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. Raw is the unprocessed capture straight from the camera’s sensor to the memory card, nothing has been altered. darktable is created for photographers, by photographers. darktable edits your images non-destructively all the way through its pipeline. Your original image is never modified!
Having developers that are also avid photographers as part of the target audience is good for understanding the real world problems, challenges, and workflows.
Professional color management features ensure fidelity all the way to print and GPU accelerated processing means you can speed up your workflow using your video card.
It focuses on the workflow to make it easier for the photographer to quickly handle the thousands of images a day of shooting can produce.
The internal architecture of darktable allows users to easily add modules for all sorts of image processing, from the very simple (crop, exposure, spot removal) to the most advanced (simulation of human night vision).
The user interface is built around efficient caching of image metadata and mipmaps, all stored in a database. The main focus lies on user interaction, both in terms of a smooth interface design as well as processing speed. High quality output is also one of our goals.
All editing is fully non-destructive and only operates on cached image buffers for display. The full image is only converted during export. Raw image loading is done using rawspeed, high-dynamic range and standard image formats such as jpeg are also supported. The core operates completely on floating point values, so darktable can not only be used for photography but also for scientifically acquired images or output of renderers (high dynamic range).
darktable supports a huge number of file formats from various camera manufacturers. In addition darktable can read a wide range of low- and high-dynamic-range images – mainly for data exchange between darktable and other software.
In order for darktable to consider a file for import, it must have one of the following extensions (case independent): 3FR, ARI, ARW, AVIF, BAY, BMQ, CAP, CINE, CR2, CR3, CRW, CS1, DC2, DCR, DNG, GPR, ERF, FFF, EXR, IA, IIQ, JPEG, JPEG XL, JPG, JXL, K25, KC2, KDC, MDC, MEF, MOS, MRW, NEF, NRW, ORF, PEF, PFM, PNG, PXN, QTK, RAF, RAW, RDC, RW1, RW2, SR2, SRF, SRW, STI, TIF, TIFF, X3F
If darktable was compiled with JPEG2000 support, the following extensions are also recognized: J2C, J2K, JP2, JPC.
If darktable was compiled with GraphicsMagick support, the following extensions are also recognized: BMP, DCM, GIF, JNG, JPC, JP2, MIFF, MNG, PBM, PGM, PNM, PPM.
darktable natively reads "ordinary" images in JPEG, 8-bit/16-bit PNG and 8-bit/16-bit TIFF format, as well as 16-bit/32-bit floating point TIFF formats, it also reads high dynamic range images in OpenEXR, RGBE and PFM formats.
Features: - Non-destructive editing throughout the complete workflow, your original images are never modified. - Take advantage of the real power of raw: All darktable core functions operate on 4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers, enabling SSE instructions for speedups. - GPU accelerated image processing: many image opertions are lightning fast thanks to OpenCL support (runtime detection and enabling). - Professional color management: darktable is fully color managed, supporting automatic display profile detection on most systems, including built-in ICC profile support for sRGB, Adobe RGB, XYZ and linear RGB color spaces. - Cross platform: darktable runs on Linux, Mac OS X / macports, BSD, Windows and Solaris 11 / GNOME. - Filtering and sorting: search your image collections by tags, image rating (stars), color labels and many more, use flexible database queries on all metadata of your images. Image formats: darktable can import a variety of standard, raw and high dynamic range image formats (e.g. JPEG, CR2, NEF, HDR, PFM, RAF … ). - Zero-latency, zoomable user interface: through multi-level software caches darktable provides a fluid experience. - Tethered shooting: support for instrumentation of your camera with live view for some camera brands. - Speaks your language: darktable currently comes with 21 translations: Albanian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and Portuguese), Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian. - Powerful export system supports Piwigo webalbums, disk storage, 1:1 copy, email attachments and can generate a simple html-based web gallery. darktable allows you to export to low dynamic range (JPEG, PNG, TIFF), 16-bit (PPM, TIFF), or linear high dynamic range (PFM, EXR) images. - Never lose your image development settings darktable uses both XMP sidecar files as well as its fast database for saving metadata and processing settings. All Exif data is read and written using libexiv2. - Automate repetitive tasks: Many aspects of darktable can be scripted in Lua.
darktable is a non-destructive image editor and opens all images in read-only mode. Any data created within darktable (metadata, tags, and image processing steps) is stored in separate .XMP sidecar files. These files are stored alongside the original Raw files and allow darktable to store information about the images as well as the full editing history without touching the original raw files. When you import an image into darktable for the first time, an XMP file is automatically generated.
