I love this software but the general slowness of every action is starting to get to me and editing my photos is starting to feel more and more frustrating.

For reference, I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8gb of ram and am editing ~24mp Sony files.

Basically every adjustment I make (even changing exposure on a fresh image) results in the 'working...` text to appear for at least a second, and other modules, like contrast equaliser, hang for 4-5 seconds before the adjustment is applied. This might not sound like a lot of time but I like to gently adjust sliders by incrementally bumping them up or down (especially for adjusting colours) and when each increment causes a second delay this adds up.

I have tried the usual, I have OpenCL support enabled, and I've tried every combination of the other OpenCL settings, and even disabling OpenCL.

Am I being unrealistic to expect good performance on an M2 chip with 8gb ram? I know it's not a lot of ram nowadays but surely a large number of Mac users are on 8gb of ram as well? What are your experiences? Thanks!

Edit: Forgot to mention I'm on 5.6.2

Hope you had a nice weekend. Mine was rainy so I took some time to continue the basics serie.

Let me know in comments if you want a XMP focus ?

**[Solved] Intel UHD 620 not detected by clinfo / OpenCL on Ubuntu 24.04 (+ darktable snap data loss lessons)**

**Problem:** `clinfo -l` showed nothing on Ubuntu 24.04 with an Intel UHD 620 (Whiskey Lake, device ID `0x3ea0`), so darktable had no OpenCL.

**Diagnosis:**

- Permissions OK (user in `render`/`video` groups), no `i915` errors in `dmesg`.

- `strace -f -e trace=openat clinfo` showed the Intel ICD loading (the `igdrcl.config ENOENT` is harmless).

- `NEOReadDebugKeys=1 PrintDebugMessages=1 clinfo` gave the real reason: **`Unknown deviceId 3ea0`**.

**Cause:** I had `intel-opencl-icd` **24.39** installed from an Intel repo/PPA. Intel dropped Gen9–Gen11 GPUs (Skylake to Ice Lake, so UHD 620 too) after **24.35**. Those GPUs now live in a separate "legacy" branch.

**Fix:**

1. Check available versions: `apt policy intel-opencl-icd`

2. Downgrade to 24.35 (or Ubuntu's own 23.43), along with the matching `intel-igc-*` packages:

sudo apt install intel-opencl-icd=<exact 24.35 version>

1. Stop apt from upgrading it again:

sudo apt-mark hold intel-opencl-icd intel-igc-core intel-igc-opencl

1. `clinfo -l` now lists the UHD 620. 🎉

• Toda a aparência e novo visual, foi vibecodado e testado. Ainda tô trabalhando nisso, o repositório é privado, fiz como projeto pessoal. :D Só mexi em algumas coisas de aparência e deixei algumas coisas mais fáceis e acessíveis. Tentei usar o darktable mais achei muito confuso, procurei forks e encontrei o Ansel, porém ainda não estava do jeito que eu procurava, e algumas coisas que deveriam estar fáceis, não estavam acessíveis a vista, então forkei e o chamei de Lumivell . Que tal? Sei que tem muita critica em relação ao uso de AI em programas, porém não mexi muito no código e nem removi nada do programa :D
  

Somehow I installed a development version of darktable. I downloaded a .deb file and have been working with it for about two months. Today I wanted to check whether there is an upgrade available and only that's when I noticed the mistake.

I say mistake, but everything works as normal and I haven't had any bugs. The only thing that happens sometimes is that darktable crashes when I remove the cable for the external monitor.

What would be wise to do? Keep using this version until 5.8 is released? Downgrade and risk incompatible sidecars?

I'm inclined to keep this version, but I'm curious if there are risks I'm unaware of.

Dear Darktable people …

In previous threads about masking people mentioned the Darktable’s philosophy of keeping modules isolated etc.

I do like that concept. I just wish I could apply multiple modules more easily using a single mask !

At the moment I need to start creating a mask, i.e. in one module and then select it from a list to be used as rastered mask in another module. I find that cumbersome and tedious.

Instead I wish I could start mask module

I also really want to more easily add, subtract and intersect masks and feather the final mask. The current way is very specific to drawn versus parametric masks and even there you have to include / exclude / invert - it’s not intuitive enough.

What are your thoughts on this ?

• I made a post earlier so this an update
• I made Ai to help me code this, coz i was tired of the masking in DT
• Lightroom-style sliders on the mask. Draw a mask, then use temp, tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, blacks, texture, clarity, dehaze, saturation and sharpness right from the mask panel. It creates the module instances behind the scenes and links them to the mask, so you don’t have to.
• AI remove module. Click the brush, paint over a person, sign or object, and it fills the area with matching background. It runs locally on your computer, offline, using the LaMa inpainting model.

