I've been using darktable for a while to edit my RAW photos. The amount of features, viable workflows, and in general the quality of the software is baffling for a free product. I would happily pay 200 bucks or something per year to use this, it makes all other RAW editing software obsolete.
I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.
Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.
I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.
With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.
I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE.
If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.
Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything.
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.
Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.
Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ:
>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.
I use it on Mac - I didn’t notice too much. There’s some GPU usage, I assume Apple still has some deprecated OpenCL drivers kicking around that it knows to use.
I highly recommend people try out Capture One. After using Lightroom for years, switching to Capture One a few years ago felt like someone turned the lights on. Far and away the best photo and media mangement software I've ever used by at least two orders of magnitude, and reasonalbe license cost and generous free tier.
If Capture One or any other buy-once commercial offering worked at all under Wine (or, in a dream land, had a Linux build), I would happily pay for it. But unfortunately, I've had no luck getting either Capture One or DxO PhotoLab running on Linux.
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.
Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €. Lightroom is the more expensive one if you plan on using the software more than 2 years and 2 months.
> Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €.
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.
I have tried to get used to Darktable for more than 2 years but finally gave up and went back to Lightroom. For some reason it never clicked with me and made me almost lose interest in photography . And the AI stuff like masking in the latest Lightroom versions is crazy good.
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
Darktable is great. You can easily do pro-level photo editing. Anything you need for editing RAW files, you can do. The modules are powerful. The UI is good. There is a learning curve, but there are also learning curves for the paid software options.
Darktable is one of the few Apps that I loved and advocated for, only to land back on a pirated copy of CaptureOne. Which is I think the only pirated software that I still have installed.
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.
Pirated copies seem like a blackbox of potential malware, even if virus scans fail to find any problems (and they often give 10-30% false positives on most keygens/cracks). Even if the code is hosted in github, there has been plenty of cases of malware/viruses being hosted there too.
To me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same.
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.
> The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
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).
Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.
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.
Have you looked at the documentation? In Darktable you can click the questionmark, then click on any feature, and very extensive, well written documentation walks you through how, when and when not to use each module and feature.
Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.
this was my main way of managing and processing my RAWs for years until i started using DxO PhotoLab. darktable is an excellent way to learn how to start editing IMO because it simplifies settings a bit less than other tools, is free, and from my experience has better denoise/tone mapping modules out of the box than RawTherapee. for my needs the library/lightroom was also very intuitive and lightweight.
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.
RapidRaw is too much AI-focused, with the typical drawback that you cannot tell the AI that it is wrong. You want to remove something from the photo by inpainting something else over it, and the only way to do it in RapidRaw is to brush over what you want to remove and pray that the object is removed cleanly by AI. But often, the AI leaves even worse artifacts, and the low-tech solution, that is, manually selecting what you want to copy over, is not available.
Another issue is that the overblown highlight reconstruction is much worse than in DarkTable.
I have tried to switch to Darktable multiple times over the years, it never has worked for me properly in my workflows. I'm still solidly on Lightroom Classic + DxO Photo Lab + Photomatix/Zerene Stacker (for stacking/HDR/bracketing)
I found Darktable to have very steep learning curve while RAWtherapee felt perfect immediately. Never used other software like that before besides some Photoshop.
I am always amazed at how much Aurelian Pierre is able to produce. But I think he is too smart for his own good and also too opinionated to be a good leader of an open source community.
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.
I haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?
If you’re looking specifically for an Aperture replacement, Nitro[0] was created by the person who led the Aperture, iPhoto, RAW Camera and Core Image engineering teams, as well as the imaging team for the Mac version of Photos.
>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.
I've been using darktable for a while to edit my RAW photos. The amount of features, viable workflows, and in general the quality of the software is baffling for a free product. I would happily pay 200 bucks or something per year to use this, it makes all other RAW editing software obsolete.
I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.
Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.
I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.
With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.
I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
Another +1 for this.
I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE.
If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.
Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections.
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.
You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything.
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.
Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.
Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ:
>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.
When I still used it, I only ever opened the folder with the files I wanted to edit.
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.
Pretty sure Darktable only supports openCL and not Metal for MacOS.
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.
I use it on Mac - I didn’t notice too much. There’s some GPU usage, I assume Apple still has some deprecated OpenCL drivers kicking around that it knows to use.
I used Darktable on Mac yesterday
I highly recommend people try out Capture One. After using Lightroom for years, switching to Capture One a few years ago felt like someone turned the lights on. Far and away the best photo and media mangement software I've ever used by at least two orders of magnitude, and reasonalbe license cost and generous free tier.
If Capture One or any other buy-once commercial offering worked at all under Wine (or, in a dream land, had a Linux build), I would happily pay for it. But unfortunately, I've had no luck getting either Capture One or DxO PhotoLab running on Linux.
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.
Not getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.
Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €. Lightroom is the more expensive one if you plan on using the software more than 2 years and 2 months.
> Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €.
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.)
> 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.
391 euro for a piece of software seems kinda crazy.
