It's just an ordinary search engine for the specialized topic. Aurelien Pierre is being overly dramatic here, it's in his character.
lukah•Jul 29, 2026
I haven't heard of either, but have been hoping for a replacement for Aperture for years. Having no knowledge of the history here, reading the `ansel` github page sounds like the developer has some animosity towards `darktable`. Does anyone have any experience with both? Or more knowledge of the history here?
cmrdporcupine•Jul 29, 2026
There's also RawTherapee, which I found more usable than Darktable for reasons I don't recall.
hack1312•Jul 29, 2026
If you’re looking specifically for an Aperture replacement, Nitro[0] was created by the person who led the Aperture, iPhoto, RAW Camera and Core Image engineering teams, as well as the imaging team for the Mac version of Photos.
The history is that Aurelien Pierre was leading some big changes in Darktable around the time the filmic module was introduced and the bigger switch from rethinking the internal architecture and processing pipeline to be happening in the right color spaces before things get crammed down into the RGB display color space. There's a lot of subtlety to that. But it boils down to a lot less rounding errors and loss of information for basic edits related to color correction, tone mapping, etc.
Aurelien Pierre was the main developer of filmic and several related modules and a key driver of that whole transition. A few versions ago there were some other developers that forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX. He argued against that and people ignored him and he basically decided to do it properly with Ansel and strip away all the stuff he never liked as well as beat some sense into especially the lightroom part of Darktable which is where you organize your photos. IMHO he did a great job on that from what I've seen so far.
Since the fork, a lot of stuff happened of course and there are now several competing alternatives to filmic in Darktable (Sigmoid and Agx). They each have their pros and cons and the differences can be very subtle; especially if you are new to the topic. There's a lot of complexity here. Which is why UX matters. And a point of criticism with especially Filmic is that it is a very complex module. But I'm still on Darktable and Ansel is actually not compatible with the newer Darktable versions.
lukah•Jul 29, 2026
Thanks for the detail - it's really interesting to hear
ezst•Jul 29, 2026
Is the last release on GitHub from 2022 or is it me?
Infernal•Jul 29, 2026
Not just you - from ansel.photos:
>Ansel has not published a stable release yet and there is no ETA for one : a new release is published when the list of all bugs have been cleared, so we know the software and stable. So far, Ansel only publishes revisions, which are intermediate states of the sourcecode.
vjvjvjvjghv•Jul 29, 2026
I am always amazed at how much Aurelian Pierre is able to produce. But I think he is too smart for his own good and also too opinionated to be a good leader of an open source community.
Makes me admire Linus Thorvalds even more. He is super smart, opinionated by also was able to keep a huge community on track for decades.
randomstate•Jul 29, 2026
Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.
ghostly_s•Jul 29, 2026
Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ:
>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶
Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.
What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
When I still used it, I only ever opened the folder with the files I wanted to edit.
I had folders based on dates YYYY.MM.DD - Eventname. No need for cli.
I still do the same now for CaptureOne to be honest.
Arainach•Jul 29, 2026
That's not library management, and it's not a replacement for Lightroom/C1.
"If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
Well not if you use the library management, it's not no.
People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available. I still would say Firefox can be a chrome replacement.
Arainach•Jul 29, 2026
There are many image editors. The primary appeal of something like Lightroom is image editing workflow - library management and editing combined. Being able to organize and move around your library is a core feature.
My images are also stored in date-based folders, but C1/Lightroom allow me to very quickly move between folders and identify the file I want, search for files I've rated highly or tagged with keywords/colors, and more.
speed_spread•Jul 29, 2026
I wish Darktable and Immich could be integrated into a single system.
pnut•Jul 29, 2026
Pretty sure Darktable only supports openCL and not Metal for MacOS.
OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.
Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.
Yossarrian22•Jul 29, 2026
I used Darktable on Mac yesterday
wizzledonker•Jul 29, 2026
I use it on Mac - I didn’t notice too much. There’s some GPU usage, I assume Apple still has some deprecated OpenCL drivers kicking around that it knows to use.
donatzsky•Jul 29, 2026
OpenCL is deprecated, not unsupported, on MacOS and may be removed at some point, but it absolutely does still work for now. If you don't have OpenCL acceleration, it's a bug.
Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep .
Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare.
They got beef!
lukah•Jul 29, 2026
Right?! And the rest of the README continues like that. Must be some juicy history here
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
And I think this was a few years back. Imagine still having that in your readme.
esafak•Jul 29, 2026
I'm digging their Sentry charts. That's the kind of discipline we need more of. Stability is a feature.
GordonS•Jul 29, 2026
Looks interesting - does it have better library management than DarkTable?
lolc•Jul 29, 2026
I used Ansel for a while, and I agree that Darktable is suffering from feature creep. Ansel right away had some usability improvements. But the amount of regressions introduced was wild. The anger you can read in the messaging was apparently also employed to cut code, and things got flaky. In the end some features I used stopped working in all releases I tried, and I went back to Darktable. Maybe Ansel is stabilizing now, and I should try again.
I tried. Just way too many bugs for even the simplest of things to be reliable.
I have very simple needs. I'm a hobby photographer who now has a bunch of kids. I want to shoot JPEG, I want to cull photos and maybe touch the exposure meter, and then upload my selected photos to Google Photos (aiming to replace this with Immich but not there yet).
And I want to do it on Linux. I can't believe this workflow is so wild that there simply isn't a single reliable option...
(Fwiw, digikam would allow me to import the photos and I could locate them via Finder. But through Digikam they never showed up - only the folders containing the photos. No filters were applied)
kkukshtel•Jul 29, 2026
I highly recommend people try out Capture One. After using Lightroom for years, switching to Capture One a few years ago felt like someone turned the lights on. Far and away the best photo and media mangement software I've ever used by at least two orders of magnitude, and reasonalbe license cost and generous free tier.
tokai•Jul 29, 2026
Private equity owed proprietary Mac and Windows exclusive. No thanks.
flipthefrog•Jul 29, 2026
Want the best software for editing photos? No thanks, I'd rather use inferior open source solutions. Go Gimp
mcdonje•Jul 29, 2026
Darktable is top class.
bix6•Jul 29, 2026
Yeah who needs the best software for hobbyist editing? $20/mo to Adobe forever until they jack it up even more, no thanks.
BeetleB•Jul 29, 2026
Upvoting you, because I actually use Gimp. While it has its headaches, for photo editing it's still the best after Photoshop.
(Yes, still better than Krita).
But this is all a digression, as Lightroom/Darktable are not Photoshop/Gimp replacements. Not even the same category.
dismalaf•Jul 29, 2026
> still better than Krita
??? Krita is painting/raster image creation software, why would you use it for photo editing?
BeetleB•Jul 29, 2026
You shouldn't. But I point it out because people keep posting "Ditch Gimp. Use Krita instead."
Krita's better for painting. Gimp's better for photo editing.
mcdonje•Jul 29, 2026
Pretty sure they said "go gimp" ironically
willbicks•Jul 29, 2026
If Capture One or any other buy-once commercial offering worked at all under Wine (or, in a dream land, had a Linux build), I would happily pay for it. But unfortunately, I've had no luck getting either Capture One or DxO PhotoLab running on Linux.
I struggle with Darktable's workflow, but it works without issue on Fedora with Wayland (including with my monitor's color calibration), so I'm sticking with it for now.
wmfiv•Jul 29, 2026
Not getting into which solution is better, but Capture One is at least 50% more expensive than Lightroom. It's a material difference.
Hamuko•Jul 29, 2026
Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €. Lightroom is the more expensive one if you plan on using the software more than 2 years and 2 months.
throw0101d•Jul 29, 2026
> Lightroom is 15.29 €/month and Capture One can be had for a one-time payment of 391 €.
Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)
dylan604•Jul 29, 2026
> AIUI, they don't backport things like that.
Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.
weezing•Jul 29, 2026
391 euro for a piece of software seems kinda crazy.
Arainach•Jul 29, 2026
That's less than €1/hour for how much time I've spent using Capture One.
