blog on darktable

darktable 5.4 - A Simple Beginner Workflow and Interactive Walkthrough

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a beginner-friendly and simple workflow for developing photos in darktable 5.4 using some new tools made available in this version. The intent is not to go in-depth on any particular tool, but rather to show off how a small number of modules can be used to process an image quickly. This article can hopefully serve as a relatively non-technical introduction to darktable and a reliable starting framework for developing your own photos whether you’re new to RAW editing or an experienced photographer looking into using darktable.

How do I ... in darktable 5.x?

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Users new to darktable who have experience with other raw developers may have trouble figuring out how to do various tasks as a result of different names or workflows in darktable compared to their previous software. The following entries are a quick reference to help you accomplish what you want to do.

Have a tip not covered here? Share it in the comments!

How do I…

run darktable in ‘simple’ or ‘beginner’ mode

The large number of processing modules and many different ways of accomplishing the same goal often leaves first-time users feeling overwhelmed. You can manage this feeling by not trying to use every single option right from the beginning, but focusing on a few key controls and slowly learning the rest as you discover that you need them.

darktable 4.0: 3763 Days Later

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Translations of this article: German, Spanish.

A little over 10 years since darktable 1.0 was first released, the darktable team is proud to present darktable 4.0!

For a complete changelog, please see the release notes. The latest version of the user manual is here. Ukrainian and Polish translations are currently available and we expect to add more over the coming months.

Color and Exposure Mapping

A new “spot mapping” mode has been added to both the exposure and color calibration modules. This mode can be used, for example, to perform white balance (chromatic adaptation) against non-grey objects of known color, or to ensure color and exposure consistency of an object across a series of images. A “sampling” mode allows you to pick a reference color in a source image, recording the output exposure/color after the current exposure and color calibration modules respectively. The “correction” mode then mode computes the relevant exposure and color calibration settings so as to match the color selected from a matching sample picked from the target image. The target can also be manually defined by direct input of the appropriate CIE Lab 1976 color coordinates.

darktable 3.8: Winter Release 2021

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Translations of this article: German, Spanish.

The darktable team is proud to announce the second feature release of 2021.

Documentation

As is becoming the norm now, all new features are fully documented in the latest version of the user manual. We have also added a new introductory section to act as a guide for new users and those unfamiliar with scene-referred workflow.

While translated documentation was not quite ready in time for darktable 3.6.0, a few completed translations were quietly introduced to the documentation website alongside the 3.6.1 release. The darktable 3.8.0 documentation now includes four translated languages (the first time complete, translated documentation has been made available on the release date), fully integrated into darktable’s help link system. Translated versions of the epub and pdf manuals are also available. Due to the amount of work involved in translating the documentation we will probably provide further updates over the next month so if your language isn’t supported at the moment, please check back in the new year. Please see this page if you want to find out how to contribute your own translations.

darktable 3.6: Summer Release 2021

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Translations of this article: German, French, Spanish

The darktable team is proud to announce our second summer feature release, darktable 3.6. Merry (summer) Christmas!

This is the first of two releases this year and, from here on, we intend to issue two new feature releases each year, around the summer and winter solstices.

Documentation

Thanks to countless hours of work of very dedicated contributors, all of the new features are fully documented in time in the user manual, which is now available in epub format along with the existing online and pdf versions. Help links within darktable have been updated to point to the new manual and the old version will now be officially discontinued. The user manual is still English-only for the moment, but translations are in progress (here) and we expect other languages to be available in time for darktable 3.8.

darktable 3.4: Encore!

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Translations of this article: German, French

Happy holidays everyone – it’s time for your favourite Christmast gift. This is the second major release of 2020 from the darktable project following the early release of darktable 3.2 in August, and we’ve been busy: between the darktable, rawspeed, and dtdocs repos, there have been more than 5,500 commits in 2020!

Documentation

Photography is a difficult enough endevor and trying to manage your post-processing without documentation can make things even harder! This time, though, the darktable team has been busy getting the user manual ready in time for the release and it is available today at https://www.darktable.org/resources/, and fully up-to-date with the latest version.

darktable 3.2: containment effect!

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In other languages: Français, Deutsch. Italiano.

For the first time in its history, darktable breaks its one year release cycle by releasing version 3.2 in August of 2020. The unfortunate state of global health has led to a marked increase in contributions and improvements. On top of that, version 3.4 is still scheduled for Christmas 2020. 2020 will therefore be the first year in which the darktable team will have the pleasure to offer you two major versions. If you need a refresher course on version 3.0 features see the 3.0 article.

darktable 3.0

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In other languages: Français, Italiano, Deutsch.

Following the tradition, darktable 3.0 has been released for Christmas. After many evolutions in 2018, 2019 has seen many very unexpected changes in darktable, both in its user interface and in its internal mechanisms. This makes darktable 3.0 a more than major version, justifying the direct transition from version 2.6.x to version 3.0.

