darktable – photography workflow application and raw developer

darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. This software manages your digital negatives in a database and lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable. it also enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

It tries to fill the gap between the many excellent existing free raw converters and image management tools (such as ufraw or f-spot). The user interface is built around efficient caching of image metadata and mipmaps, all stored in a database. the user will always be able to interact, even if the full resolution image is not yet loaded.

All editing is fully non-destructive and only operates on cached image buffers for display. the full image is only converted during export. The frontend is written in gtk+/cairo, the database uses sqlite3, raw image loading is done using libraw, 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).

Features include:

• 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 4×32-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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Cross platform: darktable runs on Linux, Mac OS X / macports, BSD, Windows and Solaris 11 / GNOME.
• Internationalization support: 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.

Website: www.darktable.org
Support: Documentation
Developer: Pascal Obry, Aurélien Pierre, Aldric Renaudin, parafin, Roman Lebedev
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Darktable is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to RAW Processing Tools | Return to Camera Tools | Return to Photo Management

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