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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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Darktable is great. Very powerful for editing RAWs. A few places where you have to learn plugins to do things that lightroom makes a little easier, but not paying hundreds of dollars a year for abusive cloud upsells is great.
My wife is a professional photographer and Darktable is a critical part of her editing workflow. It's a truly outstanding piece of software.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I can also recommend Raw Therapee as an open source raw editor.
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.
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.
I want a workflow where i can plug in my SD card, open Dadkroom, click a button or two and all photos are pulled onto my computer and then once definitely there the SD card is deleted.
I struggled a little to get this import workflow setup nicely, any tips on settings and config to achieve nice import workflow?
Once I’m dealing with duplicates I start to wigg out!
I cant beleive its a free product; you will do very well going to market with this. Thanks for the work
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.
I am switching soon. I hear a lot of people complain about the catalog management. What solutions have you found?
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 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)
Last time I tried it the UI was atrocious, and I ended-up buying a Capture One Pro licence. Has it improved?
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.