Darktable

Posted by siatko 5 days ago

Comments

Comment by lionkor 4 days ago

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.

Comment by mcdonje 4 days ago

I'm on Debian, which is of course behind. I tried installing the flatpak, which is up to date, but the packager removed the AI parts. The only option I have (short of moving to Arch or similar) is AppImage, which doesn't integrate well with the DE.

I get being against AI, but Darktable is very responsible about it according to their release notes. Local only, opt-in only, no nagging. It's not like Adobe trying to push AI on you when you don't want it.

Comment by doubletwoyou 4 days ago

One way to get the AppImage to integrate better would be to install appimaged.

Another way to get the up-to-date version on Debian would be to use Nix (install nix, add the stable or unstable channel or whatnot, and make darktable installable)

Comment by Groxx 4 days ago

GearLever is handy too, though they seem moderately different in goals and I'm not familiar with the details

Comment by everybodyknows 4 days ago

I built from source, on Ubuntu. There are few rough edges -- look for hints on the pixls.us forum. And git-checkout at the release point for version 5.6, not TOT.

Comment by roryirvine 4 days ago

Have you tried Darktable's own Debian packages from the OpenSuSE Build Service: https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=graphics...

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by qurren 4 days ago

I've used Darktable for almost a decade quite happily, but recently am moving off of it because they made one MASSIVE blunder with the new shitty color grading and white balancing tool that never gets any of my images right, all the tones are off, and it doesn't have sane defaults that renders things at least "almost correctly" at first go like the previous white balance tool did. It was way better a couple years ago with the vanilla "White Balance" and "Base Curve" tools.

Darktable also cannot correctly color any of my DJI Mini Pro imagery. None. They all have really bad greenish hues. I haven't been able to publish any of my DJI images for 4 years now because Darktable won't fix it, and it's a known issue that they explicitly plan to not fix (https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/13319).

I'm currently starting to love RapidRAW (https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw); the developer is super active and releases new features every couple of weeks. I'm also able to add a few minor nitpick features I want quite easily with AI code tools. I have a good feeling I can get AI to fix the DJI issue on RapidRAW since the code is quite nicely organized.

Comment by blutack 4 days ago

I don't think your assessment of the DJI Mini thing is very fair. Sounds like they would be more than happy to accept a pull request and indeed there is an open one the maintainers are helping get merged [1].

Shame that the new workflow doesn't work well for your particular camera and setup - but I would encourage other people to try it, because it works great for mine.

  We know :-) It very much seems there is no dt developer currently interested in this sort of correction, i suppose none are using such devices.

  Just two reminders:

  Such "missing support for my camera" started me to get into darktable code. A lot of code to be reused is there, there are already some hints, just go ahead :-)
  Some comments above i suggested something ... :-)

1: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/20467

Comment by pmarreck 4 days ago

I now have a business idea: Curated Open-Source App Forks.

Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the open-source software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow, and automatically updated it over time? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream, fixes any conflicts, does the rebuild, hosts the build, etc... This justifies a cost) This incompatibility with DJI images that the Darktable devs #wontfix is a perfect example use-case.

Needless to say this would be for professional use, with professional expectations, but if your business depends on having that slightly-tweaked tool, then it may be worth it; just exploring the idea, here

Comment by qurren 4 days ago

Honest answer from me: Probably not, because vanilla Claude Code already does a great job of maintaining my forks with open-source main, and also handles the packaging and installation beautifully.

There is a huge overlap between (OSS users, people who can code) and an even bigger overlap between (OSS users, people who can use coding AI tools)

The people who can't even use coding AI tools almost universally use closed-source software like Adobe Lightroom that you can't fork easily.

Comment by pmarreck 4 days ago

There's quite a difference in my experience between "using coding AI tools" and "using coding AI tools _well_", especially when it comes to editing code.

Comment by qurren 4 days ago

Doesn't really matter in this case. Doesn't matter enough for people to pull out their wallet. You can re-fork from clean OSS and re-implement any time while you sleep, using whatever AI subscription you already have.

Comment by pmarreck 4 days ago

I think you overestimate the number of photographers who are also comfortable with CLI tools, because doing this via web-facing UI's is quite less capable currently

Comment by qurren 4 days ago

Those photographers you speak of (95%) are using Lightroom and Photoshop and you wouldn't be able to build a fork business for them. The 5% who use Darktable are likely comfortable with CLI tools.