Good, ergonomic, efficient tools are worth their weight in gold. C1 is one of them. Importing/triage, editing, color profiles, tethered shooting - it's an incredibly powerful suite and works well.
For particularly problematic noisy/dark shots I'll do manual editing in DXO, but I do everything else in C1.
erksa•Jul 29, 2026
Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE.
If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.
Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
BeetleB•Jul 29, 2026
> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections.
It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE.
And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.
roblh•Jul 29, 2026
You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything.
Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
How are you organizing your photos?
For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname
and then have sub folders like raw or export.
BeetleB•Jul 29, 2026
I felt that way because my prior RAW editing tool did photo organization/collections.
But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.
I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*
(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).
In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.
mcdonje•Jul 29, 2026
You can have multiple instances with Darktable.
thewebguyd•Jul 29, 2026
> it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one.
This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).
The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.
I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.
jitl•Jul 29, 2026
well then it doesn't sound competitive with software like Lightroom (which its name seems to mirror)
vjvjvjvjghv•Jul 29, 2026
[delayed]
jillesvangurp•Jul 29, 2026
> Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
It has a very clunky UX for this. But it actually has a lot of useful features for organizing large amounts of photos. There's a guy Bruce Williams on Youtube who has been doing tutorials on Youtube for Darktable for many years that has many relevant videos on this topic. But you can do rule based collections with filters on tags, camera type, and whatever other meta data is there.
It's probably a bit different from what you are used to and IMHO it's over engineered and there are some bad ideas for usability that never really got addressed and are made worse by the developers just putting buttons and controls in all the wrong places. But once you get over that, it actually does have a lot of powerful features for getting organized.
There's actually a fork of Darktable called Ansel that addresses a lot of the UX issues that has been in the works for a few years. The creator of the fork got annoyed with the level of indifference on this topic. There were other reasons as well (he was the creator of the filmic module in Darktable). But most of his UX work at least looks to me as something that the Darktable people might consider adopting.
vjvjvjvjghv•Jul 29, 2026
[delayed]
dllu•Jul 29, 2026
I have a pet peeve that darktable-cli requires the GUI darktable to not be running. It would be nice to export photos using my script without having to disrupt my editing workflow...
mangogogo•Jul 29, 2026
this was my main way of managing and processing my RAWs for years until i started using DxO PhotoLab. darktable is an excellent way to learn how to start editing IMO because it simplifies settings a bit less than other tools, is free, and from my experience has better denoise/tone mapping modules out of the box than RawTherapee. for my needs the library/lightroom was also very intuitive and lightweight.
drdexebtjl•Jul 29, 2026
To me the killer feature of Adobe’s offerings in this space is backwards compatibility. You can open a very old Lightroom library and the reprocessed photos look exactly the same.
The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?
If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pipeline in the metadata for each file such that it could be reproduced reliably across software versions and even forks. Like a sequence of shaders.
akersten•Jul 29, 2026
Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.
orbital-decay•Jul 29, 2026
>How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?
In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.
drdexebtjl•Jul 29, 2026
I just suggested a different way. Embed the pipeline’s actual code in the metadata.
This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.
orbital-decay•Jul 29, 2026
Proprietary software doesn't have any problem with embedded code, for example TTF does exactly that with fonts and they're still being licensed.
Code embedding has been considered many times but the rabbit hole is way too deep. You are embedding unverified executable code, to begin with. Then there's diversity problem: too much code, too many implementation specifics with every quirk being able to mess up the result. All of that spanning multiple generations of color science pipelines, experts, hardware, and third-party software to interact with. Since the advent of ML (for denoising and segmentation in particular) you have to also embed the weights as well, making it outright impossible.
All this leads to RAW processing code going the way of scientific and financial code: once written, it's frozen and the substrate is emulated if necessary. Even the bugs are preserved.
drdexebtjl•Jul 29, 2026
I don’t think TTF is a good example. You’re usually not allowed to embed and redistribute TTF code with your projects, only the resulting geometry, which is not subject to copyright in the US.
If you embed the image pipeline’s code in the user’s raw metadata, you essentially need to give them a perpetual license to that code, which isn’t a problem for FOSS.
ryanjshaw•Jul 29, 2026
Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.
