Importing images into the darktable database is easy, just point it to a folder and it does most of the rest. The deployment of the mouse scroll wheel to change sliders and manipulate most any control is a pleasure to use, and when I hopped back into Lightroom to make some comparisons, I kept hovering over sliders and spinning the scroll wheel to no avail. I think it’s something about the colors, maybe. There is a comprehensive user manual available, but I find it harder to navigate than RawTherapee’s rockstar manual. I’ll go into some of these later, In sha’Allah. I like darktable… I’ve reviewed it here before, and so I was somewhat familiar with it when I went in.ĭarktable is very powerful, and its unconventional methods of tweaking settings make some operations easy and fast. (and especially forgive me for going on and on about the xmp file business…) So forgive me if this is a bit briefer than you hoped, or if I don’t cover something important, or didn’t find the easy solution: I’m really just trying to get this over with. I’m also very ready to get back to shooting and I have something of a backlog of images to process and share now. It’s partly that Ramadan has come and I have much lower energy (even for sitting on the sofa and typing), but mostly that I’m tired of massaging the same images over and over again, and really tired of playing/fighting with computer software. To be honest, I’ve gotten a bit tired of this testing lately. Thankfully, I’m not trying for a comprehensive review here… I just want to see if darktable can replace Lightroom for me. With the exception of user-definable albums (they’re called Film Rolls in darktable, and they’re a bit strange to use), you can do everything in darktable that you can do in Lightroom, and more, most of it in a few different ways. Easy.ĭarktable is probably the closest to Lightroom that you’ll find in the open source space. Installation: normal download dmg & drag app to Applications folder (or wherever you like). Platforms Available Tested: Linux , Mac, Windows Program: darktable (1.6.3 updated to 1.6.7 late in the review process)

How to use darktable software