The announcement and release notes for this new release can be found here: /2019/12/darktable-300-released/.

Among the new major features (the list is huge):

A new module: lut3d

Thu, 23 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The lut3d module will be introduced in darktable 3.0 and is designed to apply a 3D LUT (LookUp Table) to an image.

3D LUT

A 3D LUT is a tridimensional table which allows to transform any RGB value into another RGB value. The most common applications of LUTs are film simulation and color grading. But they can be used for any other technical transforms like LOG to REC.709, which are used in video edition for example.

darktable 2.6

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In other languages: Français, Italiano.

Following the tradition, darktable 2.6 was released for Christmas. 2018 has been a year of renewal for darktable, with many major features introduced by recent contributors.

The announcement and release notes for this new release can be found here: /2018/12/darktable-260-released/.

Among the new major features:

A new retouch module, similar to the spot removal module with smart cloning (“heal”) and ability to act on each level of detail individually.

a new website

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 11:02:54 -0600

A new year is coming on us quickly, so how about a nice new website to go with it?

Baby New Year from 110 years ago ...

houz and I have been working hard over the past few months to migrate the old website from Wordpress to a new static site, using Python/Pelican. This should make things more secure and safer for both you and us (see the problems that rawsamples.ch had for the perils of using a db-driven backend for a website). Not to mention it makes collaboration and contributing a bit easier now, as the entire site gets its own GitHub repository (I’ll be eagerly awaiting your pull requests).

local laplacian pyramids

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 20:21:45 +0000

improving contrast with the local laplacian filter

sometimes difficult lighting situations arise which, when taking photographs, result in unappealing pictures. for instance very uniform lighting on a cloudy day may give dull results, while very contrasty illumination (such as back lit) may require to compress the contrast to embrace both highlights and shadows in the limited dynamic range of the output device.

refer to the following two shots as examples:

rawsamples.ch replacement

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 17:57:27 +0000

Rawsamples.ch is a website with the goal to:

…provide RAW-Files of nearly all available Digitalcameras mainly to software-developers. [sic]

It was created by Jakob Rohrbach and had been running since March 2007, having amassed over 360 raw files in that time from various manufacturers and cameras. Unfortunately, back in 2016 the site was hit with an SQL-injection that ended up corrupting the database for the Joomla install that hosted the site. To compound the pain, there were no database backups … :(

Visualizing the raw (sensor) highlight clipping

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 10:30:24 +0000

Have you ever over-exposed your images? Have you ever noticed that your images look flat and dull after you apply negative exposure compensation? Even though the over/underexposed warning says there is no overexposure? Have you ever wondered what is going on? Read on.

the problem

First, why would you want to know which pixels are overexposed, clipped?

Consider this image:

… Why is the sky so white? Why is the image so flat and dull?

compressing dynamic range with exposure fusion

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 18:14:45 +0000

modern sensor capture an astonishing dynamic range, namely some sony sensors or canon with magic lantern’s dual iso feature.

this is in a range where the image has to be processed carefully to display it in pleasing ways on a monitor, let alone the limited dynamic range of print media.

example images

use graduated density filter to brighten foreground

using the graudated density iop works well in this case since the horizon here is more or less straight, so we can easily mask it out with a simple gradient in the graduated density module. now what if the objects can’t be masked out so easily?

colour manipulation with the colour checker lut module

Tue, 24 May 2016 13:49:13 +0000

[update 2016/07/31: there was a section about intermediate export to csv and manually changing that file. this is no longer needed, exporting the style directly from darktable-chart is fine now.]

motivation

for raw photography there exist great presets for nice colour rendition:

in-camera colour processing such as canon picture styles
fuji film-emulation-like presets (provia velvia astia classic-chrome)
pat david’s film emulation luts

unfortunately these are eat-it-or-die canned styles or icc lut profiles. you have to apply them and be happy or tweak them with other tools. but can we extract meaning from these presets? can we have understandable and tweakable styles like these?

Liquify, liquify?

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 08:09:43 +0000

Most modules in darktable are working on changing pixels color, lightness, etc. Few modules are moving pixels and when they do they are doing it in a very constraint way like to rotate, fix the lens’ distortions or remove spots.

The liquify module offer more ways to move pixels around by applying some free style distortions to parts of the image. There is three tools to help doing that:

point
line
curve

Running on non-x86 platforms

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 18:27:28 +0000

For many years darktable would only run on x86 CPUs that also support at least SSE2. While that is nowadays almost everything looking like a PC it’s still limiting. Consequently Roman sat down and started work on dropping that hard requirement. While his work isn’t complete yet it’s definitely becoming useful. So with a little tweaking you can for example use the development versions on an ARM, like the Raspberry Pi. Together with a touchscreen that has the potential to make a fun little package.

