Plugins and extensions

Can you make them do more?

W ith the exception of darktable and Fotoxx, none of the other tools provide or support extending their functionality with plugins. While some LightZone users have long requested for a mechanism to extend beyond the default features, it seems unlikely to happen any time soon, if at all. However, both

LightZone and Photivo can be configured as plugins for Gimp. This means that you can access LightZone or Photivo to edit images while working on your images in Gimp.

The darktable wiki provides details on a number of plugins, but these are features that have already been added to darktable over time. The project uses the versatile Lua scripting language that you can use to write scripts to extend darktable. The darktable manual has an entire chapter dedicated to scripting with Lua. You’ll find the official scripts on the GitHub page. On Linux, you must clone the entire repository into the ~/.config/darktable/lua directory. You’ll have to manually enable the scripts by editing the

~/.config/dartable/luarc file. You can use these scripts to perform certain actions whenever a defined event occurs. The events can be saving a file, opening darktable and so on. In addition to the user manual, the project also hosts a user manual for the Lua API, which is a must read if you’re planning to create your own scripts.

By default, Fotoxx only ships with three plugins, which you can access by clicking Edit>Plugins on the sidebar. These are Gimp, whiteboard-cleanup and auto-gamma. You can read about these in the user guide. You can use this feature if you prefer to perform some operations using an alternate tool such as Gimp or darktable.