Comment by jasonjayr 4 days ago

Isn't this what happened with ElasticSearch and AWS OpenSearch? I imagine that OSS developers will not appreciate this at scale, especially if the core developers are not reaping some of the revenue from such a project.

Comment by seemaze 4 days ago

VPD - virtual private developer. Sell off parcels of developer attention by the hour!

Comment by actionfromafar 4 days ago

Somebody™ should do it with Ansel IMHO.

Comment by jollymonATX 4 days ago

Nope

Comment by mikae1 4 days ago

> but recently am moving off of it because they made one MASSIVE blunder with the new shitty color grading and white balancing tool

If you're talking about color calibration and color balance rgb you can disable them and use darktable exactly as before.

Comment by c7b 4 days ago

Stupid question, if there's an old version that you liked, couldn't you just keep using that version?

Comment by qurren 4 days ago

It's a pain in the ass to maintain when it has dependencies on older stuff while I upgrade the rest of the system

Comment by epihelix 4 days ago

Well, you shouldn't need to maintain - just compile a static linked binary and you should be good for the rest of your system's life.

But more practically - I've been using darktable for well over a decade, and it's remained backward compatible with my old styles. If you like the older modules, they should still be there, and you should still be able to apply your old styles the same as always.

My own problem is that darktable keeps improving, so much so that I want to reprocess all my old photos again :/

Comment by jimnotgym 4 days ago

I followed the github issue you posted.

There is a pr they are trying to merge, last comment was...10 hours ago. I'm not sure how this is 'actively plans not to fix'

Comment by anfractuosity 4 days ago

Doesn't arch already package it (https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/darktable/), I was using darktable on arch, but recently switched distros.

Comment by lionkor 4 days ago

Arch packages it, but it did not package the very latest one.

Comment by cryo32 4 days ago

Another +1 for this.

I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.

Comment by sv123 4 days ago

Is there a catalog conversion tool?

Comment by cryo32 4 days ago

Don’t think so. I just exported all files to jpeg 90% into the Lightroom library folder structure. Then moved all the RAWs to an archive disk. I just add any directories I want to do edits on into the Darktable library.

Comment by IgorPartola 4 days ago

I guess I am in the minority but I did not have a good time with Darktable. I used it for a few years and then had to hold my nose and transition to Lightroom. On decent hardware (MacBook Pro that was only a few years old) it was dog slow. But the worst part was transitioning from their version 2 to version 3 of the workflow or whatever they called it. None of my old photos would render correctly after that and half of the modules I learned to use to edit my photos were not obsolete.

The documentation for it is dense. It’s like you need to know the inner workings of the software to be able to do things like basic color correction. And even basic masking was just awkward as hell. When I quit it did not have smart object detection either so removing things from the background required editing the photo in external software.

Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast, it is intuitive, and it does not expose modules that the documentation says to never use.

I really wish I could use open source software for this. But I have yet to find a good alternative that lets me do what I want (which is fairly basic, I don’t go crazy with my editing) that doesn’t require me to get a Masters degree in its usage.

Comment by yonatan8070 4 days ago

> Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast

I'm not a Lightroom user myself, but my mom is a photographer and uses Lightroom for all of her photos and at least on her PC, it became extremely slow and painful to use. And it's not like it's a super outdated system either, it has a Ryzen 5600G, RTX 4060, 32GB RAM, nothing too ancient...

We even tried contacting Adobe support, and they claimed that the catalog was corrupted, took the catalog file, and later retured a "fixed" version which had no effect.

They then blamed Windows 10 and suggested we upgrade to 11. Does anyone here have any better tips to get it running more smoothly?

Comment by MoonWalk 4 days ago

You are in good company. I went into Darktable enthusiastically and with willingness to learn its workflow.

What I found was crippling bugs and a piss-poor UI. I've even gone back to it after a few years to see if I'd soften my stance, but nope: It blows.

Part of my beef with it is discussed below; people are acknowledging that it sucks at organizing (and, I submit, browsing). But it purports to do it, so you waste time wrestling with its ineptitude.

Comment by epihelix 4 days ago

The lack of easy browsing is an issue, but Darktable has never purported to provide an image browser / organizer. Quite the contrary, the devs have always been crystal clear that they hate the concept with a fiery passion.

