Darktable

Darktable 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.

Features

• 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 4x32-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.
• Cross platform: darktable runs on Linux, macOS / macports, BSD, Windows and Solaris 11 / GNOME.
• 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.
• Speaks your language: 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.
• Powerful export system supports G+ and Facebook webalbums, 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.
• 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.

Modules

Darktable contains several image operation modules. Many modules support powerful blending operators offering blend functionality that works on the incoming image information and the output of the current module or be used with drawn masks.

Basic image operations:

• Contrast, brightness, saturation: Quickly tune your image using this simple module.
• Shadows and highlights: Improve images by lightening shadows and darkening highlights. Read Ulrich's blog post on this.
• Crop and rotate: This module is used to crop, rotate and correct the perspective of your image. It also includes many helpful guidelines that assist you using the tools (e.g. rule of thirds or golden ratio).
• Base curve: darktable comes with general enhanced basecurve presets for several models that are automatically applied to raw images for better colors and contrast.
• Exposure controls: Tweak the image exposure either by using the sliders in the module or dragging the histogram around.
• Demosaic: You have the choice between several demosaicing methods when editing raw files.
• Highlight reconstruction: This module tries to reconstruct color information that is usually clipped due to information not being complete in all channels.
• White balance: A module offering three ways to set the white balance. You can set tint and temperature or you define the value of each channel. The module offers predefined white balance settings as well. Or just pick a neutral region in the image to balance for that.
• Invert: A module inverting colors based on the color of film material.

Tone image operations:

• Fill light: This module allows the local modification of the exposure based on pixel lightness.
• Levels: This module offers the well-known levels adjustment tools to set black, grey and white points.
• Tone curve: This module is a classical tool in digital photography. You can change the lightness by dragging the line up or down. darktable lets you separately control the L, a and b channel. Read in Ulrich's blog post how to make use of this feature.
• Zone system: This module changes the lightness of your image. It is based on the Ansel Adams system. It allows to modify the lightness of a zone taking into account the effect on the adjacent zones. It divides the lightness in a user-defined number of zones.
• Local contrast: This module can be used to boost details in the image.
• Two different tone mapping modules: These modules allow to recreate some contrast for HDR images.

Color image operations:

• Velvia: The velvia module enhances the saturation in the image; it increases saturation on lower saturated pixels more than on high saturated pixels.
• Channel mixer: This module is a powerful tool to manage channels. As entry, it manipulates red, green and blue channels. As output, it uses red, green, blue or grey or hue, saturation, lightness.
• Color contrast
• Color correction: This module can be used to modify the global saturation or to give a tint. Read Johannes' blog post.
• Monochrome: This module is a quick way to convert an image to black and white. You can simulate a color filter in order to modify your conversion. The filter can be changed in size and color center.
• Color zones: This module allows to selectively modify the colors in your image. It is highly versatile and allows every transformation possible in the LCh colorspace.
• Color balance: Use lift/gamma/gain to change highlights, midtones and shadows.
• Vibrance: For a detailed description read Henrik's blog post.
• Color look up table: Apply styles or film emulations. You can also easily edit the changes done. For more information you can read this blog post
• Input/output/display color profile management
• A useful feature that displays pixels outside the dynamic range.

Correction modules:

• Dithering: This helps with banding in smooth gradients in the final image.
• Sharpen: This is a standard UnSharp Mask tool for sharpening the details of an image.
• Equalizer: This versatile module can be used to achieve a variety of effects, such as bloom, denoising, and local contrast enhancement. It works in the wavelet domain, and parameters can be tuned for each frequency band separately.
• Denoise (non-local means): Denoising with separated color / brightness smoothing.
• Defringe: Remove color fringes on high contrast edges.
• Haze removal: This module allows to remove the low contrast and color tint coming from haze and air pollution.
• Denoise (bilateral filter): Another denoising module.
• Liquify: Push image parts around, grow them, shrink them. More information can be found in this blog post
• Perspective correction: A great module to automatically un-distort shots with straight lines. See our blog post for an introduction and examples.
• Lens correction: lens defect correction using lensfun.
• Spot removal: Spot removal allows you to correct a zone in your image by using another zone as model.
• Profiled denoise: By measuring the typical noise of cameras at the different ISO levels darktable is able to remove a lot of it. Read this blog post for more information.
• Raw denoise: Raw denoise allows you to perfom denoising on pre-demosaic data. It is ported from dcraw.
• Hot pixels: This module allows you to visualize and correct stuck and hot pixels.
• Chromatic aberrations: This module automatically detects and corrects chromatic aberrations.

