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Darktable Is A Totally Free Yet Powerful Alternative To Lightroom
Ever wondered if you could use a photo cataloging and editing software for free, without renouncing to powerful features, and across computer platforms? Enter Darktable
Darktable (learn more) is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It 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. It has the features that most Lightroom users need. Darktable is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and it won’t cost you a penny.
The video below by Anthony Morganti gives you a very good overview. To learn more and to master it, we recommend you follow Rico Richardson feed on YouTube where you’ll find lots of tutorials. You can also have a look at the online manual.
General features of Darktable:
- 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 operations 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, Mac OS X / 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, Portugese (Brazilian and Portugese), 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 XMPsidecar 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.