darktable

A free RAW photo workflow application.

darktable is a non-destructive RAW developer for digital photographers. Edits are stored as a stack of operations rather than baked into pixels, so the original RAW file is never modified and any edit can be revisited, reordered, or removed later. Catalogue management, tagging, rating, and a flexible filtering system handle photo libraries that grow into hundreds of thousands of files.

The processing pipeline includes lens correction, perspective adjustment, exposure and contrast tuning, white balance, colour calibration, denoising (including AI-based modules in recent versions), and many other tools. darktable supports tethered shooting — taking the photo through the connected camera and importing immediately — which is useful for studio work.

The application is GPL-3.0+ and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It has a dedicated user community and is often compared favourably to Adobe Lightroom for users committed to free software. The release cadence is steady, with major releases every six months bringing significant module improvements. RawTherapee is the main alternative in the same space, with each having different processing strengths.

darktable screenshot — Screenshot: Trougnouf, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: Graphics

Website: https://www.darktable.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install darktable
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install darktable
Arch:          sudo pacman -S darktable
macOS:         brew install --cask darktable

Authors

The darktable development team

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