A new module for automatic perspective correction

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 17:48:29 +0000

Since many years darktable offers a versatile tool for manual perspective correction in the crop & rotate module [1]. Although the principle is simple and straightforward, there are cases where it can prove difficult to get a convincing correction, especially if no distinct vertical or horizontal features can be spotted in the image. To overcome these limitations a new “perspective correction” module has just been added that is able to automatically correct for converging lines. The underlying mechanism is inspired by the program ShiftN developed by Marcus Hebel and published under the GPL [2].

Why don't you provide a Windows build?

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 21:15:02 +0000

Due to the heated debate lately, a short foreword:

We do not want to harass, insult or criticize anyone due to his or her choice of operating system. Still, from time to time we encounter comments from people accusing us of ignorance or even disrespect towards Windows users. If any of our statements can be interpreted such, we want to apologize for that – and once more give the full explanation of our lacking Windows support.

Color Reconstruction

Sat, 07 Mar 2015 20:13:22 +0000

If you overexpose a photo with your digital camera you are in trouble. That’s what most photography related textbooks tell you – and it’s true. So you better pay close attention to your camera’s metering while shooting. However, what to do when the “bad thing” happened and you got this one non-repeatable shot, which is so absolutely brilliant, but unfortunately has some ugly signs of overexposure?

In this blog article I’d like to summarize how darktable can help you to repair overexposed images as much as possible. I’ll cover modules which have been part of darktable for a long time but also touch the brand new module “color reconstruction”.

On Lens Detection and Correction

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 20:10:37 +0000

darktable (and some other projects, like for example ufraw) don’t do any real lens detection or correction by itself. We depend on two libraries which in most cases are provided by the Linux distribution you’re using.

Lens Detection

Many image files contain metadata about how the image was created. In case of digital camera images, a standard called Exif is used, this standard allows a camera to record many details about how an image was taken. However Exif is not a singular well defined specification, there is a common part that is well defined, and there are the so-called MakerNotes. The MakerNotes are parts of Exif that each vendors gets to do with whatever they like. They are typically completely undocumented, and have to be reverse-engineered to be able to handle them in any way. For most vendors this reverse engineering has been done to some degree and at least parts of the MakerNotes can be deciphered most of the time.

Print Module

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 21:01:25 +0000

After being in the camera our pictures deserve some love and to be shared. Every photographer will tell you the joy of having a picture in the hands. At last the pixels have taken form on a piece of paper to give birth to a photography which can be put on the wall!

Though, printing is not easy, there are many technical aspects to take into account. To streamline this process darktable has been added a print module.

Luminosity Masks in darktable

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 20:43:58 +0000

Pat David has a great blog on photoediting in GIMP. I recently read his post on luminosity masks and was fairly impressed. Can darktable do something similar? Yes – they’re a special case of parametric masks.

I thought I’d post a quick tutorial on luminosity masks using parametric masks. First, I strongly suggest you read Pat David’s post and thoroughly understand what’s going on.

A quick and simplistic explanation follows: Normally, if we make a selection and, say, adjust the brightness dramatically in that selection, we get a sharp (and ugly) transition near the edge of the selection:

Using X-Trans cameras with darktable

Sat, 02 Aug 2014 08:24:01 +0000

There is now a development branch of darktable with experimental support for raw files from many recent Fujifilm cameras. These cameras include those with the X-Trans sensor (X-Pro1, X-E1, X20, X100S, X-M1, XQ1, X-E2, and X-T1), X-Series cameras with conventional sensors (X100, X10, X-S1, XF-1, X-A1), and some from Fujifilm’s other lines (S6000fd, E550, IS-1, S3Pro, S5Pro, S5600, E900, S2Pro, S5000, S5200, S5500, S6500fd, S9500, S9600, S9600fd). Previously, darktable would fail to read RAF-type raw files produced by these cameras.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 in Leipzig, Germany

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 13:09:13 +0000

Yes, it’s this time of the year again. The annual Libre Graphics Meeting is getting closer, and we, that is the whole developer community of your favorite free graphics applications, would like to ask you for your help. Some of you might remember our call for sponsoring from last year. Back then we asked for donations for specific people – a task that didn’t work out that well in the end. So this year we would just like to ask you for a small donation to the general funding campaign instead. This money is only being used to pay the travel expenses of developers and contributors of free graphics projects. Like us. You can see an incomplete list here.

Of Histograms and Waveforms

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 16:08:41 +0000

Figure 1: the gradient test image – download and play with it in darktable

People using image editors or similar (raster) graphics editors are probably familiar with histograms. You also have them in almost all digital cameras. In darktable you can find it very prominently in the top right corner of darkroom mode, but also as a backdrop of modules like levels, tonecurve and similar.

