That is not a typo. darktable is spelled with a lowercase d. It is an amazing, open source photo editing solution that I have been using for some time now. With quite a pedigree and quite a following, this has a steep learning curve and in some ways is making me rethink everything I thought I knew about editing photos.
Like Lightroom, it is non-destructive. darktable creates a database of your images and edits are saved within that database. Your original files are never touched, so you can at any time revisit them. Exactly the same method used by Adobe Lightroom. But that is where any similarity ends.
Modular
darktable has over 60 separate modules for processing photos. Each has a distinct function, and there is some overlap. Which ones to use? That’s part of the learning curve. You can choose any combination you want. There is little Lightroom can do that darktable cannot. darktable may be a little less user friendly and require more finesse – it’s rarely the case of just moving a slider or two – but the upside of that is significantly greater control. It has that finesse built in, and then some.
One example where darktable stands head and shoulders above Lightroom is noise control. Raw images can be inherently noisy and a whole industry has arisen around resolving that. Lightroom itself has basic controls and recent updates include an AI denoise function. Expensive third-party programs claim to offer solutions, but they really don’t. At least, I have not found one that I have been happy with.
darktable, on the other hand? darktable has a dedicated noise profile module which contains built-in profiles for almost every camera ever sold. At every ISO. And if your camera is not in the program database, you can take some photos and send them off and request the darktable developer community to make one. Free. Let that sink in. I use a Canon EOS 90D and when I open a raw image in darktable the program reads the metadata and applies the appropriate noise profile for that ISO. I can override it manually, of course, if I need to tweak it. But I rarely do. The day I side-by-side compared some test images in Lightroom and darktable was the day I decided to jump. My jaw was almost literally on the ground. And it does this right out of the box. And that’s just one reason I like this free program.
DJI
One camera causes problems every time and requires much more editing. My DJI drone. Though Lightroom allegedly has profiles for this sensor the colors are always wrong. The DJI LUT from the DJI web site does not always help, either. Also, Lr does a very poor job, as mentioned earlier, of removing noise. darktable also has noise noise profiles for this sensor. And they work. Out of the box.
Case in point. I edited this drone image in darktable. The raw image is on the left. It’s dark and muddy. It was sunrise, but still. Now lLook at the detail in the edited image, on the right. darktable pulled up the shadows without adding noise. The bridge infrastructure and tracks are clearly visible in sharp detail. You can even see the reflected rising sun on the train tracks at the far end. Try as I could, and I know what I’m doing and I did try, I could not achieve a result even close to this in Lightroom. I’ve been using L since it launched. I still use it daily. But for some images, darktable is now my default. This is one such image.
The more I play with darktable the more I find to like. I look forward to the day when I can make it my default editor. That day approaches ever closer. And the image below shows why.