Comment by erksa 5 days ago

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.

Comment by jillesvangurp 4 days ago

> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.

It has a very clunky UX for this. But it actually has a lot of useful features for organizing large amounts of photos. There's a guy Bruce Williams on Youtube who has been doing tutorials on Youtube for Darktable for many years that has many relevant videos on this topic. But you can do rule based collections with filters on tags, camera type, and whatever other meta data is there.

It's probably a bit different from what you are used to and IMHO it's over engineered and there are some bad ideas for usability that never really got addressed and are made worse by the developers just putting buttons and controls in all the wrong places. But once you get over that, it actually does have a lot of powerful features for getting organized.

There's actually a fork of Darktable called Ansel that addresses a lot of the UX issues that has been in the works for a few years. The creator of the fork got annoyed with the level of indifference on this topic. There were other reasons as well (he was the creator of the filmic module in Darktable). But most of his UX work at least looks to me as something that the Darktable people might consider adopting.

Comment by vjvjvjvjghv 4 days ago

In my view Darktable should delegate organization to Digikam and focus on image processing. Digikam is really good and it would be perfect if was integrated with Darktable.

Comment by everybodyknows 4 days ago

Consider sidecar-only mode, and use whatever external organizing tool you like. This is not documented as such, rather it's the CL option

  --library ':memory:'

Comment by dllu 4 days ago

I have a pet peeve that darktable-cli requires the GUI darktable to not be running. It would be nice to export photos using my script without having to disrupt my editing workflow...

Comment by porl 4 days ago

can you run it in a container?

Comment by BeetleB 4 days ago

> 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.

Comment by roblh 4 days ago

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.

Comment by thewebguyd 4 days ago

> it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one.

This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).

The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.

I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.

Comment by BeetleB 4 days ago

I felt that way because my prior RAW editing tool did photo organization/collections.

But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.

I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*

(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).

In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.

Comment by Mashimo 4 days ago

How are you organizing your photos?

For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.

Comment by mcdonje 4 days ago

You can have multiple instances with Darktable.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by vjvjvjvjghv 4 days ago

Then they should not even try to have some clunky organization features in Darktable

Comment by jitl 4 days ago

well then it doesn't sound competitive with software like Lightroom (which its name seems to mirror)

Comment by BeetleB 3 days ago

https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/#faq-lightroom

Comment by jitl 2 days ago

ok so it does have a library, but gp just thinks its bad

Comment by thatxliner 4 days ago

I found Darktable absolutely amazing, although the learning curve is incredibly steep.

Some ex-maintainers hated the direction of Darktable and thus made their own fork, namely https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel

Comment by dllu 4 days ago

Original founder of darktable, hanatos, went and made vkdt which fixes a bunch of my pet peeves with darktable:

https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt

https://jo.dreggn.org/vkdt/

* Vulkan instead of OpenCL has way better performance.

* Graph-based editing akin to Blender. This fixes the issue of it being annoying and weird to reorder modules in darktable

It is, of course, still early on in its development and way less mature and featureful than Darktable.

Comment by mikece 4 days ago

I've kept an eye on Darktable for a while. I do high volume photography for high school sports so while Lightroom Classic (LrC) is the final editing tool before exporting the images that go to the clients a more critical app for me is Photo Mechanic (PM) to cull down from 6,000 images to the 300 keepers from an event (a process that only takes about ten minutes on PM). The last time I tried to run Photo Mechanic on Linux (using Wine) I was able to get it to load but it crashed hard every time I tried to actually use it. If there's a capable competitor to Photo Mechanic for Linux I might take a serious look again at switching. Then again, the speed from the Apple Silicon CPU+RAM+GPU processors means that even if I could get comparable hardware for Linux it wouldn't be any less expensive than a new MacBook Pro M5 Max. Definitely keeping an eye on this space but it's not where I need it to be for my workflow.

Comment by jdubs1984 4 days ago

> It is forked on Darktable 4.0, and is compatible with editing histories produced with Darktable 4.0 and earlier. It is not compatible with Darktable 4.2 and later and will not be, since 4.2 introduces irresponsible choices that will be the burden of those who commited them to maintain, and 4.4 will be even worse.

lol

Comment by randomstate 5 days ago

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.