From a mathematical point of view they are a diagram displaying the amount of pixels in the image that have a specific colour, lightness, value or similar measure. The horizontal axis represents the brightness while the vertical axis corresponds to the amount of pixels that have that brightness.

determining focus in lighttable

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 16:50:01 +0000

wouldn’t it be great if you could judge sharpness of your images in lighttable mode? this mode is limited to small and medium sized thumbnails of your images, so we can deliver the required speed to browse a lot of them.

to tell whether or not you got the focus right during the shoot, we would like to look at the full resolution. the most you get out of lighttable mode will look like this:

about basecurves

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 20:56:40 +0000

the purpose of the basecurve is to make the otherwise scene-referred linear (linear raw rgb) color look good on your output devices. this is done independently of any color managed transforms which are also done in the pipeline, so we can establish a certain look independent of the devices. this will affect how highlights and shadows are balanced against each other, the overall contrast of the image, as well as color saturation. it basically boils down to:

Using Lua with darktable

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 08:22:05 +0000

The next major release of darktable will contain multiple features that have been discussed on this blog and that will make it more powerful than ever. These new features will allow you to process your images in new and creative ways.

However there is one new feature in the upcoming darktable release that is more about Digital Assets Management and simplifying your workflow: Lua scripting.

Lua is a scripting language that is commonly used to add scripting capabilities to programs. It is a programming language that is particularly simple to learn.

have your lens calibrated!

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 11:53:16 +0000

just a quick plug for torsten’s great new service which allows you to calibrate your lens for lensfun. this will enable you to use darktable’s lens correction module with your lens if it hasn’t been calibrated by others for you yet.

all you need to do is take some sample images and upload them here:

http://wilson.bronger.org/calibration

the page contains some more detailed instructions about which images are useful and which aren’t.

Display color management in darktable

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:47:54 +0000

The general picture on the modern Linux desktop

Modern Linux distros featuring either GNOME, Unity or KDE offer fairly easy configuration of color management, this system level configuration mostly pertains to the handling of an ICC display profile.

If you have set a display profile via your system configuration tool (The Color applet in System Settings for GNOME or Unity), there are a few things to keep in mind.

An ICC display profile consists of two main parts. First the so-called “vcgt”, which corrects for whitepoint (this is most noticeable on laptops which shift from being very blueish to a bit more yellowish) and gamma. The “vcgt” is loaded into X11 and applied to your whole screen, so all applications automatically benefit. On a GNOME or Unity desktop this is done by GNOME Settings Daemon during login.

masks

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:05:43 +0000

In darktable, selective editing was a long awaited feature. Our development version now allow limiting module effects to a region of the image.

Remember the old times, the red light of the darkroom, the smell of the developing bath …

Remember when you were using your hands or a small piece of cardboard to achieve some masking …

Now you can do that in darktable.

example

let take this photo as an example.

Color Mapping

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:54:34 +0000

I’d like to give a few words on a new module named “color mapping” that is currently under development in our master branch. This module is a rework and enhancement of the older “color transfer” module. That older module had several issues which made a migration impossible. So we leave the old one behind as deprecated (old history stack still work as before) and for all new history stacks “color mapping” should be used instead.

released 1.2

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 08:18:42 +0000

we released the next feature release (1.2):

source tarball

user manual

macintosh disk image

as a feature release, it comes with a lot of new goodies:

profiled denoising: adapt to the properties of your camera’s sensor (72 cameras already profiled for you).
lightroom import: convert some basic edits from your lightroom collection to darktable operations.
multi instance support: duplicate your modules and apply them more than one time with different settings.
improved usability for distorting modules (streamline spot removal in the presence of crop/rotate for example).
selective copy/paste of image processing.
new more intuitive keystone correction tool.
jpeg2000 support.
graphics magick import (support virtually all input image formats).
much faster thumbnail loading (if you can live with crappy embedded thumbnails).
incredibly lengthy list of small bug fixes, performance enhancements, and usability improvements.
new camera support (decode and color matrices).
dithering against banding.
sharper thumbnails in lighttable mode.
new oauth2 based picasa uploader.
updated translations.
and a thoroughly overhauled user manual, proof read by natives (thanks heaps guys!).

this is the list of cameras supported for profiled denoising in this tarball:

released 1.2rc1

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:25:29 +0000

we just released a new tarball for the first release candidate in the next feature release (1.2):

source tarball

mac disk image

as a feature release, it comes with a lot of new goodies:

profiled denoising: adapt to the properties of your camera’s sensor (72 cameras already profiled for you).
lightroom import: convert some basic edits from your lightroom collection to darktable operations.
multi instance support: duplicate your modules and apply them more than one time with different settings.
improved usability for distorting modules (streamline spot removal in the presence of crop/rotate for example).
selective copy/paste of image processing.
new more intuitive keystone correction tool.
jpeg2000 support.
graphics magick import (support virtually all input image formats).
much faster thumbnail loading (if you can live with crappy embedded thumbnails).
incredibly lengthy list of small bug fixes, performance enhancements, and usability improvements.
new camera support (decode and color matrices).
dithering against banding.
sharper thumbnails in lighttable mode.
new oauth2 based picasa uploader.
and the final release 1.2 will contain a thoroughly overhauled user manual, proof read by natives (thanks heaps guys!).

translations:

darktable 1.1.4 release

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:02:27 +0000

Hi,

there is a new point release with a couple of smaller updates. The source tarball and OSX image can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.4.tar.xz/download

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.4.dmg/download

And the usermanual is still the same.

