11 ms·

Darktable 3.0

341 points by trop 7y ago

kingbirdy 7y ago
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.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  Agreed, a welcome change indeed!
- m-p-3 7y ago
  Agreed, and so many apps lacks an easily accessible screenshots section, if they even have screenshots. I want to see what the apps looks like if I'm even going to download it, do at least a minimum of effort to entice potential users.
- tomcam 7y ago
  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.
- radiowave 7y ago
  I've been similarly impressed with their manual, which while not the most thorough, answers the all-import question: "What does this control do?"
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  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.
  - seanhunter 7y ago
    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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - niknetniko 7y ago
      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.
      - brudgers 7y ago
        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.
        pdabbadabba 7y ago
        By this logic, they probably should have picked a different name.
        StavrosK 7y ago
        You can file a lawsuit without merit about anything, you don't need merit.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  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.
  - Sharlin 7y ago
    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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_table
    - xwowsersx 7y ago
      Good point!
devit 7y ago
How does it compare to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom?
- LandR 7y ago
  I've used both, loghtroom only upto version 5, but I prefer dark table! I've never missed lightroom since moving to dark table. But then I only do pretty basic editing of raw files. It has a couple of editing features that lightroom up to v5 doesn't have.
- jseliger 7y ago
  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.
- trop 7y ago
  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 https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable.
cs702 7y ago
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!
- bayindirh 7y ago
  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. If you're interested, you can see some of my photos at http://www.flickr.com/zerocoder http://www.flickr.com/zerocoder
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Me too. Thanks especially to the awesome YouTube tutorials of people like harry, I have taken my photography yo absolutely the next level. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAs... I love the concept of this being a digital darkroom where much artistic expression occurs long after taking an exposure.
  - felubra 7y ago
    Thanks you for sharing this. I've seen one video in this playlist opened my eyes to the level of adjustments that Darktable allows.
  - brudgers 7y ago
    Bruce Willis's Learning Darktable is pretty good, too. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF-rFQw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF-rFQw
    - jillesvangurp 7y ago
      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.
kilroy123 7y ago
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.
- abtinf 7y ago
  The answer used to be Picasa. Thanks google.
  - sfuller808 7y ago
    RIP.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Killing Picasa was one of the worst things google did.
- decasteve 7y ago
  Have you tried digiKam?
  - kilroy123 7y ago
    I haven't even heard of this before. This looks very promising. Thank you!
- benjaminl 7y ago
  Depending on your neeeds, both Adobe Lightroom and Google Photos will do this. Adobe finally made Adobe Lightroom sync your library with the cloud. So you can now have all your photos from on all your devices.
- shantly 7y ago
  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).
dang 7y ago
Thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 (for the curious)
- trop 7y ago
  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...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
darthcoder1011 7y ago
Darktable is amazing! Can't wait to try this new version!
norlywtf 7y ago
Opens entirely in Russian. WTF.
- HenriNext 7y ago
  Not for me. Check your browser?
- dmolony 7y ago
  Check your VPN?
Railsify 7y ago
But does it work on windows?
- jeena 7y ago
  In theory yes but I think you need to compile it yourself.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Not anymore. They have full windows support now.
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  There’s a windows installer available. Any reason to believe that it doesn’t work well on Windows?
  - kqr 7y ago
    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.
  - Railsify 7y ago
    I just tried to install it, received a cryptic error message.
thawaway1837 7y ago
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?
- BeetleB 7y ago
  Although I and many others use DT to organize photos, the developers are fairly open about not wanting DT to do too much of that. https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-filemanager https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-filemanager They even make it their April Fool's joke: https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file-management/ https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file-management/
  - caseyf7 7y ago
    What do DT users use for file/digital asset management?
    - BeetleB 7y ago
      Can't speak for others, but what I do: 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.
      - LandR 7y ago
        This is pretty much my workflow too, manually copy from camera to PC, then import them into Darktable. Edit and delete from within darktable.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vassy 7y ago
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.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Yes. They are called "styles".
algorithm314 7y ago
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?
- CharlesW 7y ago
  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.
  - tagrun 7y ago
    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.
    - CharlesW 7y ago
      Helpful, thanks! RawPedia's "Features" page (http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features 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.
      - tagrun 7y ago
        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.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  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.)
HenriNext 7y ago
Looks great. I might ditch Lightroom for this and donate the subscription moneys to you instead, as a matter of principle. But everybody is and forever will be comparing Darktable to Lightroom, so how about: - Add to website a clear comparison vs Lightroom. - Add to website how to import Lighroom catalogue.
- GordonS 7y ago
  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.
  - HenriNext 7y ago
    I'm not exactly against paying subscription fees. 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.
- risingsubmarine 7y ago
  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.
seabass 7y ago
Huge fan of Darktable. For such a gui-centric set of updates, though, how could they not include a single screenshot?
- ygra 7y ago
  I think developers should really take note of VS Code's release notes (e.g. https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41 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.
  - trop 7y ago
    There are screenshots (though not animations!) in the announcement for darktable 3.0 at https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-3-0/15384 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.
    - ygra 7y ago
      That's indeed a lot better.
deanclatworthy 7y ago
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. [1] https://dtstyle.net/ https://dtstyle.net/
- bosie 7y ago
  > 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?
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    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.
    - bosie 7y ago
      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?
Jeaye 7y ago
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. https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type=Issues https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type... Congrats on the release!
- microcolonel 7y ago
  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.
JeremyNT 7y ago
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!
notyourday 7y ago
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?
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  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).
bedros 7y ago
any darktable expert here knows how to compare two photos side by side in darktable Also, can we use magnifying glass, instead of zooming in and scrolling the photo ideally, would be select two photos to compare, click on compare side by side, and the two photos viewed on screen
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  FWIW Digikam has a light-table feature for this. https://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/LightTable https://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/LightTable Sorry if that's not helpful to you, it might be useful to others though.
- trop 7y ago
  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).
lolc 7y ago
Great news! Happy casual user here. Just the other day I decided to include Darktable in my yearly donations. Not a chance. They don't take donations :-)
m0zg 7y ago
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.
GiorgioG 7y ago
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!
deepspace 7y ago
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.
- morsch 7y ago
  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.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  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.
- virtualritz 7y ago
  I suggest to watch this video[1] completely. It's as technical as necessary. If you want to use a tool like DT properly there is no way around this. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbPj_TqTF88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbPj_TqTF88
jillesvangurp 7y ago
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: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/vid... 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.
stunpix 7y ago
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.
- dbrgn 7y ago
  "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." Can you name a few open source ones? I'm not aware of any open source RAW development software that comes close.
  - stunpix 7y ago
    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. :)

