Darktable (stylized as darktable) is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

photography Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...

application and raw developer. Rather than being a

raster graphics editor A raster graphics editor (also called bitmap graphics editor) is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap ...

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc., Adobe for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital ...

GIMP Gimp or GIMP may refer to: Clothing * Bondage suit, also called a gimp suit, a type of suit used in BDSM * Bondage mask, also called a gimp mask, often worn in conjunction with a gimp suit Embroidery and crafts * Gimp (thread), an ornamental tr ...

, it comprises a subset of

image editing Image editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they are Digital photography, digital photographs, traditional Photographic processing, photo-chemical photographs, or illustrations. Traditional analog image editing is known ...

operations specifically aimed at non-destructive raw image

post-production Post-production, also known simply as post, is part of the process of filmmaking, video production, audio production, and photography. Post-production includes all stages of production occurring after principal photography or recording indivi ...

. It is primarily focused on improving a photographer's workflow by facilitating the handling of large numbers of images. It is freely available in versions tailored for most major

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

distributions,

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

and

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later.

Features

Darktable involves the concept of non-destructive editing, similar to that of some other raw manipulation software. Rather than being immediately applied to raster data of the image, the program keeps the original image data until final rendering at the exporting stage — while parameter adjustments made by a user display in real-time. The program features built-in

ICC profile In color management, an ICC profile is a set of data that characterizes a color input or output device, or a color space, according to standards promulgated by the International Color Consortium (ICC). Profiles describe the color attributes o ...

s, GPU acceleration (based on OpenCL), and supports most common image formats.

Main features

* Non-destructive editing with the XMP change description entry * Work in 32-bit float mode on a color channel in CIE LAB space * Full implementation of color management * Supports RAW, JPG, RGBE, PFM and more * Completely modular architecture * More than 30 modules for transformation, color correction, quality improvement and artistic effects * Organize images and search by parameters * Translated into 19 languages * Support for shooting directly through the camera * Find similar photos * Support for geographical coordinates labels with the display of photos on the map * An integrated mover for executing Lua scripts. Scripts can be linked to hotkeys or specific events, such as when importing new images.

Masks

Support for drawn masks was added in Darktable version 1.4, allowing application of effects to manually specified areas of an image. There are five mask types available: brush, circle, ellipse, Bézier path, and gradient; all are resizable, allow fade-out radius for smooth blending and can have their opacity controlled. An arbitrary number of masks can be created and are collected into a "mask manager" on the left hand side of the darkroom UI.

Color

Darktable has built-in

support for

sRGB sRGB (standard RGB) is a colorspace, for use on monitors, printers, and the World Wide Web. It was initially proposed by HP and Microsoft in 1996 and became an official standard of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as IEC 6 ...

Adobe RGB Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used ...

, XYZ and linear

RGB color spaces RGB color spaces are a category of additive colorimetric color spaces specifying part of its absolute color space definition using the RGB color model. RGB color spaces are commonly found describing the mapping of the RGB color model to human p ...

Importing and exporting

Raw image format A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed, ...

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

, HDR and PFM images can be imported from disk or camera, and exported to disk,

Picasa Web Albums Picasa Web Albums (PWA) was an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites. The service links with Google's photo organizing desktop program Picasa. It was discontinued in May 2016 and succeeded b ...

, email, and to a simple HTML-based web gallery as JPEG, PNG,

JPEG XL The JPEG XL Image Coding System is a royalty-free open standard for a image compression, compressed Raster graphics, raster image format. It defines a graphics file format and the abstract device for coding JPEG XL bitstreams. It is developed by t ...

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

WebP WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency. Google announced the WebP ...

, PPM, PFM and EXR images. Images can be exported to

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons, or simply Commons, is a wiki-based Digital library, media repository of Open content, free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used ...

using an external plugin.

Scripting

Darktable can be controlled by scripts written in Lua version 5.2. Lua can be used to define actions which Darktable should perform whenever a specified event is triggered. One example might be calling an external application during file export in order to apply additional processing steps outside of Darktable.

Multi-mode histogram

Multiple histogram types are available, all with individually selectable red, green and blue channels: linear, logarithmic and waveform (new in version 1.4).

User interface

Darktable has two main modes: "lighttable" and "darkroom". Each represents a step in the image development process. Two more modes are tethering and a map view. Upon launching, ''lighttable'' opens by default, where image collections are listed. All panels in all modes can be minimized to save screen real estate.

Lighttable

The left panel is for importing images, displaying

Exif Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other system ...

information, and filtering. Rating and categorizing buttons are at the top, while the right-side panel features various modules such as a metadata editor and a tag editor. A module used to export images is located at the bottom-right.

Darkroom

The second mode, "darkroom", displays the image at center, with four panels around it; most tools appear on the right side. The left panel displays a pannable preview of the current image, an undo history stack, a color picker, and Exif information. A filmstrip with other images is displayed at the bottom, and can be sorted and filtered using lists from the upper panel. The latter also gives access to the preferences configuration. Darktable's configuration allows custom keyboard shortcuts and personalized defaults.