Fixes:

keep the styles plugin usable after applying a style
darktable should now be better able to import some of the data from .xmp’s from other applications
better redraw logic in darkroom mode
it should be less likely to get blurry thumbnails in lighttable mode now
on low end system use lower quality thumbnails
work around some malformed icc profiles
add a mandatory cprt tag to our embedded icc profiles
prevent adobe rgb related trademark issue
some fixes with regard to the colorpicker
tooltips should now be more easily distinguisable
fix build with new glib versions
more assorted small fixes

Added preliminary camera support:

Nikon coolpix p7100 blackpoint fix
Leica basecurve should apply to more camera models now
Pentax k-5 ii (s)
Nikon 1 j3
Nikon 1 s1
Improved panasonic dmc-g5 support
Improved panasonic dmc-lx7 support

Improved color rendition:

Olympus e-m5 enhanced color matrix (frederic crozat)

New white balance presets:

Panasonic dmc-g5 (thouks)
pentax k-5 ii (s) (jack bowling)
sony slt-a77v
nikon d3200
nikon d800 update (wolfgang goetz)

darktable wouldn’t be where it is now if we weren’t able to depend on the great work of others, in particular we’d like to thank:

String freeze for darktable 1.2

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 10:50:12 +0000

Dear all,

since March 3 we are in the string freeze phase for the upcoming darktable 1.2 release. This release will be a major new version introducing tons of new features (as you might have guessed by all the blog articles in the last months …).

Please don’t push or provide patches with any new translatable strings to master or change them (that’s the ones in _("…") ).

multi-instances

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:43:45 +0000

One of the upcoming new feature in darktable is the ability to use the same development module several times. By applying the same module multiple times and combining them with blendif it is possible to do some effects that could not be achieved previously without using external tools like the gimp.

Modules that can be instantiated multiple times have a new icon in their header, next to the “reset” button. Clicking that icon will open a pop-up menu that allows you to create a new instance of the module, change the order in which the different instances are applied, or delete an instance of the module. Each instance can have its own parameters, can be activated or deactivates separately and can use presets. Note that the last instance of a module can’t be deleted, it can only be deactivated.

released 1.1.3

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 02:41:01 +0000

hi,

there is a new point release with a couple of smaller updates.

source tarball:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.3.tar.xz/download

mac disk image:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.3.2.dmg/download

and the usermanual is still the same.

fixes:

check (on build) if glib 2.28 or higher is present
don’t sanitize exif when creating hdr dngs
colorpicker now disappears immediately when disabling it
lens correction now uses loose lens matching (ivan tarozzi)
konica minolta dynax 5d rotation fix
removed an outdated assertion which could cause a crash in rare cases
don’t crash when loading half-corrupted xmps
don’t crash when an imported file contains incomplete gps information
libjpeg-turbo workaround (klaus post)

camera support:

preliminary support for the new nikon d5200

white balance presets:

sony alpha 700 (update to firmware v4)
sony alpha 230 (new)
canon eos 650d (new)
canon eos rebel t2i (fixed)
canon eos m (fixed)

enhanced color rendition:

konica minolta dynax 5d (wolfgang kuehnel)
sony nex 3 (wolfgang kuehnel)
sony alpha 230 (wolfgang kuehnel)
sony rx100 (josef wells)

darktable wouldn’t be where it is now if we weren’t able to depend on the great work of others, in particular we’d like to thank:

Call for LGM donations

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 21:55:46 +0000

Hello everyone,

today we have a request to you, the users of darktable.

As you might know there is an annual meeting of developers and users of free and open source graphics applications (like GIMP, Inkscape, blender, scribus, and also darktable), the Libre Graphics Meeting. This year it’s held in Madrid, Spain, and it’s a great opportunity to discuss things with other developers face-to-face. Last year this has brought us native colord support in darktable.

Importing Lightroom Development

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 11:44:22 +0000

One of the most time consuming work for any photographer is probably the development process. Lot of time behind a computer screen to adjust the curves, the contrast, the colors, the sharpness… All these are application specific, that is, the development process done with Lightroom is not compatible with AfterShot Pro or darktable (to name just few raw processing softwares around). This makes it really difficult to move from one software to another. The risk is loosing all the work done so far with a specific tool. After years, when the library contains some ten thousands pictures no one is ready for the switch.