341 points by trop 7y ago

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.

xwowsersx 7y ago
Agreed, a welcome change indeed!
m-p-3 7y ago
Agreed, and so many apps lacks an easily accessible screenshots section, if they even have screenshots. I want to see what the apps looks like if I'm even going to download it, do at least a minimum of effort to entice potential users.
tomcam 7y ago
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.
radiowave 7y ago
I've been similarly impressed with their manual, which while not the most thorough, answers the all-import question: "What does this control do?"
Ididntdothis 7y ago
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.
- seanhunter 7y ago
  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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - niknetniko 7y ago
    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.
    - brudgers 7y ago
      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.
      - pdabbadabba 7y ago
        By this logic, they probably should have picked a different name.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        You can file a lawsuit without merit about anything, you don't need merit.
xwowsersx 7y ago
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.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_table
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    Good point!

devit 7y ago

How does it compare to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom?

LandR 7y ago
I've used both, loghtroom only upto version 5, but I prefer dark table! I've never missed lightroom since moving to dark table. But then I only do pretty basic editing of raw files. It has a couple of editing features that lightroom up to v5 doesn't have.
jseliger 7y ago
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.
trop 7y ago
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 https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable.

cs702 7y ago

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!

bayindirh 7y ago
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. If you're interested, you can see some of my photos at http://www.flickr.com/zerocoder http://www.flickr.com/zerocoder
acidburnNSA 7y ago
Me too. Thanks especially to the awesome YouTube tutorials of people like harry, I have taken my photography yo absolutely the next level. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAs... I love the concept of this being a digital darkroom where much artistic expression occurs long after taking an exposure.
- felubra 7y ago
  Thanks you for sharing this. I've seen one video in this playlist opened my eyes to the level of adjustments that Darktable allows.
- brudgers 7y ago
  Bruce Willis's Learning Darktable is pretty good, too. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF-rFQw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkqe4BYsllmcxo2dsF-rFQw
  - jillesvangurp 7y ago
    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.

kilroy123 7y ago

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.

abtinf 7y ago
The answer used to be Picasa. Thanks google.
- sfuller808 7y ago
  RIP.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Killing Picasa was one of the worst things google did.
decasteve 7y ago
Have you tried digiKam?
- kilroy123 7y ago
  I haven't even heard of this before. This looks very promising. Thank you!
benjaminl 7y ago
Depending on your neeeds, both Adobe Lightroom and Google Photos will do this. Adobe finally made Adobe Lightroom sync your library with the cloud. So you can now have all your photos from on all your devices.
shantly 7y ago
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).

dang 7y ago

Thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012499 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261849 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640753 (for the curious)

trop 7y ago
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...