Comment by ghostly_s 5 days ago

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.

Comment by donatzsky 4 days ago

As the one responsible for writing much of the FAQ, I can assure you that's not what is meant. The point is to hopefully make new users aware that they can't assume their Lightroom knowledge will help them, and thus encourage them to consult the manual or some tutorials. It's an unfortunate fact that many coming from Lightroom think they already know everything and don't have to learn anything new, but when they fail to make head or tails of darktable they conclude that the issue is that it's trash and not that they didn't bother educating themselves - and they will often loudly proclaim this on Reddit in a rather entitled manner.

But yes, the library features could do with some improvements.

Comment by Mashimo 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Arainach 4 days ago

That's not library management, and it's not a replacement for Lightroom/C1.

"If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.

Comment by Mashimo 4 days ago

Well not if you use the library management, it's not no.

People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available. I still would say Firefox can be a chrome replacement.

Comment by Arainach 4 days ago

There are many image editors. The primary appeal of something like Lightroom is image editing workflow - library management and editing combined. Being able to organize and move around your library is a core feature.

My images are also stored in date-based folders, but C1/Lightroom allow me to very quickly move between folders and identify the file I want, search for files I've rated highly or tagged with keywords/colors, and more.

Comment by Mashimo 4 days ago

A believe you. But it's not like that for everyone. Every raw editor I ever used was strictly for editing a single project at a time.

Comment by speed_spread 4 days ago

I wish Darktable and Immich could be integrated into a single system.

Comment by pnut 5 days ago

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.

Comment by donatzsky 4 days ago

OpenCL is deprecated, not unsupported, on MacOS and may be removed at some point, but it absolutely does still work for now. If you don't have OpenCL acceleration, it's a bug.

Comment by wizzledonker 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Yossarrian22 4 days ago

I used Darktable on Mac yesterday

Comment by drdexebtjl 4 days ago

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.

Comment by ryanjshaw 4 days ago

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.

Comment by lionkor 4 days ago

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.

Comment by drdexebtjl 4 days ago

Intuitive UX teaches you without asking you to read the documentation.

That said I don’t think the UX of LR and Photoshop is particularly good, especially in recent years. People just expect their skills to transfer over, but I don’t think FOSS should be doomed to clone the UX of proprietary software it seeks to replace.

Comment by jdubs1984 3 days ago

The ansel fork seeks to remedy a lot of the bad design and workflow choices.

https://youtu.be/1R7gdfJVH9Q?si=a4WgcPt8q-aNSS2o

Comment by ryanjshaw 3 days ago

“Intuitive” implies “don’t need to read documentation”. That’s the entire point of my comment. There’s intuitive software and unintuitive software. This is unintuitive software. It’s not bad software, just unintuitive. I place value on intuitive software.

Comment by vegetarianarian 4 days ago

That's a legitimate complaint as a newcomer, but the darkroom navigation hotkeys are backspace and space.

Comment by TiredOfLife 4 days ago

Is delete key used for zooming

Comment by throwup238 4 days ago

> 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).

Comment by muti 4 days ago

Darktable editing workflow is centered around modules. Exposure, denoise, various color adjustments, etc are all separate modules. Dynamic range compression (and other common operations) has several implementations: base curve, filmic, sigmoid, and AgX. They all essentially do the same thing but have effectively superseded each other as they were added to newer releases.

Darktable keeps the old modules around but hides them, opening a file processed years ago will still go through the pipeline with the base curve module and come out the same. As a bonus, it is possible to use "obsolete" modules that may handle certain images better, achieving a particular look, or you are comfortable with the older module and prefer not to use the new replacement.

Comment by orbital-decay 4 days ago

>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.

Comment by drdexebtjl 4 days ago

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.

Comment by orbital-decay 4 days ago

Proprietary software doesn't have any problem with embedded code, for example TTF does exactly that with fonts and they're still being licensed.

Code embedding has been considered many times but the rabbit hole is way too deep. You are embedding unverified executable code, to begin with. Then there's diversity problem: too much code, too many implementation specifics with every quirk being able to mess up the result. All of that spanning multiple generations of color science pipelines, experts, hardware, and third-party software to interact with. Since the advent of ML (for denoising and segmentation in particular) you have to also embed the weights as well, making it outright impossible.

