Darktable

A photography tool for RAW processing. FREE | WWW.DARKTABLE.ORG

If you want to get the best results out of a digital SLR camera, you’ll want software to process the files. There are many applications in Linux that can process RAW files and Darktable was one of the first-open source RAW tools that appeared for Linux, and while longevity doesn’t always imply perfection, we believe that every Linux photo enthusiast should be aware of some of Darktable’s very useful features.

Darktable works in two modes. Lighttable resembles an image viewer with thumbnail support: you select a directory with a corresponding tool on the left edge and wade through dozens of photos in order to sort out the best shots. Once you double-click an image, you’re taken to darkroom mode where the magic begins.

A set of colour correction tools on the right edge of the window enable you to fix colours and produce better quality images than the default camera optimiser. You can tune shadows and highlights, fix white balance, sharpen or apply a lens mask to fix distortion and as long as RAW stores more data and preserves both details and colour dynamic range, most of your changes will be non-destructive. Based on our tests, Darktable is very robust in handling heavyweight RAW files, it easily applies all your changes with little or no delay.

The only thing you can’t do inside the darkroom mode is exporting. In order to save or export your work, you need to get back to the lighttable and use the menu again on the right edge. This time, there will be tools for selecting images, editing styles metadata tags and exporting. Building Darktable from source probably isn’t necessary — it’s been picked up by most distros and the packages are often kept up to date.