In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.
If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.
lionkor•Jul 29, 2026
Have you looked at the documentation? In Darktable you can click the questionmark, then click on any feature, and very extensive, well written documentation walks you through how, when and when not to use each module and feature.
drdexebtjl•Jul 29, 2026
Intuitive UX teaches you without asking you to read the documentation.
That said I don’t think the UX of LR and Photoshop is particularly good, especially in recent years. People just expect their skills to transfer over, but I don’t think FOSS should be doomed to clone the UX of proprietary software it seeks to replace.
throwup238•Jul 29, 2026
> The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.
I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).
arikrahman•Jul 29, 2026
How does it compare to RapidRaw?
patrakov•Jul 29, 2026
RapidRaw is too much AI-focused, with the typical drawback that you cannot tell the AI that it is wrong. You want to remove something from the photo by inpainting something else over it, and the only way to do it in RapidRaw is to brush over what you want to remove and pray that the object is removed cleanly by AI. But often, the AI leaves even worse artifacts, and the low-tech solution, that is, manually selecting what you want to copy over, is not available.
Another issue is that the overblown highlight reconstruction is much worse than in DarkTable.
mcdonje•Jul 29, 2026
Darktable is great. You can easily do pro-level photo editing. Anything you need for editing RAW files, you can do. The modules are powerful. The UI is good. There is a learning curve, but there are also learning curves for the paid software options.
lionkor•Jul 29, 2026
I've been using darktable for a while to edit my RAW photos. The amount of features, viable workflows, and in general the quality of the software is baffling for a free product. I would happily pay 200 bucks or something per year to use this, it makes all other RAW editing software obsolete.
I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.
Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.
I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.
With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.
I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
cryo32•Jul 29, 2026
Another +1 for this.
I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
mcdonje•Jul 29, 2026
I'm on Debian, which is of course behind. I tried installing the flatpak, which is up to date, but the packager removed the AI parts. The only option I have (short of moving to Arch or similar) is AppImage, which doesn't integrate well with the DE.
I get being against AI, but Darktable is very responsible about it according to their release notes. Local only, opt-in only, no nagging. It's not like Adobe trying to push AI on you when you don't want it.
doubletwoyou•Jul 29, 2026
One way to get the AppImage to integrate better would be to install appimaged.
Another way to get the up-to-date version on Debian would be to use Nix (install nix, add the stable or unstable channel or whatnot, and make darktable installable)
I've used Darktable for almost a decade quite happily, but recently am moving off of it because they made one MASSIVE blunder with the new shitty color grading and white balancing tool that never gets any of my images right, all the tones are off, and it doesn't have sane defaults that renders things at least "almost correctly" at first go like the previous white balance tool did. It was way better a couple years ago with the vanilla "White Balance" and "Base Curve" tools.
Darktable also cannot correctly color any of my DJI Mini Pro imagery. None. They all have really bad greenish hues. I haven't been able to publish any of my DJI images for 4 years now because Darktable won't fix it, and it's a known issue that they explicitly plan to not fix (https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/13319).
I'm currently starting to love RapidRAW (https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw); the developer is super active and releases new features every couple of weeks. I'm also able to add a few minor nitpick features I want quite easily with AI code tools. I have a good feeling I can get AI to fix the DJI issue on RapidRAW since the code is quite nicely organized.
pmarreck•Jul 29, 2026
I now have a business idea: Curated Open-Source App Forks.
Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream) This incompatibility with DJI images that the Darktable devs #wontfix is a perfect example use-case.
Needless to say this would be for professional use, with professional expectations, but if your business depends on having that slightly-tweaked tool, then it may be worth it
bix6•Jul 29, 2026
I am switching soon. I hear a lot of people complain about the catalog management. What solutions have you found?
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
> What solutions have you found?
* Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name.
* over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.
vjvjvjvjghv•Jul 29, 2026
Same for me. Managing images in Darktable alone is terrible but with Digikam it’s quite doable.
selfawareMammal•Jul 29, 2026
Is this better than Lightroom?