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darthcoder1011 7y ago

Darktable is amazing! Can't wait to try this new version!

norlywtf 7y ago

Opens entirely in Russian. WTF.

HenriNext 7y ago
Not for me. Check your browser?
dmolony 7y ago
Check your VPN?

Railsify 7y ago

But does it work on windows?

jeena 7y ago
In theory yes but I think you need to compile it yourself.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Not anymore. They have full windows support now.
thawaway1837 7y ago
There’s a windows installer available. Any reason to believe that it doesn’t work well on Windows?
- kqr 7y ago
  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.
- Railsify 7y ago
  I just tried to install it, received a cryptic error message.

thawaway1837 7y ago

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?

BeetleB 7y ago
Although I and many others use DT to organize photos, the developers are fairly open about not wanting DT to do too much of that. https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-rename-files https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-filemanager https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-filemanager They even make it their April Fool's joke: https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file-management/ https://www.darktable.org/2011/04/file-management/
- caseyf7 7y ago
  What do DT users use for file/digital asset management?
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    Can't speak for others, but what I do: 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.
    - LandR 7y ago
      This is pretty much my workflow too, manually copy from camera to PC, then import them into Darktable. Edit and delete from within darktable.

deleted 7y ago

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vassy 7y ago

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.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Yes. They are called "styles".

algorithm314 7y ago

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?

CharlesW 7y ago
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.
- tagrun 7y ago
  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.
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    Helpful, thanks! RawPedia's "Features" page (http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Features 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.
    - tagrun 7y ago
      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.
stevekemp 7y ago
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.)

HenriNext 7y ago

Looks great. I might ditch Lightroom for this and donate the subscription moneys to you instead, as a matter of principle. But everybody is and forever will be comparing Darktable to Lightroom, so how about: - Add to website a clear comparison vs Lightroom. - Add to website how to import Lighroom catalogue.

GordonS 7y ago
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.
- HenriNext 7y ago
  I'm not exactly against paying subscription fees. 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.
risingsubmarine 7y ago
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.

seabass 7y ago

Huge fan of Darktable. For such a gui-centric set of updates, though, how could they not include a single screenshot?

ygra 7y ago
I think developers should really take note of VS Code's release notes (e.g. https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41 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.
- trop 7y ago
  There are screenshots (though not animations!) in the announcement for darktable 3.0 at https://discuss.pixls.us/t/darktable-3-0/15384 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.
  - ygra 7y ago
    That's indeed a lot better.

deanclatworthy 7y ago

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. [1] https://dtstyle.net/ https://dtstyle.net/

bosie 7y ago
> 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?
- BeetleB 7y ago
  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.
  - bosie 7y ago
    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?

Jeaye 7y ago

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. https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type=Issues https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/search?q=cr3&type... Congrats on the release!

microcolonel 7y ago
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.

JeremyNT 7y ago

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!

notyourday 7y ago

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?

jillesvangurp 7y ago
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).

bedros 7y ago

any darktable expert here knows how to compare two photos side by side in darktable Also, can we use magnifying glass, instead of zooming in and scrolling the photo ideally, would be select two photos to compare, click on compare side by side, and the two photos viewed on screen

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
FWIW Digikam has a light-table feature for this. https://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/LightTable https://userbase.kde.org/Digikam/LightTable Sorry if that's not helpful to you, it might be useful to others though.
trop 7y ago
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).

lolc 7y ago

Great news! Happy casual user here. Just the other day I decided to include Darktable in my yearly donations. Not a chance. They don't take donations :-)

m0zg 7y ago

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.

GiorgioG 7y ago

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!

deepspace 7y ago

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.

morsch 7y ago
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.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
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.
virtualritz 7y ago
I suggest to watch this video[1] completely. It's as technical as necessary. If you want to use a tool like DT properly there is no way around this. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbPj_TqTF88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbPj_TqTF88

jillesvangurp 7y ago

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: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg/vid... 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.

stunpix 7y ago

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.

dbrgn 7y ago
"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." Can you name a few open source ones? I'm not aware of any open source RAW development software that comes close.
- stunpix 7y ago
  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. :)