools and support for profiles and raw formats.
RawPedia's "Features" page (http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features) doesn't mention photo management, and I didn't find anything by searching for "catalog" (Lightroom's name for a collection of managed photos), etc. It'd be great if the site had more info about that aspect of the app.
The equivalent functionality is the File Browser tab when you open RawTherape. You can filter images, assign ranks/color labels, create queues, do batch edits, assign a dark frame, etc etc.
It doesn't have "collections" or "catalogs" per se, if that's what you're specifically looking for.
I think developers should really take note of VS Code's release notes (e.g. https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41) which include lots of screenshots and animations of new features or improvements. Makes it very easy to see at a glance what has changed. But it's a lot more work than just dumping the git commit log, of course.
There are screenshots (though not animations!) in the announcement for darktable 3.0 at https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-3-0/15384. The images do really help to get a sense of the new features. It's a good point that it would be great to have such images accompanying the release announcement on the main darktable site.
Once a year I'm installing the darkroom and giving it another chance, but usually half hour later I'm deleting it.
It's slow as a hell. I don't understand why changing exposure on my 16 core i9 macbook takes up to 2-3 seconds for 24 mpix image. Same with zoom: 24 mpix image takes 3-4 seconds to zoom in/out! Really? How this software is written that simple actions are taking so much time? Enabling OpenCL helps, but not so much: changing exposure takes up to second (yes, 3-4 times faster) and zoom still 3-4. Meanwhile devs are spending time on css driven UI...
But UI is also unusable: it's very compact and many elements on a retina display are very close to each other, so I'm constantly miss-clicking them. Slider knobs are ridiculously small and hard to grab and drag. Numbers on controls can't be entered manually, so if you need some exact value you should spend seconds on dragging sliders until you get what you want.
Any other photo software are way ahead of this editor in terms of UI and performance, so I don't understand why this one gets so much attention.
If we are talking only about open source, then RawTherapee. It's faster than the darkroom. Better UI. But unfortunately they both lose to a commercial software which is usually much faster in most processing/decoding scenarios. Personally I prefer to pay for a software which does its job well. Why not? Image editing isn't that tool which must be only open source. :)
Like Lightroom, darktable handles collections of images and allows applying a recipe of alterations to tune up each image. But it is like Photoshop in that it allows a great deal of volition in what happens to the image. This is especially true in darkatable v3, which allows re-ordering of of the various algorithms (also known as the pixel pipe) which work on an image.
Unlike Photoshop, which is primarily a pixel-based editor, both Lightroom and darktable tend to work on the image in aggregate, with tools which are particularly useful to images created via a lens and digital sensor. Lightroom has a lot of its choice/sequence of tools "pre-baked", and there's a lot of wisdom in its choices.
The tools in darktable are more esoteric. They're based on a variety of traditional and recent mathematical work in image processing. It takes a bit more knowledge and taste to choose the best tools, and set their parameters well for a particular image.
Depending on hardware, you may find that the Adobe tools are a bit faster.
As a sibling poster mentions, of course darktable is open source, and not subscription-based. It has an active development community. As Pascal Obry, who managed the current release, writes in an email to the darktable list: "It is also an important release as new developers have shined in and proposed some amazing features." There's also active community of darktable users who help each other to understand how to use it to work on a variety of images. I find these discussions enlightening in order to gain a more general sense of ways to think about image processing. One home of this community is https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable.
I haven't used darktable in the last few releases, but when I did, bad hotkeys on MacOS was a noticeable irritant. At the time it felt like many open source tools: powerful but difficult. It might differ today, and the lack of mandatory subscriptions makes it very appealing.
Very abstractly, LR provides more useful specific tools, whereas DT provides more advanced generic tools that can accomplish many different tasks.
E.g. the equaliser in DT can be used for denoising both chroma and luma, and dynamic range, and many other things. The LAB color curves are super powerful for all sorts of colour correction. Parametric masks allow powerful local-ish editing.
This is a great piece of software and is a crucial tool for anybody looking to manage a RAW photo processing workflow using OSS. I've used it for years and am really excited to try the new release. What a great Christmas present!
How good is Darktable as a tool for a non professional simply looking to organize all their photos? Maybe apply some automated improvements, and do some deduping?
I copy the photos from my camera to my PC. I then use rapid-photo-downloader to bulk rename and move the files to where I store all my DT files. I then import the directory using DT.
DT does have some DAM capabilities (tagging, etc). Just don't use it to copy/rename/move.
Gah, I would love to be able to use Darktable, but it doesn't yet support the CR3 files my camera outputs (since I opt not to use JPG). Once that's supported, Darktable will have a couple more users in my household.
Pretty ridiculous that manufacturers are still leaving ISVs to rely on reverse engineering in order to support their products. It's not like the formats are "protected" somehow by not being documented; they inevitably end up well documented.
My biggest issue with Lightroom is that it is dog slow with large catalogs > 100k images. It is as if it kept everything in memory. Can Darktable be used to store the data in mysql or postgresql?
It uses sqllite. If you work directory by directory, it's fine. Most of the relevant data is in sidecar files. Apparently it can migrate lightroom meta data to its internal DB (haven't tried this).
Does it support presets similar to Lightroom? My workflow is pretty basic, I got about 10 presets I use on 90% of the photos I take, depending on the lens exposure, etc.
Not sure why the post by user "norlywtf" was flagged, I'm having the same issue: on macOS Catalina the UI comes up in Russian. I can read Russian, so it's not such a huge issue for me, but for someone who doesn't it'll be very non-trivial to find where to set the UI language because it's a tiny gray gear icon on a gray background, an the program does not use the Mac menus, nor does it respond to Cmd+, shortcut.
Interestingly, one of the most annoying UI aspects of the program, the lack of label capitalization, is not present in the Russian translation. Everything is properly capitalized there.
I love the Darktable user interface and feature set, but for my camera, the default import profile for RAW images is way off, resulting in bland, flat images lacking colour depth and needing extensive tweaking to look presentable.
The same images look great after importing into Lightroom and require very little post-processing.
I would love to drop my $expensive Adobe subscription, but this is the one issue that prevents me from doing so.
It varies per camera model. With the latest version, you can at least turn off the default application of the base_curve, which IMHO is quite horrible in that it consistently blows out highlights. I default to using filmic now. Also, you can develop some default styles and presets to speed up initial processing.
Did you try the new version? File a bug report with an example raw file, if you haven't already. Which camera is that?
Obviously, if it's just a matter of applying the same adjustments to all imported images, that's very easy to do either while importing or after the fact.
Culling mode, new in v3.0, allows comparing two (or more) photos side-by-side. The new version also allows for zooming in on images in lighttable mode (control-shift-scroll) when in culling mode or when images are "previewed" (full screen via the "w" key).
The Santa hat app icon offends me! (I'm joking.) This looks like an interesting app, it's not as polished as LR, but it's functional and free - great work!
I think it was meant as a joke -- for a long time, there was no official Windows build because no contributor was using Windows so there was nobody around to maintain that buikd. I think that has changed now.
> darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.