All this leads to RAW processing code going the way of scientific and financial code: once written, it's frozen and the substrate is emulated if necessary. Even the bugs are preserved.

Comment by drdexebtjl 4 days ago

I don’t think TTF is a good example. You’re usually not allowed to embed and redistribute TTF code with your projects, only the resulting geometry, which is not subject to copyright in the US.

If you embed the image pipeline’s code in the user’s raw metadata, you essentially need to give them a perpetual license to that code, which isn’t a problem for FOSS.

Comment by akersten 4 days ago

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.

Comment by drdexebtjl 4 days ago

Right, but do these incremental upgrades preserve the look of the image? Or do they just keep the library accessible?

For example, increasing exposure in poorly lit adds noise, so you might counteract with a noise removal filter. Later on, the developers come up with a better exposure boosting algorithms that takes more sensor characteristics into account, and produces less noise.

Ideally, you’ll get this new algorithm on all new photos, but not the old ones. It’s unreasonable to expect you to go through all images you already processed and decrease the effects of the noise removal filters.

Or maybe you liked the noise on those pictures, and now it’s gone, and you need to add it back.

It’s a very reasonable to expect your photos to look the same long term.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by kkukshtel 5 days ago

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.

Comment by willbicks 4 days ago

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.

Comment by wmfiv 4 days ago

Not getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.

Comment by Hamuko 4 days ago

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.

Comment by throw0101d 4 days ago

> 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.)

Comment by dylan604 4 days ago

> 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.

Comment by weezing 4 days ago

391 euro for a piece of software seems kinda crazy.

Comment by Arainach 4 days ago

That's less than €1/hour for how much time I've spent using Capture One.

Good, ergonomic, efficient tools are worth their weight in gold. C1 is one of them. Importing/triage, editing, color profiles, tethered shooting - it's an incredibly powerful suite and works well.

For particularly problematic noisy/dark shots I'll do manual editing in DXO, but I do everything else in C1.

Comment by buildbot 4 days ago

Capture One in my opinion has much higher output quality, better defaults, and specifically for supports Phase One backs better than anything else. I have not done a scientific study or anything comparing the outputs (maybe I should!), but it’s just really good at producing gorgeous photos.

Media management though is IMO much worse than Lightroom? No keyword search, the catalog gets extremely slow over 10k images, and no filters for different cameras or lenses, as far as I know. I use peakto instead to manage and search my 40k RAWs then open them for editing only in C1.

Comment by tokai 5 days ago

Private equity owed proprietary Mac and Windows exclusive. No thanks.

Comment by flipthefrog 4 days ago

Want the best software for editing photos? No thanks, I'd rather use inferior open source solutions. Go Gimp

Comment by BeetleB 4 days ago

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.

Comment by dismalaf 4 days ago

> still better than Krita

??? Krita is painting/raster image creation software, why would you use it for photo editing?

Comment by BeetleB 4 days ago

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.

Comment by mcdonje 4 days ago

Pretty sure they said "go gimp" ironically

Comment by mcdonje 4 days ago

Darktable is top class.

Comment by bix6 4 days ago

Yeah who needs the best software for hobbyist editing? $20/mo to Adobe forever until they jack it up even more, no thanks.

Comment by andyjohnson0 4 days ago

A rather less positive view of Darktable than msny of the opinions in this thread:

https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent...

Comment by sbarre 4 days ago

Some needed context is that article is over 3 years old.

Comment by andyjohnson0 4 days ago

Has anything changed in those three years? Certainly not the ux, which is as poor as ever.

Comment by vjvjvjvjghv 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Mashimo 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Itoldmyselfso 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Mashimo 4 days ago

Yuuup.

Got it from an invite only torrent side, but yes, there is still a risk. But I don't want to pay 390 EUR (and not get any updates)

Comment by jlarocco 4 days ago

It's kind of shitty to pirate Capture One. The full, non-subscription price is only $350, which is less than most cameras, and not a bad price for "pro level" software.

I agree that it's a lot better than Darktable and RawTherapee, but if you don't want to pay for it you should settle for one of the open source tools. They're not so bad they're unusable, and editing RAW photos isn't exactly something you need to do.

Extra shame if you're using it commercially.

Comment by Mashimo 4 days ago

It's 390 EUR / 450 USD for a software without updates that I use a couple of times privately per year.