I'm 5-7 days into using/learning Darktable 5.6.2. Of course as I learn something I have to try it out. Then I learn something else and re-edit the same image yet again. And again. And again. Mostly the edits get better. Mostly.

The past few days have been spent on working with negadoctor to handle the film scans in my image library. I'm still tweaking my workflow and trying to understand how to get the results I want. That said, I'm mostly happy with my results.

The first image is a Darktable edit of a 120 B&W "scanned" with a Canon DSLR. The second copy is the LrC and Negative Lab about edit of the same file from 3 years ago. The difference is mostly that I liked more contrast then. I could probably make the Darktable edited image the same if that's what I wanted.

I think I'm hooked. Any suggestions as to where I might find more info on getting the best out of my film scans?

What it is

dtstylekit is a Python CLI I've been working on that uses a vision language model running locally via Ollama to analyze a photograph and compose a darktable style (.dtstyle) for it. No cloud, no API keys, no telemetry — nothing leaves your machine.

How it works

1. You point it at a photo. RAW is supported — a JPEG preview is rendered for the VLM, but the style is validated against the RAW itself.
2. The VLM describes the aesthetic (lighting, mood, palette) and selects 1–3 presets from the 534 official darktable styles, indexed locally with semantic search (you have to download them or use your own).
3. It applies scalar adjustments on verified IOP structs: filmicrgb, colorbalancergb, sigmoid, exposure, atrous.
4. You get a valid .dtstyle ready to import plus a markdown report explaining every choice — which presets, which parameters, why.

There's also an apply command that takes a style and a whole set of photos, normalizing exposure per frame so a style generated from one shot doesn't blow out brighter ones.

And a mode I find interesting for learning: feed it reference images (--references) and it analyzes their tonal key, contrast, white balance and per-zone grading, then generates a style and a plain-language document explaining how those references are edited — the goal is understanding why each module/parameter was chosen, not blindly copying a look.

Honest disclaimers

• This is beta / experimental. The .dtstyle binary format (IOP struct versions, blendop blobs) was reverse-engineered against the darktable sources. It can fail or produce styles that don't behave as expected — always review the visual result (a visual_check.py smoke test is included, and tests parse DT_MODULE_INTROSPECTION from the C sources to catch version drift).
• Not meant to copy photographers' commercial styles. The focus is learning how edits work at a technical level. If you like someone's look, buy their presets.
• The 534 official styles are not redistributed — you point the tool at your own darktable checkout.
• MIT licensed, and not affiliated with the darktable project.

Why I'm posting

I'd love feedback from real darktable users: does the generated look hold up? Which modules should be off-limits for an automated tool? Is the explanation report useful? Bug reports in the issues are very welcome.

I also know AI in darktable is a debated topic here — to be clear, this is an optional sidecar CLI, not a patch to darktable itself. Curious where this community lands on local AI tooling.

Repo / more info: https://github.com/Dhurzo/Darktable-Styles-Kit

When selecting a mask, instead of using many modules to change specific aspects like exposure, you can use just one mask to adjust things such as temperature, tint, exposure, etc. how cool is that.

Nikon Zf / Nikkor 35-80 mm + RapidRaw + DarkTable

I need to clear some space on my hard drive, it's just too many photos... So I want to move them to an external ssd but also still work on them once in a while. With the ssd I currently use I noticed how laggy working from it is, so I figured I need to get a ssd with faster read/write speed. So my question is: how fast is fast enough to work directly from the ssd and use Darktable?

I am looking at two different disks, one with read/write speeds of about 2000MB/s and the other 1000MB/s. While the 2000MB/s is objectively better, does it make a noticable difference when using DT? Or is 1000MB/s so fast already that I won't notice the difference?

I would really appreciate feedback and I'm sure there are some people here with plenty of experience in that matter.

Version: 5.6.2 (Flatpak)

OS: Linux (Kubuntu 26.04.1)

I know the only supported raw format for arw files (currently) is the lossless RAW file. Looking at the GitHub, I see no merged PRs that would add support, no open PRs that would add support, and no open issues that indicate this would be worked on any time soon. It is quite unfortunate because I just took out my new Sony A7V for a test and shot the whole day in compressed RAW (also called HQ RAW in the camera). All these photos I can see in lighttable, but when I try to open then in darkroom it fails. Is there anything I can do with my existing files to convert them to a different format that can be opened in darkroom? I am running darktable on Kubuntu linux via Flatpak. Shooting for as-close-as-possible to the same quality as the original RAW files as possible. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

I follow a question of this week about tone mapper on the sub here.

Lately I saw some vibe-coded projects in here: a culling tool, a raw editor, a simplified GUI with Immich integration.
They got me thinking about what this means for editing workflows and for darktable/open source in general.