Effects/artistic image postprocessing:

• Watermark: The watermark module provides a way to render a vector-based overlay onto your image. Watermarks are standard SVG documents and can be designed using Inkscape. The SVG processor of darktable also substitutes strings within the SVG document which gives the opportunity to include image-dependent information in the watermark such as aperture, exposure time and other metadata.
• Framing: This module allows you to add an artistic frame around an image.
• Split toning: Original split toning method creates a two color linear toning effect where the shadows and highlights are represented by two different colors. darktable split toning module is more complex and offers more parameters to tweak the result.
• Vignetting: This module is an artistic feature which creates vignetting (modification of the brightness/saturation at the borders).
• Soften: This module is an artistic feature that creates the Orton effect also commonly known as softening the image. Michael Orton achieved such result on slide film by using 2 exposures of the same scene: one well exposed and one overexposed; then he used a technique to blend those into a final image where the overexposed image was blurred.
• Grain: This module is an artistic feature which simulates the grain of a film.
• Highpass: This module acts as highpass filter.
• Lowpass: This module acts as lowpass filter. One use case is described in Ulrich's blog post.
• Lowlight vision: Low light module allows to simulate human lowlight vision, thus providing the ability to make lowlight pictures look closer to reality. It can also be used to perform a day to night conversion.
• Bloom: This module boost highlights and softly blooms them over the image.
• Color mapping: Transfer colors from one image to another.
• Colorize
• Graduated density: This module aims at simulating a neutral density filter, in order to correct exposure and color in a progressive manner.

What's New

We're proud to announce the new bug-fix release of darktable, 5.0.1!

Since Darktable 5.0.0:

• 105 commits to Darktable+rawspeed
• 57 pull requests handled
• 15 issues closed

Performance Improvements

• Improved performance of discarding history of selected images.

Other Changes

• Harmonized style selection in print settings with the update made in the export module for release 5.0.
• Darktable now includes the Lensfun database into the AppImage.
• Center collapsible module section labels.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a scrolling bug in the collections module where the collection tree was not scrolled to the previous position when returning from darkroom.
• Fix crash when attempting to move up the top or only shape in a group in the mask manager.
• Fix collection module when using the "module" filter which was listing none of the processing modules.
• Fix iop-order user presets use. It was not possible to get a user's iop-order preset to be applied as the Darktable internal presets where always picked up first.
• Fixed a crash in variable expansion for $(SEQUENCE[n,m]).
• Fixed handling on click from filmstrip when in map and print view. On map we now properly center the image on the map. On the print view, we use the selected image as content of the main print area.
• Fixed a regression introduced in 5.0.0 where we lost the ability to read 2-channel TIFF files and files with more than 4 channels. This fix allows them to be read by the TIFF loader, whereas previously the TIFF loader rejected such files and they were loaded by a fallback loader (GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick).
• Fixed not being able to pan with a mouse in the zoomable layout.
• Fixed possibly collapsing the module header when restoring defaults.
• Fixed a case of XMP being written without actual image modification.
• Fixed a crash of Darktable when reimporting XMP having overlay images referenced.
• Fixed the support for single lib module opened at a time when in darkroom.
• Fixed xmp sidecar writing while working as a gimp plugin.
• Fixed issues when applying a style in darkroom using the Styles module.
• Fixed a possible crash when using Ctrl+z reproduced on macOS.
• Fixed Darktable crashing in enlarge-canvas module.
• Fixed Darktable crashing using details mask due to bad tiling.
• Fixed a hash calculation bug leading to pixelpipe instabilities.
• Fixed issue to handle auto-presets when the focal length is greater then 1000.
• Fixed crash on macOS when closing the darkroom's second window.
• Fixed possible jump in filmstrip when entering darkroom from full preview.
• Fixed a performance regression in haze removal module.
• Fixed reading palette-based PNG with transparency.
• Fixed possible crash in lens correction module when changing camera and/or lens model.
• Fixed crash after deleting style or preset that was selected in shortcuts dialog.
• Fixed a crash when the currently active module instance is being deleted.
• We now support the correct orientation for JPEG XL if it was specified in the format's metadata but not in Exif (or Exif is missing). We also avoid over-transformation if it is specified in both the basic data and Exif.