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
Depends on what feature of Lightroom you use. Give it a try and see for yourself.
vjvjvjvjghv•Jul 29, 2026
Better in some areas but also very frustrating in others.
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
Darktable is one of the few Apps that I loved and advocated for, only to land back on a pirated copy of CaptureOne. Which is I think the only pirated software that I still have installed.
I was super into darktable and had fun using it. The UI and UX was not an issue for me. Loved the masks. But over time it got harder and harder for me to get decent color grading from it. I don't know what changed. When I tried to communicate that on forum and git I got rather harsh responses.
Maybe I should try it again.
Itoldmyselfso•Jul 29, 2026
Pirated copies seem like a blackbox of potential malware, even if virus scans fail to find any problems (and they often give 10-30% false positives on most keygens/cracks). Even if the code is hosted in github, there has been plenty of cases of malware/viruses being hosted there too.
Mashimo•Jul 29, 2026
Yuuup.
Got it from an invite only torrent side, but yes, there is still a risk. But I don't want to pay 390 EUR (and not get any updates)
jlarocco•Jul 29, 2026
It's kind of shitty to pirate Capture One. The full, non-subscription price is only $350, which is less than most cameras, and not a bad price for "pro level" software.
I agree that it's a lot better than Darktable and RawTherapee, but if you don't want to pay for it you should settle for one of the open source tools. They're not so bad they're unusable, and editing RAW photos isn't exactly something you need to do.
Extra shame if you're using it commercially.
vjvjvjvjghv•Jul 29, 2026
I have tried to get used to Darktable for more than 2 years but finally gave up and went back to Lightroom. For some reason it never clicked with me and made me almost lose interest in photography . And the AI stuff like masking in the latest Lightroom versions is crazy good.
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
weezing•Jul 29, 2026
I found Darktable to have very steep learning curve while RAWtherapee felt perfect immediately. Never used other software like that before besides some Photoshop.
thatxliner•Jul 29, 2026
I've been told that Darktable is more powerful than RAWtherapee and thus the learning curve is worth it, so I switched from Rawtherapee to Darktable.
I've been liking Darktable
tristor•Jul 29, 2026
I have tried to switch to Darktable multiple times over the years, it never has worked for me properly in my workflows. I'm still solidly on Lightroom Classic + DxO Photo Lab + Photomatix/Zerene Stacker (for stacking/HDR/bracketing)
andyjohnson0•Jul 29, 2026
Last time I tried it the UI was atrocious, and I ended-up buying a Capture One Pro licence. Has it improved?
jedimastert•Jul 29, 2026
I can also recommend Raw Therapee as an open source raw editor.
thatxliner•Jul 29, 2026
I found Darktable absolutely amazing, although the learning curve is incredibly steep.
* Vulkan instead of OpenCL has way better performance.
* Graph-based editing akin to Blender. This fixes the issue of it being annoying and weird to reorder modules in darktable
It is, of course, still early on in its development and way less mature and featureful than Darktable.
mikece•Jul 29, 2026
I've kept an eye on Darktable for a while. I do high volume photography for high school sports so while Lightroom Classic (LrC) is the final editing tool before exporting the images that go to the clients a more critical app for me is Photo Mechanic (PM) to cull down from 6,000 images to the 300 keepers from an event (a process that only takes about ten minutes on PM). The last time I tried to run Photo Mechanic on Linux (using Wine) I was able to get it to load but it crashed hard every time I tried to actually use it. If there's a capable competitor to Photo Mechanic for Linux I might take a serious look again at switching. Then again, the speed from the Apple Silicon CPU+RAM+GPU processors means that even if I could get comparable hardware for Linux it wouldn't be any less expensive than a new MacBook Pro M5 Max. Definitely keeping an eye on this space but it's not where I need it to be for my workflow.
jdubs1984•Jul 29, 2026
> It is forked on Darktable 4.0, and is compatible with editing histories produced with Darktable 4.0 and earlier. It is not compatible with Darktable 4.2 and later and will not be, since 4.2 introduces irresponsible choices that will be the burden of those who commited them to maintain, and 4.4 will be even worse.
lol
popPopBoom•Jul 29, 2026
I cant beleive its a free product; you will do very well going to market with this. Thanks for the work
dllu•Jul 29, 2026
I use Darktable a lot for 10 years.