I'm not proud of it. But I'm also not really ashamed.

Comment by redmaple892 4 days ago

I don't edit RAW too often so haven't invested the time and effort into Darktable. I have been very impressed by digiKam for organization and catalog management though. I refuse to be sucked into another proprietary database (e.g. Lightroom) and utilities like osxphotos made it easy to turn Apple photos into regular files that digiKam serves up nicely. My goal is to have access to the entire 'archive' on my NAS.

I do miss macOS system controls like zooming in and out via touchpad. In general though, I'm not doing a ton of editing and for my large library, digiKam is working nicely. I tried capture1 for editing but it was more than I needed. I'm glad Darktable exists for folks needing raw editing. I wonder if it produces the Fujifilm specific colors as well as C1?

Comment by olooney 4 days ago

I've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization use case?

Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it.

[1]: https://www.refern.app/

[2]: https://www.digikam.org/

[3]: https://github.com/olooney/image-tagger

[4]: https://www.oranlooney.com/books/

Comment by redmaple892 3 days ago

Interesting - I have no experience with refern.app but my couple month impression of digiKam is that it's quite flexible in terms of tagging and organization. It's also quite fast for my ~20GB collection of photos. It is definitely geared towards photography so many of the utilities (geotagging, camera metadata) might be useless for you.

Comment by wartywhoa23 4 days ago

The internal precision of controls (up to 0.0001 for many parameters) and the wonderful right-click fine tune popup UI alone were enough for me to forget Lightroom as a coarse axe of a RAW developer, and embrace Darktable.

Comment by donatzsky 4 days ago

I'll take this opportunity to shamelessly plug my darktable beginner guide, which aggregates advice and the currently best tutorials: https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with...

If you're coming from the likes of Lightroom or Capture One you will have to learn a very different way of working, but in return you get a lot of control over the edit.

Comment by tychota 4 days ago

I'm a long time user of raw therapee, that i found both awesome and complex.

Awesome because if you set the right debayering algorithm and fine tune ondelette, you can get way better result than anything else, especially in rought situation.

Complex because if i don't practice often (like have a kid) i end up watching niche tutorial and reading the wiki for VNG4 vs AMAZE which is a bit frightning.

It make me want to test dark table or one of the clone

Comment by dllu 4 days ago

I use Darktable a lot for 10 years.

It has improved vastly over the years. I love the new additions like AgX!

However I tried out the new AI denoise and it still isn't great. I also wish there was a way to manually correct barrel distortion (eg for vintage lenses) -- currently it only supports embedded metadata or lensfun profiles.

I also find the OpenCL implementation to be rather slow. It would be better if it were something more modern like Vulkan.

Comment by jedimastert 4 days ago

I can also recommend Raw Therapee as an open source raw editor.

Comment by mcdonje 4 days ago

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.

Comment by guohaochuan 5 days ago

digiKam(https://www.digikam.org/) is also very good.

Comment by vividfrier 4 days ago

I tried. Just way too many bugs for even the simplest of things to be reliable.

I have very simple needs. I'm a hobby photographer who now has a bunch of kids. I want to shoot JPEG, I want to cull photos and maybe touch the exposure meter, and then upload my selected photos to Google Photos (aiming to replace this with Immich but not there yet).

And I want to do it on Linux. I can't believe this workflow is so wild that there simply isn't a single reliable option...

(Fwiw, digikam would allow me to import the photos and I could locate them via Finder. But through Digikam they never showed up - only the folders containing the photos. No filters were applied)

Comment by hegdeezy 4 days ago

I've submitted a PR to darktable in the past. I think my main qualm with the software is that tinkering with the software gets in the way of me tinkering with actually shooting photos

Comment by weezing 4 days ago

I found Darktable to have very steep learning curve while RAWtherapee felt perfect immediately. Never used other software like that before besides some Photoshop.

Comment by thatxliner 4 days ago

I've been told that Darktable is more powerful than RAWtherapee and thus the learning curve is worth it, so I switched from Rawtherapee to Darktable.

I've been liking Darktable

Comment by kyrofa 4 days ago

My wife is a professional photographer and Darktable is a critical part of her editing workflow. It's a truly outstanding piece of software.

Comment by actionfromafar 5 days ago

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel

Comment by vjvjvjvjghv 4 days ago

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.

