Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers that 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.

What can I do with it?

You can do a ton of things using darktable! The application covers a very wide range of both basic and advanced functionalities and special tools. Basic image operations include the usual crop and rotate, exposure controls, white balance and color invert. For the more advanced tasks you will find a lot of modules that do things like light filling, color correction and vibrance, chromatic aberrations correction and sharpening. If you need special effects like watermarks, shadows, low light human night vision simulation and bloom, then darktable won’t disappoint you. All this you can do to RAW image formats which means unprocessed image files of formats like these. The safety of the process is ensured by the fully non-destructive way that darktable works, as it only operates on cached image buffers for display and the full image is only converted during export.

The highlight of darktables abilities is a powerful export system that supports Picasa webalbum, flickr upload, 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.

Read a complete list of the many darktable features on this webpage!

Is it easy to use?

I can say that darktable is quite straight forward and relatively easy to use. All functions are categorized clearly and the tools are simple as far as the usability is concerned. What could bother you a little bit is the plugins stencil icons that are not different enough from each other and you may find yourself searching for a while before you find the desired plug-in. Although darktables is very fast in general, there may be some things that will take forever like the import of a photo album for example.

Where can I get it?

You can find the latest 1.0.4 version of darktable on the official website. Just choose your operating system and follow the instructions. If you are already using a previous version of darktable, check this changelog to see what is new on this latest 1.0.4 version release!