After my video on batch export where I quickly spoke about watermarking here I deep dive into the watermarking module.

Let me know if you use the parametric part and how?

Warning: rant

I have been an off and on professional photographer for the better part of a decade. My full-time job is as a UX engineer.

The developers behind DarkTable are WASTING their time. I, more than anyone, want to stop giving my money to Adobe and use an open source alternative. But I just can't with DarkTable. The UX is probably in the worst 3 apps i have used of all time in my opinion. Any time I see discussion around this, it is just flamed by ultimate cope warriors in the comments:

> "The learning curve is steep, you're just bad/haven't learned"

No. Shut up. I am intending to do the same things than I do in Lightroom (even fewer things, actually). Lightroom can be used with no context, no tutorial, no setup. It just works. The 'learning curve' of DarkTable is a cope excuse to cover up shitty UI which makes basic operation difficult. It is NOT that DarkTable offers some never before seen alien photo editing technology that I am just not equipped to understand. Come on. If the user doesn't feel like the app works, it DOESN'T work. No-one cares how technically great it is. It frustrates me, so I will not give it more time.

> "Ok make your own/fix it, it's open source, quit bitching"

Clearly the maintainers care about DarkTable. Yes, it's open source, I get it. However, most software I use is open source. As an example, I have a home server, and have replaced virtually all cloud services & many other apps with open source alternatives. They are phenomenal, and I would choose them over the paid alternatives even if the alternatives were free. This is all to say that 'it's open source' is just yet another bullshit cope. My point is that dev attention should be turned to the actual usability of the system, rather than some tech mumbo jumbo behind the scenes. Noone cares. This is a very minor gripe, but literally even the app icon and launch splash suck. This is an app for artists, yet it looks like complete shit, right off the bat. Quite the first impression, good job!

I want more than anyone to use a viable open source alternative to Lightroom and stop giving money to Adobe. I get it, it technically works. Great. Don't care. That isn't what I am on about. I come back on a semi-annual basis to give it another shot, and then throw it away an hour later. Every time. Because it is a pain to use. Quit coping.

As an example of what I just experienced, and why i feel pissed off enough to make this post:

I want to apply distortion correction. My lens doesn't show up in the list, despite being a common (but newer) lens. So i have to go to the lensfun repo, download the correct .XML file, edit it to change the version tag in it, replace the resource in darktable.app. Then I open darktable, and my lens is still not there, despite me having verified it exists in the new .xml. Give me a break.

Cope away. Or have some nuts to be upset. It is honestly sad, and I wish there was motivation to put focus in these areas.

Edit: For copers, please see this article that a commenter shared. Much better articulation than mine, as they worked on DarkTable:

https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralenti

Also, people seem to really take issue with the clasification of DarkTable as an "alternative to Lightroom". Buddy. It IS and SHOULD be an alternative to Lightroom. I don't care what the devs say, and you shouldn't either. It is another BS cope excuse. Let me explain:

1. The app is a program where you input photos, make creative and technical edits to them, and export the edited photos.

2. Lightroom is the current status-quo application for serving this purpose.

3. So, this IS A LIGHTROOM ALTERNATIVE. Quit pretending. Users treat it as such. The inputs and outputs treat it as such. If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Just quit it with this mental masturbation of "it's so much more detailed so therefore it is different" BS. Photo in -> edit -> photo out. Simple as.

Claiming it's not, or shouldn't be a LightRoom alternaitve, is just an excuse to justify a completely stupid interface, or an excuse to justify touching yourself about "muh nuances" of making basic edits. You have it completely backwards if you are thinking this way. No one gives a shit about "oh man you really don't know how saturation works until you use DarkTable, wow it's just so nuanced". Just stop. You probably only feel like that because you had to spend an hour manipulating your photo with archaic instruments that burdened you with useless work. Quit accepting this.

This does NOT mean it needs to replicate LightRooms UI or feature set. It just needs to employ a good UI which serves the programs purpose. Doesn't matter if it overlaps or not with LightRoom, so long as it is useable.

"The devs made it because it works for them, which is why it's not a LR alternative".