It has improved vastly over the years. I love the new additions like AgX!
However I tried out the new AI denoise and it still isn't great. I also wish there was a way to manually correct barrel distortion (eg for vintage lenses) -- currently it only supports embedded metadata or lensfun profiles.
I also find the OpenCL implementation to be rather slow. It would be better if it were something more modern like Vulkan.
evolve2k•Jul 29, 2026
I want a workflow where i can plug in my SD card, open Dadkroom, click a button or two and all photos are pulled onto my computer and then once definitely there the SD card is deleted.
I struggled a little to get this import workflow setup nicely, any tips on settings and config to achieve nice import workflow?
Once I’m dealing with duplicates I start to wigg out!
jitl•Jul 29, 2026
This seems like table stakes for photo library software. Apple Photos does this perfectly on Mac and iPhone. i want more powerful capabilities but I'm not willing to sacrifice UX ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
cbarnes99•Jul 29, 2026
Darktable should already basically do all of this with their existing copy and import function. The only thing it won't do is erase the SD card for you, and generally I would recommend you just format it on the camera.
redmaple892•Jul 29, 2026
I don't edit RAW too often so haven't invested the time and effort into Darktable. I have been very impressed by digiKam for organization and catalog management though. I refuse to be sucked into another proprietary database (e.g. Lightroom) and utilities like osxphotos made it easy to turn Apple photos into regular files that digiKam serves up nicely. My goal is to have access to the entire 'archive' on my NAS.
I do miss macOS system controls like zooming in and out via touchpad. In general though, I'm not doing a ton of editing and for my large library, digiKam is working nicely. I tried capture1 for editing but it was more than I needed. I'm glad Darktable exists for folks needing raw editing. I wonder if it produces the Fujifilm specific colors as well as C1?
olooney•Jul 29, 2026
I've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization use case?
Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it.
The internal precision of controls (up to 0.0001 for many parameters) and the wonderful right-click fine tune popup UI alone were enough for me to forget Lightroom as a coarse axe of a RAW developer, and embrace Darktable.
anfractuosity•Jul 29, 2026
Really like Darktable, was playing printing a few photos at weekend from it, on my large-ish dye-sub printer - DNP DS80, works very nicely under Linux with cups (once I figured out how to make it print in colour).
I switched to it from Lightroom and made a little Python script to copy photos based on their exif data, into the same file structure as Lightroom.
tychota•Jul 29, 2026
I'm a long time user of raw therapee, that i found both awesome and complex.
Awesome because if you set the right debayering algorithm and fine tune ondelette, you can get way better result than anything else, especially in rought situation.
Complex because if i don't practice often (like have a kid) i end up watching niche tutorial and reading the wiki for VNG4 vs AMAZE which is a bit frightning.
It make me want to test dark table or one of the clone
kyrofa•Jul 29, 2026
My wife is a professional photographer and Darktable is a critical part of her editing workflow. It's a truly outstanding piece of software.
datadrivenangel•Jul 29, 2026
Darktable is great. Very powerful for editing RAWs. A few places where you have to learn plugins to do things that lightroom makes a little easier, but not paying hundreds of dollars a year for abusive cloud upsells is great.
30 Comments
Instant pass.
Edit: This appears to be their 'knowledgebase' and not something baked into the app.
Edit: I finally found a reference. It's a separate project that has nothing to do with the photography stuff. Right?
It's a way to search the docs?
No subscription cost either.
[0] https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/
https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/issues
Aurelien Pierre was the main developer of filmic and several related modules and a key driver of that whole transition. A few versions ago there were some other developers that forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX. He argued against that and people ignored him and he basically decided to do it properly with Ansel and strip away all the stuff he never liked as well as beat some sense into especially the lightroom part of Darktable which is where you organize your photos. IMHO he did a great job on that from what I've seen so far.
