All the professional photographers know about Adobe Lightroom – a comprehensive image and camera management software that comes with the some very advanced editing features as expected from Adobe. Many students who study photography at the university level are trained to use Adobe Lightroom along with the basics of camera and picture development.
But not many people know about Darktable – an open-source alternative to Adobe Lightroom. Darktable can do pretty much everything that Adobe Lightroom can. It has been available for the Linux and macOS users for a very long time. But recently they have also made it available for the Windows users as well. It offers very high quality editor and converter for images. It can be used to manage your picture collections and edit them quickly. It can work with your digital cameras and can edit RAW images directly.
The user interface looks similar to that of Adobe Lightroom. You begin by importing your image collection and then you can edit them. In its user interface there are two tabs near the top-right corner – lighttable and darkroom. The lighttable tab is used for managing your images collection, rename them, move them, label them, categorize them and export them.
Next to the lighttable tab is another tab called darkroom which is used for editing the selected images. You can edit the compressed images or RAW images imported directly from your digital camera. The editor comes with the usual editing tools – color correction, cropping, rotating, base curve, exposure curve, effects, denoising tools and more. It supports non-destructive editing – it does not make changes to the original image files.
Darktable is an open-source, free and fast replacement for Adobe Lightroom on your computer. It supports Windows, macOS and Linux. It can be used by professional photographers to quickly manage and edit their photos and RAW image files imported from digital cameras or smartphones.
You can download Darktable from https://www.darktable.org/.