RawSpeed changes

• Fujifilm GFX cameras now use the vendor supplied crop

Camera support, compared to 5.0.0

Base Support

• Leica SL3-S (DNG)
• Minolta DiMAGE 5
• Panasonic DC-S5D (3:2)

White Balance Presets

• N/A

Noise Profiles

• Fujifilm GFX100 II
• Fujifilm X-S20
• Fujifilm X100VI
• Missing Compression Mode Support
• Apple ProRAW DNGs
• CinemaDNG lossless (Blackmagic, some DJI, etc.) and lossy (Blackmagic)
• DNG 1.7 using JPEG XL (Adobe enhanced, Samsung Expert RAW)
• Fujifilm lossy RAFs
• Nikon high efficiency NEFs
• OM System 14-bit high resolution ORFs
• Sony downsized lossless ARWs ("M" for full-frame, "S" for full-frame & APS-C)

Suspended Support

Support for the following cameras is suspended because no samples are available on https://raw.pixls.us:

• Creo/Leaf Aptus 22(LF3779)/Hasselblad H1
• Fujifilm IS-1
• Kodak EasyShare Z980
• Leaf Aptus-II 5(LI300059)/Mamiya 645 AFD
• Leaf Credo 60
• Leaf Credo 80
• Olympus SP320
• Phase One IQ250
• Sinar Hy6/ Sinarback eXact
• ST Micro STV680

Previous Release Notes:

The following is a summary of the main features added to darktable 5.0. Please see the user manual for more details of the individual changes (where available).

This development cycle has included a large number of changes which improve the user experience, as detailed in the next section.

UI/UX Improvements

• Added camera-specific styles for more than 500 camera models to more closely approximate the out-of-camera JPEG rendition. These styles only affect contrast, brightness, and saturation and do not attempt to match sharpening, denoising, or hue shifts. Also added a Lua script to auto-apply the appropriate style on import and manually apply styles to a collection of previously-imported images.
• Added an optional splash screen showing startup progress (including estimated time remaining during the scan for updated sidecar files) to dramatically reduce the time between invoking darktable and something appearing on screen when the user has a large library.
• The user interface now gives feedback while processing bulk image operations such as rating, tagging, applying styles, and edit history management (and undoing those operations), rather than silently freezing until the operation completes. While the operation is in progress, darktable will now show either a busy cursor (such as a stopwatch or spinner) or a progress bar with option to cancel the remainder of the operation.
• Paths for drawn masks now display two Bézier handles per control point, which can be moved individually. This allows for more precise control of the paths.
• Added a high-contrast theme with bright white text on a dark gray background.
• Enhanced tooltips for utility module headers to provide more information about the module.
• Added more new-user hints on an empty lighttable.
• Added two new error placeholder images to distinguish between missing, unsupported, and corrupted images. When attempting to edit such an image, an appropriate, more specific error message is displayed.
• When selecting a style in the export module, hovering on the style name in the popup menu displays a thumbnail previewing the effect of appending the style to the active image's edit (first selected image in lighttable, center-view image in darkroom).
• Allow for selecting the utility modules to be displayed on the panels in the different views.
• Right-click on the empty panel area below the modules to get a menu where they can be hidden or shown. This allows additional modules to be added to the darkroom, like metadata editor and styles.
• This replaces the options in the "collections" and "recently used collections" modules' preferences to show or hide the latter and show a "history" button in the former instead. Users that want the separate module will need to reenable it once via the new Right-click menu.
• The menu also contains an option "restore defaults" that resets the selection and position of modules in the current view. In the preferences dialog, on the general tab, there's a "reset view panels" button that resets all views, including visibility and width of the panels themselves.
• Added a global preference to swap the left and right side panels in the darkroom view.
• The first time a new user presses Tab, they will be warned that this will hide all panels and how to get them back. Hopefully this prevents some confusion or frustration.
• Drag&drop utility module headers to reposition them across the left and right panels (lighttable) as well as vertically (all views). Each view can have a different layout.
• Drag&drop of processing modules in the darkroom right panel has been improved to auto-scroll when reaching the top or bottom and to not get confused when images get dragged into the area. This functionality no longer requires Ctrl+Shift modifiers.
• Improved the message displayed at startup when the database is locked by another instance of darktable.
• Replaced the icon of the operator button in the color label filter for working with multiple selected color labels (union/intersection).