Since the fork, a lot of stuff happened of course and there are now several competing alternatives to filmic in Darktable (Sigmoid and Agx). They each have their pros and cons and the differences can be very subtle; especially if you are new to the topic. There's a lot of complexity here. Which is why UX matters. And a point of criticism with especially Filmic is that it is a very complex module. But I'm still on Darktable and Ansel is actually not compatible with the newer Darktable versions.
>Ansel has not published a stable release yet and there is no ETA for one : a new release is published when the list of all bugs have been cleared, so we know the software and stable. So far, Ansel only publishes revisions, which are intermediate states of the sourcecode.
Makes me admire Linus Thorvalds even more. He is super smart, opinionated by also was able to keep a huge community on track for decades.
>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.
What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.
I had folders based on dates YYYY.MM.DD - Eventname. No need for cli.
I still do the same now for CaptureOne to be honest.
"If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.
People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available. I still would say Firefox can be a chrome replacement.
My images are also stored in date-based folders, but C1/Lightroom allow me to very quickly move between folders and identify the file I want, search for files I've rated highly or tagged with keywords/colors, and more.
OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.
Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.
I have very simple needs. I'm a hobby photographer who now has a bunch of kids. I want to shoot JPEG, I want to cull photos and maybe touch the exposure meter, and then upload my selected photos to Google Photos (aiming to replace this with Immich but not there yet).
And I want to do it on Linux. I can't believe this workflow is so wild that there simply isn't a single reliable option...
(Fwiw, digikam would allow me to import the photos and I could locate them via Finder. But through Digikam they never showed up - only the folders containing the photos. No filters were applied)
(Yes, still better than Krita).
But this is all a digression, as Lightroom/Darktable are not Photoshop/Gimp replacements. Not even the same category.
??? Krita is painting/raster image creation software, why would you use it for photo editing?
Krita's better for painting. Gimp's better for photo editing.
I struggle with Darktable's workflow, but it works without issue on Fedora with Wayland (including with my monitor's color calibration), so I'm sticking with it for now.
Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)
Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.
Good, ergonomic, efficient tools are worth their weight in gold. C1 is one of them. Importing/triage, editing, color profiles, tethered shooting - it's an incredibly powerful suite and works well.
For particularly problematic noisy/dark shots I'll do manual editing in DXO, but I do everything else in C1.
If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.
Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE.
And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.
Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.
For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.
But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.
I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*
(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).
In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.
This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).
The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.
I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.
It has a very clunky UX for this. But it actually has a lot of useful features for organizing large amounts of photos. There's a guy Bruce Williams on Youtube who has been doing tutorials on Youtube for Darktable for many years that has many relevant videos on this topic. But you can do rule based collections with filters on tags, camera type, and whatever other meta data is there.
It's probably a bit different from what you are used to and IMHO it's over engineered and there are some bad ideas for usability that never really got addressed and are made worse by the developers just putting buttons and controls in all the wrong places. But once you get over that, it actually does have a lot of powerful features for getting organized.
There's actually a fork of Darktable called Ansel that addresses a lot of the UX issues that has been in the works for a few years. The creator of the fork got annoyed with the level of indifference on this topic. There were other reasons as well (he was the creator of the filmic module in Darktable). But most of his UX work at least looks to me as something that the Darktable people might consider adopting.
The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.
How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?
If I was designing a raw engine I would try to store the high-level code for the processing pipeline in the metadata for each file such that it could be reproduced reliably across software versions and even forks. Like a sequence of shaders.
In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.
This presumably doesn’t work for proprietary software because the pipeline’s code is a trade secret.
Code embedding has been considered many times but the rabbit hole is way too deep. You are embedding unverified executable code, to begin with. Then there's diversity problem: too much code, too many implementation specifics with every quirk being able to mess up the result. All of that spanning multiple generations of color science pipelines, experts, hardware, and third-party software to interact with. Since the advent of ML (for denoising and segmentation in particular) you have to also embed the weights as well, making it outright impossible.
All this leads to RAW processing code going the way of scientific and financial code: once written, it's frozen and the substrate is emulated if necessary. Even the bugs are preserved.
If you embed the image pipeline’s code in the user’s raw metadata, you essentially need to give them a perpetual license to that code, which isn’t a problem for FOSS.