Released darktable 1.1.2

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:24:16 +0000

Dear all,

we just released darktable 1.1.2, a point release (so nothing too fancy) with a couple of bugfixes and better camera support. Additionally it comes with an updated usermanual which is available here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-usermanual-1.1.2.pdf/download

The tarball can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.2.tar.gz/download

and a new disk image for Mac users is provided as well:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.2.dmg/download

The various packages for your favourite distro are already on their way. The Ubuntu PPA should be updated already for example, and the opensuse package is available from https://software.opensuse.org/package/darktable and will be included in the upcoming opensuse 12.3 thanks to Togan Muftuoglu.

released 1.1.1

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 07:02:17 +0000

we released a patch release:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.1.tar.gz/download

along with an updated usermanual:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-usermanual-1.1.1.pdf/download

this resolves a couple of issues with 1.1. so no new features here, but:

minor reordering of lighttable mode modules (geotagging, keywords and recent collections)
cleaned up the default visible plugins when first starting darktable
in most cases raw files will now show thumbnails in the import dialog (thanks to Mattias Eriksson)
a curve related crash was fixed (#9906 thanks to James C. McPherson)
comma seperated tags should work everywhere now (#9006 thanks to Tobias Ellinghaus)
Ulrich Pegelow fixed a huge amount of opencl related issues, particularly for AMD GPUs
we now deal better with hybrid GPU machines (#9074 by Ulrich Pegelow)
a deadlock in the lens correction module was fixed (#9106 thanks to Ulrich Pegelow)
we don’t delete module presets when cancelling the dialog anymore (#9108 thanks to Tobias Ellinghaus)
we now have better default memory usage settings (which are set upon starting darktable the first time)
initial support for SONY NEX 5R
preliminary/experimental Canon EOS 6D and Sony RX1 support (future changes for these camera’s may (for the time being) retroactively affect your images)
Canon EOS 6D white balance presets (thanks to no_maam_)
lots of updates for the usermanual (make sure you download a new copy from here)
and for our 1.1 the ubuntu packages from the PPAs were built without facebook export support, this has been fixed for 1.1.1

darktable wouldn’t be where it is now if we weren’t able to depend on the great work of others, in particular we’d like to thank:

profiling sensor and photon noise

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 06:48:50 +0000

… and how to get rid of it.

[update 02/05/2018 The information how to create camera noise profiles is outdated please read this tutorial instead!]

[update 20/12/2012: ‘how to profile your camera’ includes instructions with the new gen-profile script]

[update 15/12/2012: no more recompile needed, updated the instructions in the benchmark section and how to run make.sh.]

to summarize the current situation in dt: we have a lot of cool tools wrapped around great algorithms with almost all the knobs you need to get perfect results. while you can actually get really great results it’s this sheer number of knobs that makes finding a good parameter set quite a time consuming task. even creating per-iso presets is not straight forward, as most of the current modules depend on a lot more stuff early on in the pipe (whitebalance, exposure, basecurve, etc).

released darktable 1.1

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:17:08 +0000

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.tar.gz/download

this is a feature release, so there is a lot of new stuff:

general

new camera support, new whitebalance presets, etc., including canon eos m support and samsung nx fix
similarity matching search for images that look alike.
geotagging, complete with map view (thanks to dinamic for starting that ages ago and to houz for actually bringing it home): “ Geotagging in darktable ”
mac os package: “ Bringing current darktable to OS X ”
a lot of bugfixes (mainly thanks to ulrich for his meticulous work)
facebook exporter (for those who have an account there)

ui

reworked the much hated `more plugins’ widget (thanks to boucman)
image grouping: “ Grouping ”
command line interface! “ Exporting images on the command line ”
tone and base curves got a new user interface to better support fine grained workflow as in: “ Mastering color with Lab tone curves ”
visually low-profile controls with finetuning: “ bauhaus widgets ”
color correction module (" color correction ") got a GUI update since the blog post (two circles indicating shadows and highlights instead of the quad).
live view for tethered shooting! “ Live view ”

darkroom

extensive use of edge-aware filtering techniques to suppress noise, halos and ringing all around darktable: “ edge aware image development ”
conditional blending, and a lot of goodies around it! “ Some enhancements to conditional blending ”
magenta highlights: “ magenta highlights ” improved on high-contrast edges to overexposed areas (should get rid of purple highlights on tiny water waves and purple fringes around tree leaves for example)
much improved sharpness for both export and darkroom view, especially for downsampled images and if you use lens corrections or rotations/perspective corrections. check the new options in the preferences dialog, also one more than mentioned in the blog (“demosaicing for zoomed out darkroom mode” to trade performance for even more sharpness): “ Upcoming features: New interpolation modes and better resize ”

color management

improved per-screen color management (should reload the screen profile automatically)
more compatible embedded color profiles (should fix problems on windows viewing our images, if that matters)
read embedded color profiles from jpg

opencl

most of our modules now can take advantage of your computer’s gpu power
caching for compiled opencl kernels (even in case the driver doesn’t do it) for faster startup times

usermanual

find a pdf snapshot here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-usermanual.pdf/download
is reasonably up to date again
not translated so far

translations

two new translations (both portuguese … ;) )
well translated: cs de es fr it ja nl pl pt_BR pt_PT sv
half translated: ca fi gl ro ru sq th zh_CN

enjoy!