Comment by lukah 5 days ago

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?

Comment by jillesvangurp 4 days ago

The history is that Aurelien Pierre was leading some big changes in Darktable around the time the filmic module was introduced and the bigger switch from rethinking the internal architecture and processing pipeline to be happening in the right color spaces before things get crammed down into the RGB display color space. There's a lot of subtlety to that. But it boils down to a lot less rounding errors and loss of information for basic edits related to color correction, tone mapping, etc.

Aurelien Pierre was the main developer of filmic and several related modules and a key driver of that whole transition. A few versions ago there were some other developers that forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX. He argued against that and people ignored him and he basically decided to do it properly with Ansel and strip away all the stuff he never liked as well as beat some sense into especially the lightroom part of Darktable which is where you organize your photos. IMHO he did a great job on that from what I've seen so far.

Since the fork, a lot of stuff happened of course and there are now several competing alternatives to filmic in Darktable (Sigmoid and Agx). They each have their pros and cons and the differences can be very subtle; especially if you are new to the topic. There's a lot of complexity here. Which is why UX matters. And a point of criticism with especially Filmic is that it is a very complex module. But I'm still on Darktable and Ansel is actually not compatible with the newer Darktable versions.

Comment by lionkor 3 days ago

I've tried filmic and AgX, as well as the default scene-referred, and I have to say filmic really is easy to misuse. AgX makes misuse much harder, though its still very unclear to me which of the 15 ways I should be using to get where I want the photo to be, even after reading all the documentation.

Comment by lukah 4 days ago

Thanks for the detail - it's really interesting to hear

Comment by hack1312 4 days ago

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/

Comment by CharlesW 4 days ago

Nitro is wonderul. On macOS it also integrates perfectly with Photos, which I find to be an ideal "combination pro/consumer surface" for my library.

Comment by actionfromafar 4 days ago

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

Comment by cmrdporcupine 5 days ago

There's also RawTherapee, which I found more usable than Darktable for reasons I don't recall.

Comment by ezst 5 days ago

Is the last release on GitHub from 2022 or is it me?

Comment by Infernal 4 days ago

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.

Comment by junaru 5 days ago

> Meet Chantal, your image processing AI librarian

Instant pass.

Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.

Comment by orbital-decay 4 days ago

It's just an ordinary search engine for the specialized topic. Aurelien Pierre is being overly dramatic here, it's in his character.

Comment by aurelienpierre 3 days ago

You dumb or what ?

Under Chantal, there use to be Word2Vec, now replaced by FastText. Aka a shallow neural network building a language model that understand synonyms and some EN/FR translations, by embedding words as vectors in a vector space built so cosine distance represent semantic distance. It was called AI when Google published Word2Vec and Facebook FastText, I didn't made it up.

I mean, I wrote 2 articles on the topic explaining how it's built. Each page in the index is represented by the centroid of all the word vectors it contains, then it computes the cosine distance between the centroids of the pages and the centroid of the request and returns the closest matches. Aka not your regular grep.

Overly dramatic yourself, Internet minion. All opinions and zero substance.

Comment by orbital-decay 2 days ago

Please calm down, I had no intention of offending you! I agree, of course that's AI, just a pretty... commoditized? kind in 2026 and a long-winded explanation of word2vec or even mention of it is probably not necessary. What I meant it's not the sort of model anti-AI people would oppose, in response to an "instant pass" knee-jerk reaction.

Comment by sejje 5 days ago

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?

Comment by aurelienpierre 3 days ago

You make a software, people want tutorials. You make tutorials, people want docs. You make docs, people won't read them and their questions end up in your mailbox.

So Chantal is the missing link in all that, it lets users be autonomous while researching their questions while aggregating various sources of knowledge on photography software, color science, bugs and docs. It's Ansel docs and much more (ICC, CIE, academic journals, forums, etc.)

Comment by junaru 5 days ago

It's on https://ansel.photos

Comment by anfractuosity 4 days ago

Really like Darktable, was playing printing a few photos at weekend from it, on my large-ish dye-sub printer - DNP DS80, works very nicely under Linux with cups (once I figured out how to make it print in colour).

I switched to it from Lightroom and made a little Python script to copy photos based on their exif data, into the same file structure as Lightroom.

Comment by e12e 5 days ago