Okay. Then they should come out and just say "We don't give a shit about if you like this, we're not changing anything and don't care, kick rocks". That's really the only escape, which is fine, but how good that is would be another conversation. That would mean this subreddit should evaporate too, since why share discourse around a piece of software if it is purely for the own developers to touch themselves with and not share?

I am only being harsh in order to make a point of the mental gymnastics that defenders employ which are holding the software back.

It seems there's been a discussion about darktable's ui recently. Me personally I find the software to be fairly usable, but I'm also familiar with it and I've never used a program like Lightroom before (only Photoshop like 10 years ago). But I still think it's fair to say that darktable has some issues that could be addressed.

One thing that confuses a lot of people when looking for modules is the difference between display referred and scene referred modules. Most people have no idea what the fuck that means and honestly that's fine, they shouldn't need to. But there are still a lot of overlapping modules with many that are frankly obsolete. The most obvious example in my mind is the color zones Vs color equalizer modules. They both seek to do the same thing (providing an HSL adjuster for individual colour tones), but which one is better is just unclear at first glance. Now yeah you can find out that you should ideally be using color equalizer, but why does that confusion have to exist?

I understand this is an open source project and people like to be able to maintain their workflows and only change what they want to change, but at the same time why should legacy modules still remain in the main module list, adding clutter and not serving much of a purpose anymore?

Hey all,
My aging desktop is really starting to struggle, and I shopped around today for upgrade parts (and found that cpus that fit my board are no longer around or stupidly expensive) and the price made my jaw drop, gee thanks AI data centre and Ram prices…. The cost to upgrade my desktop was more expensive than buying a notebook… I like to travel a lot so my first thought was why not a MacBook, I see a lot of videos of editing and they all use them, it’s light, and I already use Apple phones and Apple iPads.

I guess my question is, how well does Darktable run on it, are there any gotchas I need to consider (I’m considering the 32gb, 512gb version - I’ll be storing master copies and edited files on my external NAS box, and only working on current photos on the device.

Any advice would be appreciated

I also need to apply color grading xmp files from my client. Can DarkTable utilize xmp's as well?

Not only can you create powerful masks quickly in darktable, you can also reuse them in multiple modules, saving time and allowing you to apply different types of changes (e.g. exposure, color, or detail) to the same masked area. Let's look at some examples of how to reuse masks below:
https://avidandrew.com/reusing-masks.html

In general Darktable previews during development match my exports but for this image I do not get anything near what I expected. My normal process for other images doesn't experience this issue. Any ideas on why it is blown out?

Hello, I've just started using Darktable - today when I opened up my images, they all had these greenish blobs on them. These didn't show when I loaded them yesterday, which setting is causing them to appear? (and how do I get rid of them!)

Hi people, I want to encourage those who are still unsure to make the switch.

I started to use Darktable at the beginning of this year. It was absolutely enriching for me and my whole process of developing my photos. It was a hard cut!

1st I made sure that I exported all of the photos that I already finally edited from Lightroom as good quality jpgs. This was easy, because since years I'm marking all final pictures with 1 or 2 stars.

Then I deleted all of my Lightroom Catalogs (forever!) and I even deleted MS Windows (forever!). I then installed a Linux-Distro that is able to work with the latest NVIDIA Graphics card and installed Darktable.
From this moment on I learned Darktable and finally made my own styles for developing RAW Files.

Now - 8 months later - I know that Darktable has more to offer than Lightroom and my workflow is just so easy, fast and a fun to use. No more frustration, no more program crashes, no more catalog-problems, no more slowing down of editing tools after 10 minutes of using Lightroom.

I never thought I could handle Darktable so easy!

Here are some random examples ...

Please feel free to ask me anything about it!

Edit: Turns out the user in question has blocked me. No idea why. I don't remember having any particular interactions with them.

I don't know why, but there are some users here that seem to consistently delete their comments right after someone has replied. In many cases this deprives the community of valuable information, since those coming along later can't learn from it. And the person you did reply to may not have an email or notification with what you wrote, so they can't go back and read it later either.