Performance Improvements

• Added OpenCL implementation of color equalizer.
• Improved the speed of bulk image operations by improving the speed of sidecar writes, and by moving sidecar updates for many operations into a background task, allowing the user to proceed before the writes complete.
• Significantly accelerated loading of PFM files due to loops parallelization and optimization that eliminated additional processing.

Other Changes

• Switched default scope for new installations from histogram to waveform to display more detailed information about image color and tonality.
• The ISO 12646 color assessment condition is kept until unset by user action.
• Exposure bias can now be used to form collections and as a display filter.
• Improved visualization of the color equalizer's effect.
• Improved debugging support for verifying CPU vs. GPU results.
• Add Calibrite alias for X-Rite ColorChecker in color calibration.
• The scan for updated sidecar files now ignores timestamp differences of two seconds or less.
• The macOS installation package now has a background image to direct the user on installing darktable.app.
• Changed the user interface of the import dialog to make it easier to delete custom places.
• Numerous rounds of code cleanup.
• The copy-parts dialog does not select any module by default now.
• Add support for undo/redo for actions done on the filmstrip while in darkroom.
• In darkroom, add action (binding to Ctrl+x by default) for synchronizing the last edited module on current edited module to the selection.
• Adjusted the internal AVIF encoder parameter to significantly boost encoding speed without compromising the output quality.
• Tag names can now easily be copied to the clipboard via popup context menu in the tagging module.
• The Piwigo export storage now supports to specify a file name pattern for the exported file.
• The directory where darktable will write the log file under Windows has been changed to %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Darktable. This allows the user to easily see where the log file is located without even having to search for it in the documentation or FAQ. The previous location was deep in the system subdirectories of the user profile, and also under a hidden directory (so it was impossible to click to it in File Explorer with default system settings).
• Allow import of JPEG 2000 files with .jpf and .jpx file extensions.
• Add a visible indicator to the color calibration module when its color mapping section has non-neutral settings which will affect color rendition.
• Added new substitution variables$(IMAGE.TAGS.HIERARCHY)to insert tags with full hierarchy and$(IMAGE.ID.NEXT)to insert the image ID to be assigned to the image being imported, allowing the image ID to be part of the filename generated during a copy&import operation.
• Exporting to floating-point JPEG XL with a quality of 100 will try to do it as losslessly as possible. That is now consistent with the behavior of integral JPEG XL formats.
• Improved visibility of shortcuts that can be changed by users by using bold text.
• The histogram-exposure interface now supports all standard bauhaus features (Ctrl+click, Right-click…).
• Introduce image module order v5.0 to have the final-scale done before color-out to fix some issues with color difference between darkroom view and exported files.
• Add support for editing any live color-picker samples. Using Right-click on a sample it is possible to edit it (changing location and/or size of the box) and either add a new sample based on the edit or store the edit into an existing live sample.
• Added more substitution variables for using EXIF data fields, enabled autocompletion of variables in the watermark module.
• The new variables are$(EXIF.FLASH),$(EXIF.METERING),$(EXIF.EXPOSURE.PROGRAM),$(EXIF.WHITEBALANCE)and$(GPS.LOCATION.ICON).
• Increase maximum focal length for filtering auto-applied presets to 2000mm.
• Added an expanded color-checker preset to the Color Look Up Table module with seven-level red/green/blue/gray ramps, IT8/CC24-like skin tones, and miscellaneous color patches for more targeted color adjustments across the full spectrum.
• Added support for EXIF tags 'AnalogBalance' used for color calibration and 'LinearResponseLimit' used in highlights reconstruction.
• If we find currently unsupported color calibration data in DNG specific tags, we tag the image by darktable|issue|no-samples for better support.
• Added read support for HEIF files with AVC (H.264) compression and .avci file extension.
• Added read support for JPEG 2000 encoded images in HEIF containers with .hej2 file extension.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a performance regression for redrawing mipmaps.
• Fixed handling of old (2020) edits using Filmic RGB.
• Various OpenCL fixes to reduce differences between CPU and GPU processing: colorspace conversion, saturation gradient filter in color equalizer.
• Fixed gallery export not working on Windows.
• Fixed printer discovery in the print module, which could cause available printers to be missed.
• Work around out-of-spec EXIF date field caused by buggy software.
• Fixed reading embedded color profiles from PNG images.
• Fixed certain boundary cases in the crop module.
• Fixed crash when loading corrupted .gpx file in the geotagging module
• Fix preset handling in the export module not saving all parameters.
• Fix an issue in FilmicRGB where one of the parameter could be above the maximum allowed range making the validation failing and the whole set of parameters reset to default.
• Fix overlay recording to work in all cases (discarding history or copy/paste history for example) ensuring that an image not referenced anymore as overlay in a composite module can be removed.
• Properly reset darktable internal tag darktable|style| and darktable|changed when resetting history.
• Fixed crash in the Piwigo export storage when not logged in to the Piwigo server.
• Fixed a bug in the export module where it was impossible to export a file again if "on conflict: overwrite if changed" was selected.
• Fixed a bug where double clicking on a label in darkroom modules does not reset the control.
• The composite module now prevents assigning an overlay that would lead to a loop. Previously, only direct references (image #1 <-> image #2) were checked; this has now been extended to also cover chains (image #1 -> image #2 -> image #3 -> image #1) of arbitrary length.
• Fix a bug in overlay module which incorrectly apply a color profile and so creating an unwanted and wrong color cast. This bug was a regression added just before the 4.8 release.
• Fixed a bug in color calibration module where switching between various illuminants could lead to unpredictable settings.
• Various fixes In the demosaic module. Non-usable options are hidden now. Fixed dual demosaicing for xtrans sensors and OpenCL code.
• Fixed a bug in the history module where style creation fails if a style with that name already exists.
• Fixed guides drawing in case a module is expanded and active.
• Ensure that the list of images in the culling view remains up to date when hidden.
• Fixed minor glitches in color calibration module.
• Fixed issues with wrong corrections in highlight opposed OpenCL code.
• Fixed surface blur radius calculation possibly resulting in garbled output.

