Darktable: Powerful & Underrated Lightroom Substitute?

More than anyone else, we as Fujifilm users are always open to alternatives to Lightroom. Capture One, Iridient X-Transformer and Developer, or even the new X-RAW STUDIO, just to name a few. But Linux users have been using for a long time Darktable, an open source photography workflow application and raw developer.

Here’s the list of the general 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 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.
• 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.

It’s powerful, it’s free and it’s available for multiple operating systems. So, is it worth a try? Take a look at this video from Francisco Cribari, explaining how he processes his Street Photography using Darktable:

To download this software please follow the link below and choose your operating system:
https://www.darktable.org/install/

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