[opensourcedex]

Darktable is a free, open source photo & video editors project written in C and released under GPL-3.0. It has 13,088 GitHub stars, 1,434 forks and 678 open issues, and was last pushed 5 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #5 of 10 tracked projects in Photo & Video Editors, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 27 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

Darktable — Professional RAW photo editing and workflow management

What is Darktable?

What it is

Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and non-destructive raw developer. It acts as a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers, and it lives in the open source photography ecosystem as a C project licensed under the GPL-3.0. It manages digital negatives in a database, lets a user view them through a zoomable lighttable, and supports raw development, enhancement, and export to local or remote storage.

The problem it solves is the need to organize camera files while editing without destroying the original raw data. Darktable stores the workflow around the negative, then lets the user develop, enhance, and export the image from that managed collection. The README states that Darktable is not a free Adobe Lightroom replacement, so it is its own open source workflow tool rather than a substitute.

Key capabilities

  • Darktable provides non-destructive raw development, so the original digital negative remains the base for editing.
  • It manages digital negatives in a database, giving the user a structured way to track and browse the collection.
  • It offers a zoomable lighttable view for inspecting and organizing images through thumbnails at different scales.
  • It includes a darkroom workflow for developing raw images and enhancing them with image modules.
  • It supports export to local or remote storage, so finished images can leave the managed workflow.
  • It includes optional AI-powered features such as object masks and denoise.
  • It can use an OpenCL-capable GPU, with Nvidia recommended because some AMD drivers behave unreliably with some modules.

Who uses it and how

  • Photographers use Darktable as a desktop workflow tool for managing digital negatives, reviewing them in the lighttable, and developing them in the darkroom.
  • Users on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows 10 and later, or Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 and later can install it; big-endian platforms are not supported.
  • Users with modest hardware can run it on lightweight configurations, including a Raspberry Pi, but modules such as denoise, local contrast, contrast equalizer, retouch, or liquify become slow beyond usable.
  • Users who want a smoother experience can add a recommended Nvidia GPU with OpenCL support, although the GPU is not mandatory.
  • Windows users should note that printing support is not currently implemented on that platform.

Getting started

Install the latest release or a development snapshot from the project website. For a source build, fetch the source and submodules, install dependencies, and compile the application.

When to use it — and when not to

Use Darktable when an open source, non-destructive raw workflow with database management, lighttable browsing, darkroom editing, and export is needed. Avoid it when a direct Adobe Lightroom replacement is expected, because the README says it is not a free Adobe Lightroom replacement. Self-installed users must operate the supported desktop platform and account for hardware limits, optional GPU acceleration, and missing printing support on Windows.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

icon darktable GitHub Workflow Status (branch) CII Best Practices

darktable is an open source photography workflow application and non-destructive 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, enhance them and export them to local or remote storage.

screenshot_lighttable

darktable is not a free Adobe® Lightroom® replacement.

https://www.darktable.org/

Table of Contents

  1. Documentation
  2. Website
  3. Requirements
  4. Installing
  5. Updating from older versions
  6. Obtaining extensions
  7. Building
  8. Using
  9. Contributing
  10. FAQ
  1. Wiki
  2. Community

Documentation

The darktable user manual is maintained in the dtdocs repository.

Lua API documentation is maintained in the luadocs repository.

Website

The website (https://www.darktable.org/) is maintained in the dtorg repository.

Requirements

Supported platforms

  • Linux
  • FreeBSD
  • NetBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • Windows 10 and later
  • Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 and later

Big-endian platforms are not supported.

32-bit platforms are not officially supported - they might or might not work.

Both darktable and the libraries it uses are developed on the Linux platform. Therefore, other platforms MAY have additional bugs that are not present in the Linux version. In addition, for example, on the Windows platform, printing support is not currently implemented. So we recommend, if you have a choice of platform, to use darktable on Linux.

Hardware

(workable minimum / recommended minimum):

  • RAM: 4 GB / 8 GB
  • CPU: Intel Pentium 4 (Core 2 for Windows) / Intel Core i5 4×2.4 GHz
  • GPU: none / Nvidia with 1024 CUDA cores, 4 GB, OpenCL 1.2 compatible
  • free disk space: 250 MB / 1 GB

darktable can run on lightweight configurations (even on a Raspberry Pi), but expect modules like denoise, local contrast, contrast equalizer, retouch or liquify to be slow beyond usable.

A GPU is not mandatory but is strongly recommended for a smoother experience. Nvidia GPUs are recommended for safety because some AMD drivers behave unreliably with some modules (e.g. local contrast).

AI features (optional)

Darktable includes optional AI-powered features such as object masks, denoise and upscale. These require building with -DUSE_AI=ON (off by default), or --enable-ai when building with the build helper script build.sh. AI features are disabled by default in preferences and must be enabled by the user. Models are downloaded from the AI tab in preferences (default repository: darktable-org/darktable-ai).

CPU inference is bundled and works out of the box - no additional software is needed. On macOS (Apple Silicon), CoreML acceleration and on Windows, DirectML GPU acceleration are also bundled by default. Processing on CPU is slower than GPU but requires no special hardware.

GPU acceleration significantly speeds up AI inference but requires installing a GPU-enabled build of ONNX Runtime separately:

  • NVIDIA (CUDA): Linux and Windows.
  • AMD (ROCm): Linux only.
    • Supported AMD GPU with up-to-date drivers (RDNA2/CDNA or newer), see compatibility matrix
    • ROCm 6+
    • MIGraphX (may require separate install, e.g. apt install migraphx migraphx-dev on Ubuntu)
  • Intel (OpenVINO): Linux and Windows.
    • Supported Intel GPU with up-to-date drivers (integrated Gen9+, discrete Arc, or NPU Meteor Lake+)
    • Intel OpenCL or/and Level Zero runtime (included with drivers on Windows; on Linux may need intel-opencl-icd or level-zero)
    • On Windows, requires OpenVINO Toolkit installation
  • Windows (DirectML): bundled, works with any DirectX 12 compatible GPU (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel). No extra install needed.
    • Windows 10 1903+ (DirectML is a system component)
  • macOS (CoreML): bundled, uses Apple Neural Engine automatically. No extra install needed.
    • macOS 11+ (Big Sur)
    • Apple Silicon (M1+)

GPU memory: 4 GB VRAM minimum. If GPU inference fails (out of memory, unsupported op, EP crash), darktable automatically retries on CPU and continues.

AMD first-run latency: on AMD GPUs the first inference per model is significantly slower because ROCm/MIGraphX compiles the model graph on the fly. The compiled graph is cached, so subsequent runs of the same model are fast.

To enable GPU acceleration, run one of the install scripts:

Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/darktable-org/darktable/HEAD/tools/ai/install-ort-gpu.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/darktable-org/darktable/HEAD/tools/ai/install-ort-gpu.ps1 | iex

Then point darktable at the installed library via the AI tab in preferences (click detect). See tools/ai/README.md for flags, prerequisites, manual install, and troubleshooting. Verify the active provider with darktable -d ai.

Installing

If the latest release is still not available as a pre-built package for your distribution, you can build the software yourself following the instructions below.

Latest release

5.6.1 (stable)

*When

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is Darktable free to use?

Darktable is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Darktable do?

Professional RAW photo editing and workflow management

What is Darktable written in?

Darktable is primarily written in C. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable, and it has 13,088 GitHub stars.