released 1.1rc2

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:41:13 +0000

i just uploaded the tarball for the second release candidate for 1.1:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1~rc2.tar.gz/download

packages for your favourite distros should be in the usual place, mac dmg is here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1~rc2.dmg/download

i know there are still translations coming, but something has to be left for the final release after all :)

changes since rc1 aren’t many as to be expected, but we’ve got:

canon eos m support (new rawspeed, also includes samsung nx fix)
usermanual is progressing
two new translations (both portuguese … ;) )
reworked the much hated `more plugins’ widget (thanks to boucman)
a lot of bugfixes (mainly thanks to ulrich for his meticulous work)

enjoy!

What's involved with adding support for new cameras

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:12:25 +0000

Update: Some of the information on this page is oudated. See the github wiki page on camera support for up-to-date instructions.

Say you’re running darktable, you’ve just bought a brand spanking new camera and it’s not supported yet by darktable. Here is a list of things that need to be done (typically we’d recommend to check this before actually buying anything, often you’ll be able to find sample raw files online):

String freeze for darktable 1.1

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:14:48 +0000

Yes.

As of today we are in string freeze for the next darktable version. Version 1.1 will not only contain bug fixes (that too) but a lot of new features. Some of them long-wanted, some of them you haven’t even dreamed about.

As usual we follow our release procedure:

String freeze (as of now). Translators get time to catch up and it’s a good means to stop overly crazy development to be merged into master
A couple of weeks of translating and bug hunting
Then we’ll release release candidates again, to enable bread testing even from users who aren’t comfortable with “unstable” packages or git.
… and finally there will be a new stable version of darktable.

Please help us to make this release another success, translate if there is something to translate, test, find bugs and report them to our bug tracker. If you have any questions, join us on IRC or the mailing lists.

Process HDR images using darktable.

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 17:16:03 +0000

Introduction

This blog post will go through a simple workflow when working with high dynamic ranged images using darktable and the modules for processing, you need use darktable 1.1RC for this guide. The example image used in the screenshots can be downloaded at following link: AtriumMorning

How to make an HDR image

I’m not going into details of the process of making an HDR image, there are many guides out there describing manual methods or automatic ones which some cameras have, but basically, take a bracket shot of your scene and import them into darktable and do no processing at all, export to 16bit tiff and import the tiff files into luminance hdr where you use its align and merge HDR functionality, when HDR is merged and cooked just save the image as EXR image format which you load into darktable for further processing.

Geotagging in darktable

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 22:30:34 +0000

For quite some time people have asked us for a way to geotag their images from within darktable. While that is a nifty feature for sure and really helpful when you take pictures outside of a studio we always had to say something along the lines of “sorry, we don’t have that yet”. Some day however Henrik decided to give it a try and started work in his geo branch. Things started to come together nicely and everything looked really promising, but unfortunately he was a little short in free time so the progress stalled and the code started to bitrot. Since it would be a pity to throw away all the great work Henrik did I kind of adopted the branch and set sails to add the missing bits and pieces to make geotagging a new feature of darktable.

Grouping

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 22:11:45 +0000

People following the development of darktable might have heard that we added a grouping feature. Everyone who hasn’t heard of that yet: We added a grouping feature.

Now that everybody knows about it I should try to explain what it actually is and how it works/how to use it. For the technical specification you can have a look at the design specs.

![Grouping turned off](grouping_off.jpg)

Grouping turned off

The first change in the GUI that can be noticed is a little ‘G’ button. Well, first of all we have to notice that there are two kinds of ‘G’ in the GUI: one in the top toolbar, next to the preferences wheel. The other kind is on images frames which are part of a group, next to the yin-yang-edited symbol.

edge aware image development

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 00:56:42 +0000

in an ideal world, an image is piecewise smooth. it has soft gradients, some detail and edges. in particular there’s no noise and the edges are sharp. given these assumptions, you can do a lot of cool things to your pictures, using techniques like frequency space editing, wavelets, or local histograms.

darktable’s equalizer module demonstrates some of this, using the wavelet approach. you can use it to sharpen and denoise, enhance or attenuate certain frequencies in your image, while keeping the edges intact.

Experimental darktable OS X image

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 21:33:34 +0000

After the progress reported in the latest blog post on the OS X port of darktable we now have something new for the Mac users:

parafin just released an experimental DMG image of darktable!