Camera support, compared to 4.8

Base Support

• Fujifilm X-M5 (compressed)
• Fujifilm X-T50 (compressed)
• Leica D-Lux 8 (DNG)
• Leica M11-D (DNG)
• Leica Q3 43 (DNG)
• Minolta Alpha Sweet Digital
• Minolta Alpha-7 Digital
• Nikon Z50_2 (14bit-compressed)
• Nikon Z6_3 (14bit-compressed)
• Panasonic DC-FZ80D (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-FZ82D (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-FZ85 (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-FZ85D (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-G100D (4:3)
• Phase One P20+
• Sony ILCE-1M2
• White Balance Presets
• Nikon Z6_3
• Sony ILCE-6700
• Noise Profiles
• Canon PowerShot G1 X
• Leica M11
• Nikon Z6_3
• Missing Compression Mode Support
• Apple ProRAW DNGs
• CinemaDNG lossless (Blackmagic, some DJI, etc.) and lossy (Blackmagic)
• DNG 1.7 using JPEG XL (Adobe enhanced, Samsung Expert RAW)
• Fujifilm lossy RAFs
• Nikon high efficiency NEFs
• OM System 14-bit high resolution ORFs
• Sony downsized lossless ARWs ("M" for full-frame, "S" for full-frame & APS-C)

Suspended Support

Support for the following cameras is suspended because no samples are available on https://raw.pixls.us:

• Creo/Leaf Aptus 22(LF3779)/Hasselblad H1
• Fujifilm IS-1
• Kodak EasyShare Z980
• Leaf Aptus-II 5(LI300059)/Mamiya 645 AFD
• Leaf Credo 60
• Leaf Credo 80
• Minolta DiMAGE 5
• Olympus SP320
• Phase One IQ250
• Sinar Hy6/ Sinarback eXact
• ST Micro STV680