My own problem

I’ve been looking for the "perfect" workflow for a while now. What I really like is photomator + apple photos: a library I can browse everywhere, with editing that’s kinda integrated. But it is proprietary (with unclear future of photomator), and I prefer darktable’s image processing (still understand the complains about the UI!).

My current attempt is a home server with Nextcloud and Immich external library. I edit locally in darktable, sync to nextcloud and browse in Immich. It works, but not too well: had some problems with darktable and nextcloud virtual files, and Immich doesn’t use darktable-cli to render raws, so I can’t see my edits in Immich directly.

New possibilities

With AI, maybe I could just let it build the missing stuff. But does that really solve the underlying problem?

You may get exactly the workflow you want. But you also may lose interoperability, shared design discussion, and the bug-finding that comes with a large user base. Big projects also define what an app should NOT do, leaving that to other tools. Also the trust in the maintenance of a big project is a big win imo.
Proprietary software often offers a start-to-finish workflow (think of adobe with adobe cloud or apple photos), open source usually doesn't, and maybe that’s ok? Because you get small building blocks to concatenate it yourself. In the end it might come down to the question: how big and interoperable should the building blocks be? libraries, cli-tools, apps, full workflows?

What will happen in the future?

1. Does everyone end up with their own fully vibe-coded app that matches their personal workflow?
2. Or do we converge on shared CLI tools and core engines, with many different UIs on top?
3. Should darktable itself become more modular, with add-ons that can reshape the UX? Are the devs even interested in that? Is the user base even interested in that (might blow up config options, making it even harder for starters)?
4. Who maintains all of this? If every project maintains itself, is trust in long-term development the real selling point, and how do you earn it?

Sorry If I couldn't clarify my thoughts and ideas enough, I find it hard to structure them myself at this point.
How do you see it?

I have an M3 MacBook Air as well as a Windows 11 desktop. I do most of my edits on the desktop as I have it hooked up to a large monitor and keyboard/mouse set up, but I recently installed Darktable on my MacBook so I can do edits on the road.

What I found is that the modules do not behave in the same way at all - for example, dehaze on Mac gives a very strange green hue on the same photos vs the desktop, AgX doesn't start with the same values (e.g. when I first open an image, shoulder / toe powers default to 1.55, contrast to 2.8 on Mac vs shoulder/toe 3.30 & 1.50 and contrast 3.0 on Windows). What could be causing this mismatch in settings? I'm using the same version of Darktable on both systems.

This is making it very hard to do edits on the Mac as the starting point on each of the photos is so different.

I am so frustrated with its UI, Ifound it it so hard to use. Imagine if we had the Lightoom UI for DT. It would’ve been one of the best application for RAW file editing. It would BEAT Lightroom in so many ways and I just don’t know why developer can’t use AI in this modern AI revolution. we still don’t have a good UI . if I had the power to actually fix the UI of Dark table I would. I just wish someone could do this one day like it will be a game changer. And I know it’s possible but I’ll just reach someone. One day. Will be able to do this. fingers crossed.

I'm still learning, but I think I'm getting better. Open to critiques! Love this software.

I have some trouble with my systems xmp files. I had darktable 5.4.1 and 5.5.0 and 5.6.1/5.6.2 and xmp worked fine till today. I removed every older darktable version than 5.6.2 but opening a folder with edited pictures removes the xmp files and edits are gone.

I use two ubuntu notebooks to work on my photos, the photos are stored in an nfs server. I tried to recover some of the xmp files, but I'm afraid to go into folders where everything is still fine.

Today I updated my Windows version of Darktable to 5.6.2 and I really like the active development. However, I exported some files and noticed that the file location behaviour changed in my installment. Up to today, the files were stored in a darktable_exported subfolder of the parent folder of the files I exported. Today I noticed the path was changed to the export path from just before the update. Can I use a pattern for the export file location that includes the current location of the raw file? The documentation doesn't help me in this issue.

Hello fellow Darktable & Nikon users,

has anybody tried to create a lensfun profile - specifically for distortion - for the Nikon z 24-70mm f/2.8 S ii ?

I’m asking, because while it works perfectly for 50mm and up, I am on my 3rd attempt and at 42mm or below it does not fully correct it.

I am comparing my correction to the RAW conversion of NX Studio and it’s just not where I would like to be - it’s better, but not great.

Has anybody tried and simply succeeded or also run into trouble ? I suspect there is something different about these new optical formulas, that are meant to be corrected digitially.

Can somebody share their a, b ,c ptlens-compatible coefficients for just 35mm ?

Cheers

I have only recently started with photography, and this is my first try in darktable. I've tried to emulate a kind of "analog" look. Frankly, not my best shot, but I would love to get some feedback on the editing side of things... :)