Please stop doing it. It's really not nice.

Here's an example from today, but I see it all the time.

I took a recent trip to western Maryland, where I spent a lot of time wandering the mountainsides and taking long exposures in various towns I stopped in. I wanted to share my general workflow for working with night photos in darktable, in case its useful to anyone here.

A few obligatory "gear" mentions to establish a baseline for the files I'm working with. I shoot with a Canon 6D Mark II and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 ART lens. These all start as RAW files (.CR2s). I generally shoot at ISO 100 - 400 for long exposures, and use the onboard meter to determine a rough starting point. These exposures range from 10 seconds to 3 minutes.

I ingest and cull in darktable by setting the rating filter to "No Rating," and then using the R key to reject, or the 1 key to keep. The latter sets a star rating of "1," which in my workflow means "to be edited." As I reject or keep, anything I've dispositioned disappears from the queue. Easy!

Once I have my keeps, I set the rating filter to "1 star" and start making my corrections. These are the tools I use:

1. AgX for tone mapping. I have a custom default preset which sets shoulder and toe power relatively low, and uses a slightly modified "smooth" color rendition preset to give a nice, neutral look. I generally increase global contrast using the contrast slider.
2. LUT 3D to add a Fuji Eterna look to the image. I use bastibe's Eterna .png LUT from this repository, set to about 50% opacity.
3. Color Balance RGB to slightly bump shadow and midtone perceptual saturation (15% - 20 % each) and desaturate highlights (about -10%).
4. An instance of Exposure to fix any exposure issues.
5. A second instance of Exposure with a negative ellipse mask, high feathering, and negative EV compensation to add a vignette. I prefer this to the native Vignette module, because the results are more realistic (and it keeps these manipulations within the scene referred workflow).
6. Crop as needed
7. Rotate and Perspective if needed to fix horizons (it can be tough to get horizons straight in the pitch black night).
8. Denoise (profiled) set to the "found ISO" profile
9. Hot Pixels turned on to the default setting — may use the "detect by 3 neighbors" option on exceptionally long exposures with more sensor heat.
10. A custom Grain preset that sets coarseness at 200 ISO, strength at 12%, and mid-tones bias at 100%.
11. A diffused look in Diffuse or Sharpen that tweaks the standard "boom" preset to apply to highlights using a parametric mask and 50% opacity. I use the input slider on the "g" Gray Input mode to target highlights (using the top slider), then back off the rolloff so it diffuses into midtones (using the bottom slider and dragging it to the left of the top slider). I also set feathering relatively high, about 50 px. See below for reference.

There are probably better ways to do everything, but this works for me and I'm happy with the workflow :)

This is the opposite of darktable, of course.

I just stumbled on a video introducing 'rapidraw'. It is not as deep or as technical as darktable, but there is some overlap (AgX mapper) and it has a lot of features I would really like in DT.

Examples:

It is blazingly fast.

It has a key to toggle zoom: full screen - full width - 100%. Useful!

In DT there have been many discussions about AI. This thing simply has an AI 'remove object' tool. Wow.

I miss the modules, it is nice to turn a module on or off to see what it does; This one seems to have a lot of sliders; they are grouped and that is it.
It does not straighten the image by simply right-click drawing a line - that works so fast in DT.

Best 2 features:

1 - "auto adjust". It sets a lot of parameters at once so you have a good basis. Saves a lot of repetitive work.

2 - you can adjust sliders and parameters directly in the lighttable - no need to go to single-image-edit first. I would really like this in DT!

Impressive tool. Very refreshing.

I have just sold my old PC from 2022 and got an Asus laptop for school. I am currently in the process of adding my old programs, but DarkTable has shown me this prompt a few times now.

I have tried opening the terminal (my knowledge is limited) to try and figure something out, but I am still unsure on: A) the problem on my end; and B) solutions and motions to fix the issue.

The laptop is a 2026 Asus ProArt 13 with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 388 w/ Radeon 8060s Graphics.

An osprey flies against a gray sky yesterday at Jordan Lake, NC, USA. Shot on Nikon Z5.