Tethering

The third mode allows tethering through

gPhoto gPhoto is a set of software applications and libraries for use in digital photography. gPhoto supports not just retrieving of images from camera devices, but also upload and remote controlled configuration and capture, depending on whether t ...

to some of the cameras which support it.

Map

The fourth mode can display maps from different online sources and geotags images by drag-and-drop. It also uses maps to show images already geotagged by a camera.

Plugins

darktable includes 67 image adjustment plugins, which it divides into 5 groups;

Basic group

Plugins for simple well-known photo adjustment operations include: contrast brightness saturation module; shadows and highlights; color reconstruction; base curve with presets to automatically improve contrast and colors; crop and rotate; orientation; exposure; demosaic; highlight reconstruction;

white balance In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors (typically red, green, and blue primary colors). An important goal of this adjustment is to render specific colors – particularly neu ...

; invert and raw black/white point.

Tone group

Plugins related to contrast and lighting include:

fill light In television, film, stage, or photographic lighting, a fill light (often simply fill) may be used to reduce the contrast of a scene to match the dynamic range of the recording media and record the same amount of detail typically seen by eye in ...

for modifying the exposure based on pixel lightness; levels to set black; tone curve;

zone system The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer. Adams described the Zone System as " ..not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principle ...

; filmic; local contrast; global

tone mapping Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map one set of colors to another to approximate the appearance of high-dynamic-range (HDR) images in a medium that has a more limited dynamic range. Print-outs, C ...

and tone mapping.

Color group

Plugins related to hue and saturation include: velvia, which mimics

Velvia Velvia is a brand of daylight-balanced color reversal film produced by the Japanese company Fujifilm. The original version of the film, was introduced in 1990 as "Velvia for Professionals", and given the classification code "RVP" meaning "Re ...

film colors by increasing saturation on lower saturated pixels more than on highly saturated pixels; channel mixer; output color profile; color contrast; color correction, to modify the global saturation or to give a tint;

monochrome A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, mon ...

; color zones; color balance; vibrance; color look up table; input color profile and unbreak input color profile.

Correction group

Plugins for repairing visual imperfections include: dithering; sharpen; equalizer; denoise (non-local means); defringe; haze removal; denoise (bilateral filter); scale pixel; rotate pixels; liquify; perspective correction; lens correction using the LensFun library; retouch; spot removal; denoise (profiled); raw denoise;

hot pixels A defective pixel or a dead pixel is a pixel on a liquid crystal display (LCD) that is not functioning properly. The ISO standard ISO 13406-2 distinguishes between three different types of defective pixels, while hardware companies tend to have ...

and

chromatic aberration In optics, chromatic aberration (CA), also called chromatic distortion, color aberration, color fringing, or purple fringing, is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point. It is caused by dispersion: the refractive index of the ...

Effect group

Artistic postprocessing plugins used for visual effects include:

watermark A watermark is an identifying image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light (or when viewed by reflected light, atop a dark background), caused by thickness or density variations i ...

; framing; split-toning;

vignetting In photography and optics, vignetting ( ) is a reduction of an image's brightness or saturation toward the periphery compared to the image center. The word '' vignette'', from the same root as ''vine'', originally referred to a decorative b ...

; soften;

grain A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached husk, hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and ...

;

highpass A high-pass filter (HPF) is an electronic filter that passes signals with a frequency higher than a certain cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies lower than the cutoff frequency. The amount of attenuation for each frequency de ...

; lowpass; lowlight vision; bloom; color mapping; colorize and graduated density.

Development

Google Summer of Code

In 2011, the Darktable team participated in the

Google Summer of Code The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. , the program is ...

(GSoC). The main goals were to remove libglade dependency from Darktable and to make room for more

modularity Modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a system into varying ...

. The input system for handling shortcuts was also rewritten and incorporated into version 0.9.

Distribution

Darktable is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later as

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

. The current version of Darktable works on

and

. Many Linux distributions include Darktable in their default repositories, including

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open-source software, free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable r ...

Arch Linux Arch Linux () is an Open-source software, open source, rolling release Linux distribution. Arch Linux is kept up-to-date by regularly updating the individual pieces of software that it comprises. Arch Linux is intentionally minimal, and is meant ...

, and

Gentoo Linux Gentoo Linux (pronounced ) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for ...

. Darktable also runs on Solaris 11, with packages in IPS format available from the maintainer.

Localization

Darktable is available in multiple languages. Darktable is notable for using all-lowercase literals in every language by default. Since version 4.4.0, a new locale called "en@truecase" allows users to apply conventional casing to English.

References

Bibliography

External links

* {{Raster graphics editors Free software programmed in C Graphics software that uses GTK Photo software for macOS Photo software for Linux Free raw image processing software Software using the GNU General Public License Cross-platform free software Free software for BSD Free software for Linux Free software for Windows Free software for macOS