In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.
If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.
That said I don’t think the UX of LR and Photoshop is particularly good, especially in recent years. People just expect their skills to transfer over, but I don’t think FOSS should be doomed to clone the UX of proprietary software it seeks to replace.
A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.
I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).
Another issue is that the overblown highlight reconstruction is much worse than in DarkTable.
I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.
Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.
I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.
With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.
I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
I get being against AI, but Darktable is very responsible about it according to their release notes. Local only, opt-in only, no nagging. It's not like Adobe trying to push AI on you when you don't want it.
Another way to get the up-to-date version on Debian would be to use Nix (install nix, add the stable or unstable channel or whatnot, and make darktable installable)
Darktable also cannot correctly color any of my DJI Mini Pro imagery. None. They all have really bad greenish hues. I haven't been able to publish any of my DJI images for 4 years now because Darktable won't fix it, and it's a known issue that they explicitly plan to not fix (https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/13319).
I'm currently starting to love RapidRAW (https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw); the developer is super active and releases new features every couple of weeks. I'm also able to add a few minor nitpick features I want quite easily with AI code tools. I have a good feeling I can get AI to fix the DJI issue on RapidRAW since the code is quite nicely organized.
Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream) This incompatibility with DJI images that the Darktable devs #wontfix is a perfect example use-case.
Needless to say this would be for professional use, with professional expectations, but if your business depends on having that slightly-tweaked tool, then it may be worth it
* Putting the photos in folders, based on dates and event name. * over a decade ago I used digiKam in parallelle with Darktable.
I was super into darktable and had fun using it. The UI and UX was not an issue for me. Loved the masks. But over time it got harder and harder for me to get decent color grading from it. I don't know what changed. When I tried to communicate that on forum and git I got rather harsh responses.
Maybe I should try it again.
Got it from an invite only torrent side, but yes, there is still a risk. But I don't want to pay 390 EUR (and not get any updates)
I agree that it's a lot better than Darktable and RawTherapee, but if you don't want to pay for it you should settle for one of the open source tools. They're not so bad they're unusable, and editing RAW photos isn't exactly something you need to do.
Extra shame if you're using it commercially.
I am generally really impressed with what the Darktable are delivering but somehow it just doesn’t come together for me personally.
I've been liking Darktable
Some ex-maintainers hated the direction of Darktable and thus made their own fork, namely https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt
https://jo.dreggn.org/vkdt/
* Vulkan instead of OpenCL has way better performance.
* Graph-based editing akin to Blender. This fixes the issue of it being annoying and weird to reorder modules in darktable
It is, of course, still early on in its development and way less mature and featureful than Darktable.
lol
It has improved vastly over the years. I love the new additions like AgX!
However I tried out the new AI denoise and it still isn't great. I also wish there was a way to manually correct barrel distortion (eg for vintage lenses) -- currently it only supports embedded metadata or lensfun profiles.
I also find the OpenCL implementation to be rather slow. It would be better if it were something more modern like Vulkan.
I struggled a little to get this import workflow setup nicely, any tips on settings and config to achieve nice import workflow?
Once I’m dealing with duplicates I start to wigg out!
I do miss macOS system controls like zooming in and out via touchpad. In general though, I'm not doing a ton of editing and for my large library, digiKam is working nicely. I tried capture1 for editing but it was more than I needed. I'm glad Darktable exists for folks needing raw editing. I wonder if it produces the Fujifilm specific colors as well as C1?
Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it.
[1]: https://www.refern.app/
[2]: https://www.digikam.org/
[3]: https://github.com/olooney/image-tagger
[4]: https://www.oranlooney.com/books/
I switched to it from Lightroom and made a little Python script to copy photos based on their exif data, into the same file structure as Lightroom.
Awesome because if you set the right debayering algorithm and fine tune ondelette, you can get way better result than anything else, especially in rought situation.
Complex because if i don't practice often (like have a kid) i end up watching niche tutorial and reading the wiki for VNG4 vs AMAZE which is a bit frightning.
It make me want to test dark table or one of the clone