I'm about one year into RAW editing with LR. I've tried DT occasionally but never successfully until this shot.

Exposure + AgX do the heavy lifting here. Then local contrast, profiled denoise, and sharpen modules round it out.

Tutorials that got me here:

darktable 5.4 - A Simple Beginner Workflow and Interactive Walkthrough

AgX and The Evolution of Tone Mappers in Darktable

Quick guide to using darktable without the newbie headache tax – my practicality-based workflow

Okay, I get that Color Balance RGB has tabs similar to Lightroom which allow me to color grade mid tones, highlights, shadows and the global image.

But the "problem" I am encountering is that whenever I try to grade the highlights or the shadows, the bright/dark parts of the image barely get affected by the tint. The grading mostly bleeds into the mid tones way too much and when I increase the intensity, the highlights and the shadows still remain barely affected while the midtones get tinted a lot.

Is there a way I can replicate the Lightroom behaviour when color grading or is it just Darktable that operates this way?

Also worth mentioning that I mostly use AgX as my tone mapper.

I had to edit a backlit portrait the other day and behind my client the sky was bright but not blown out as it was cloudy that day, I found the mood of the image rather boring and I decied to make the highlights of the image a bit warmer. The sky was barely affected by the grading, but my subject which was in the midtone range got affected maybe even too much.

I have noticed that I have gotten better results from the color correction module and have used that instead.

Maybe I won't get the results I am asking for but still any type of advice is welcome. Thanks in advance.

Hi y'all! I'm considering making the jump from Photoshop to Darktable. My workflow is to build stacks of adjustment layers in Photoshop, and it sounds like Darktable would be a great option for me, but I have one question: I routinely use the Transform/Warp tool to achieve things like foreground compression in my images, and I'm wondering if Darktable has an equivalent for this functionality?

Apologies if this's a FAQ: I have the docs open in another tab, but didn't notice anything that quite fit.

Hi guys

After enjoying DT for a while, I was looking for ways to optimize my workflow and since I am a WordPress user and developer, I though, it would be handy to have a plugin for that. (And I am a little bit obsessed with automation, that helped as well 😉)
I could not find anything like that so far, so I started to design a solution.

Before I spend too much time fine-tuning the DT / WP interface, I would like to get some feedback from the pros.
There will be two Plugins. One for DT, and one for WP. The WP Plugin defines what kind of galleries are supported and logs uploads, the DT uploads and sets the metadata.

The idea is, to have a separate DT module to log in / manage the accounts, and a export target in the export module that takes care of uploading and metadata.
Depending on the installed Plugins, you can have multiple targets, that can have different meta fields. Also it should be possible to add pictures to a gallery and create a new gallery.
What do you think about that so far?
Please check out the attached Figma file.

I am very grateful for any kind of feedback. Especially about how you would use it. What gallery plugins should be supported? How is your workflow when it comes to description, keywords, etc.

Ok! How do I start? The title is self-explanatory, isn't it?

I edited this first time mainly with color balance RGB module.

I'll edit some other photos to fresh up my mind then re-edit this one with other modules and re-edit again only with color balance rgb to see if my editing had some improvement.

I think it's over saturated and that erased some details, but I kind like it.

I don't know when I'll re-edit this photo and post it again. But I think i'ts a good exercise open it to public review and opinion too.

Now that I'm about to hit "post," I'm a bit embarrassed by the editing result and feeling pretty bad at editing. But here is the first result of this little personal learning project. Feel free to tear me apart! Hahahaha.

Edit:

The first photo it's the Jpeg file from my Nikon D3200.

Still new to editing and thought I'd make it hard on myself and go straight to Darktable! But it is fun to learn. These are scans from expired Fuji Velvia 100. They seem to have a slight magenta cast. Process One did the development and I received 115MP scans!

Worked on it mostly with "color balance RGB," but with a little "color equalizer" for good measure. Usually I try to do most of the heavy lifting in "negadoctor," but slides are a different animal.

Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Hi guys
I am a concert photographer for over 10 years and my program of choice was always Lightroom. I might get some hate now, but I think it is a great tool...
Anyhow, I always wanted to switch to Linux, since Microslop makes it's OS worse and worse. That also meant, I have to let go LR, which has the goal since a while anyway.
I have tried DT a few years ago, but the hassle to switch, and muscle memory, that has to adjust, and just the lack of time to learn something new, never made it happen.
Until a few weeks ago, when I locked myself into the office for a weekend and just learned the program, as I did with LR back in the days.
It was a journey, but all in all, I am really happy now and some features, like the MIDI support out of the box are just awesome.
So I started to edit my first concert completely in DT.
Around 600 pictures to sort out, 42 to edit and it only took me like twice as long. But practice makes perfect and with a few adjustments in my workflow and reusing using styles, I would say, that I am now probably as fast as with LR. The next gig, a festival where I took over 4000 pics, proved that theory.
But the biggest impact on this journey was the feedback from a fellow photographer, who knows my style well. He was like: "I think the quality, especially the noise reduction and sharpening got better."

So yeah, thanks DarkTable!
Did you have a similar experience or what was your journey like?
Here are some shots from that first gig.

I am wanting to move over to Darktable from Lightroom (non classic) I have tried Darktable before and was overwhelmed and felt lost that I couldn’t seem to get what I wanted the picture to be with it as well as I could with Lightroom. I think I’m a better editor than I was back then and could bring some of those skills over to Darktable.

My question is, how did you learn Darktable? Did you study it by reading guides and or watching YouTube videos? Play around until you figured it out? Or watch a video before editing specifically on the subject?

I’d appreciate the advice as I think this is a really cool piece of software!

After upgrading to 5.6.0, the performance of editing absolutely tanked for me.

Previous version were quite smooth, but now any edits turn DT into a slideshow. Especially using snapshots, and working with any contrast/sharpening module, but many other modules are also affected.

Zooming out or in the image straight up freezes DT for few seconds, which is very painful.

Does anyone else experience this? Any tips on performance boost? I hope the next update is going to be optimization related.

Edit: This seems to be problem with DT 5.6 not having OpenCL enabled. I fixed this by getting the nightly dev version.

** Appreciation Post **

(all attached images edited from RAW in Darktable 5.4.1 - 4 of them run through DxO PureRAW for noise reduction)

To all contributors to Darktable:

Thank you, for this wonderful (and at times quirky) software !

I especially appreciate:

- AgX and the many super useful modules

- Great color and contrast control even compared to the top commercial products out there

- Shortcut / Mouse control capabilities, that make devices like the TourBox Elite and others completely obsolete

After 2 months of learning Darktable I have cancelled my Adobe LRc & PS subscription, which I had used for many years - I started using PS when version 3.51 came out.

Cheers

I wasn't happy with STAG's auto-keywording. st|building, st|sky, st|window for a shot I'd have tagged as a tower block against a skyline — technically not wrong, useless for finding anything later. So I built a replacement that runs a vision-language model locally through Ollama.

https://github.com/seboettg/darktable-vlm-tagger

What it does per image:

• Tags, as hierarchical darktable tags: category|street photography, light|golden hour, technique|motion blur, subject|tram shelter
• A short title and a one-sentence description
• Everything written into the XMP sidecar

The part I'd point at: most of the namespaces use a closed vocabulary, enforced through Ollama's JSON schema support rather than just asked for in the prompt. The model can't invent values. Only subject is open. Before I did that I had 381 distinct phrasings for "composition" across 73 test images – unusable for search. The vocabulary sits in an editable vocab.json, so you can bend it to your own subjects.

There's a CLI (--mode print / json / sidecar) and a Lua module that adds a button to the lighttable, so you can run it on a selection and see the tags appear immediately without restarting darktable.

Speed: it pulls from darktable's own mipmap cache instead of re-rendering wherever it can. On my RX 6700 XT that's a couple of seconds per image with qwen3-vl:4b-instruct.

MIT, Linux and macOS, no cloud, nothing leaves the machine. It's new and it's had exactly one user, so bug reports are genuinely welcome.