That's less than €1/hour for how much time I've spent using Capture One.
Private equity owed proprietary Mac and Windows exclusive. No thanks.
Want the best software for editing photos? No thanks, I'd rather use inferior open source solutions. Go Gimp
Upvoting you, because I actually use Gimp. While it has its headaches, for photo editing it's still the best after Photoshop.
(Yes, still better than Krita).
But this is all a digression, as Lightroom/Darktable are not Photoshop/Gimp replacements. Not even the same category.
> still better than Krita
??? Krita is painting/raster image creation software, why would you use it for photo editing?
You shouldn't. But I point it out because people keep posting "Ditch Gimp. Use Krita instead."
Krita's better for painting. Gimp's better for photo editing.
Yeah who needs the best software for hobbyist editing? $20/mo to Adobe forever until they jack it up even more, no thanks.
Darktable is top class.
I have tried to get used to Darktable for more than 2 years but finally gave up and went back to Lightroom. For some reason it never clicked with me and made me almost lose interest in photography . And the AI stuff like masking in the latest Lightroom versions is crazy good.
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
Darktable is great. You can easily do pro-level photo editing. Anything you need for editing RAW files, you can do. The modules are powerful. The UI is good. There is a learning curve, but there are also learning curves for the paid software options.
Darktable is one of the few Apps that I loved and advocated for, only to land back on a pirated copy of CaptureOne. Which is I think the only pirated software that I still have installed.
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.
Pirated copies seem like a blackbox of potential malware, even if virus scans fail to find any problems (and they often give 10-30% false positives on most keygens/cracks). Even if the code is hosted in github, there has been plenty of cases of malware/viruses being hosted there too.
To me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same.
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.
> The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
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).
Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.
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.
Have you looked at the documentation? In Darktable you can click the questionmark, then click on any feature, and very extensive, well written documentation walks you through how, when and when not to use each module and feature.
Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.
>How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?
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.
I just suggested a different way. Embed the pipeline’s actual code in the metadata.
This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.
I can also recommend Raw Therapee as an open source raw editor.
digiKam(https://www.digikam.org/) is also very good.
I am switching soon. I hear a lot of people complain about the catalog management. What solutions have you found?
> What solutions have you found?
* Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name. * over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.
Same for me. Managing images in Darktable alone is terrible but with Digikam it’s quite doable.
this was my main way of managing and processing my RAWs for years until i started using DxO PhotoLab. darktable is an excellent way to learn how to start editing IMO because it simplifies settings a bit less than other tools, is free, and from my experience has better denoise/tone mapping modules out of the box than RawTherapee. for my needs the library/lightroom was also very intuitive and lightweight.
Last time I tried it the UI was atrocious, and I ended-up buying a Capture One Pro licence. Has it improved?
See also: https://ansel.photos/en/
Right?! And the rest of the README continues like that. Must be some juicy history here
And I think this was a few years back. Imagine still having that in your readme.
I'm digging their Sentry charts. That's the kind of discipline we need more of. Stability is a feature.
Looks interesting - does it have better library management than DarkTable?
Is this better than Lightroom?
Depends on what feature of Lightroom you use. Give it a try and see for yourself.
Better in some areas but also very frustrating in others.
How does it compare to RapidRaw?
RapidRaw is too much AI-focused, with the typical drawback that you cannot tell the AI that it is wrong. You want to remove something from the photo by inpainting something else over it, and the only way to do it in RapidRaw is to brush over what you want to remove and pray that the object is removed cleanly by AI. But often, the AI leaves even worse artifacts, and the low-tech solution, that is, manually selecting what you want to copy over, is not available.
Another issue is that the overblown highlight reconstruction is much worse than in DarkTable.
I have tried to switch to Darktable multiple times over the years, it never has worked for me properly in my workflows. I'm still solidly on Lightroom Classic + DxO Photo Lab + Photomatix/Zerene Stacker (for stacking/HDR/bracketing)
I found Darktable to have very steep learning curve while RAWtherapee felt perfect immediately. Never used other software like that before besides some Photoshop.
https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
I am always amazed at how much Aurelian Pierre is able to produce. But I think he is too smart for his own good and also too opinionated to be a good leader of an open source community.
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.
I haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?
If you’re looking specifically for an Aperture replacement, Nitro[0] was created by the person who led the Aperture, iPhoto, RAW Camera and Core Image engineering teams, as well as the imaging team for the Mac version of Photos.
No subscription cost either.
[0] https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/
I don't know, but it's interesting to see a bunch of people stop developing features and fix bugs straight for 4 years.
https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/issues
There's also RawTherapee, which I found more usable than Darktable for reasons I don't recall.
Is the last release on GitHub from 2022 or is it me?
Not just you - from ansel.photos:
>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.
> Meet Chantal, your image processing AI librarian
Instant pass.
Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.
It's just an ordinary search engine for the specialized topic. Aurelien Pierre is being overly dramatic here, it's in his character.
I can't find that on the page.
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?
It's on https://ansel.photos