Please be aware of this being an experimental OS X build as well as experimental software in general – it’s based on the latest development version of darktable that will be darktable 1.1 someday in the future.

Bringing current darktable to OS X

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 19:44:11 +0000

darktable has been software of my choice for raw photo development for quite some time now, I’ve occasionally submitted bug reports and patches and kept an eye on current development by using git master version. My main operating system is Linux, which is the priority target of darktable support, but recently I bought MacBook Air to take with me on trips and such. Also my current project at work consists of porting a library to OS X, so this presented to me as a great opportunity to contribute to one of my favorite open-source projects and make darktable work reliably on Macs. Some work has already been done in the past, there’s even a package of an old darktable version for OS X, but of course I was interested in bringing the latest darktable experience to OS X.

darktable 1.0.5 released

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:34:47 +0000

It’s our pleasure to announce that darktable-1.0.5 has been released. Find the tarball on sf.net:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.0/darktable-1.0.5.tar.gz/download

The Ubuntu PPAs have been built already, you should get them with your next update automatically if you subscribed to Pascal’s PPA.

This has a good chance of being the last one in a series of stable releases (with stuff backported from our latest and greatest). Thanks to Pascal for maintaining it! As such, it comes with a short list of maintenance things as change log:

Some enhancements to conditional blending

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:08:50 +0000

Conditional blending, also known as “blend if”, is a feature which is currently under development in our master branch. A general description of the idea together with some examples can be found here. In short, conditional blending allows you to limit the effect of a module to certain pixels of an image, determined by their color coordinates. For modules in Lab space, you can restrict the effect of a module depending on the pixel’s L, a, and b value. For modules in RGB space, you can restrict the effect of a module depending on color channels Red, Green, and Blue plus a Gray value.

magenta highlights

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:51:08 +0000

false color highlights seem to be an issue frequently, so here’s some quick faq about it. alexandre, please excuse all the outward references ;)

why are my highlights magenta?

that’s how the sensor works. it collects a couple of photons, at some point it fills up and rejects to deliver any more useful information past this point. unfortunately that doesn’t happen at the same time for all color channels.

how does the sensor work?

usually digital cameras come with a color filter array (CFA) of absorptive filters in front of an array of CCD or CMOS sensor which collect electrons proportional to the incoming photons according to the photoelectric effect.

Exporting images on the command line

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:13:10 +0000

Recent builds from git will bring you a new executable, “darktable-cli”. With this tool you can export images using the processing power of darktable on the command line.

The simplest way to call the utility is

darktable-cli <input> <output>

This will take the input image, look for the XMP file associated with it, process it at maximal resolution and write the output to output, trying to guess the output format from the output filename. You can also explicitly give a XMP file by running

Fixed: darktable crashing Unity

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 13:45:16 +0000

Some Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) users who use Ubuntu’s default Unity desktop environment may have noticed that it’s commonplace for Unity to crash when closing darktable. It so happens that darktable is exposing a bug in Unity, which got fixed upstream with a one-liner patch.

The above fix will be available in the next major update of Unity (5.14), but in the meanwhile I cherry picked the relevant patch to the current released version of Unity (5.12). The fixed version of Unity is available from a special temporary PPA:

darktable 1.0.4 released

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 00:13:47 +0000

Pascal was so kind to tend to a stable branch, the next incarnation of which we have the good fortune to announce.

The changes over darktable 1.0.3 are:

More robust OpenMP compiler detection code
New warming/cooling filter presets for color correction plugin
Lighttable thumbnails should be slightly faster and sharper
Correctly restore panels when using Tab.
Checking if an export target directly is read-only
Writing of hierarchical tags in our .xmp has been improved

Community contributions to the project

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 15:57:15 +0000

We heard quite some voices from users requesting better possibilities to contribute to the project. Here they are.

In our dev meeting (or if you had a closer look: even before) we decided to ditch the old bug tracker in favor for a new one: Redmine, hosted by PolarFox, just on the same server as our website lives. This comes with some long-wanted features – and more liberty in configuration.

Upcoming features: New interpolation modes and better resize

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 07:34:51 +0000

darktable is all about providing you the best tools in order to get the most out of your photographies. This blog entry will explain how an existing feature can help you get more detailed exports and it will try to give you a glimpse of what is cooking in an unscheduled but upcoming version of darktable for even better detail preservation.

Make sure to enable High Quality Resampling for exporting your photographies

In darktable, the pixel pipeline is responsible for processing your photography from demosaic up to the point it is passed over to the output subsystem (saving in tiff, jpeg…).

Moving the git repo to github [done]

Thu, 31 May 2012 13:24:17 +0000

**Update: **the git repository officially resides in github now.

Today we are moving our git repo from sf.net to github, as it was agreed in the developer meeting that took place yesterday. This will happen today 22:00 – 23:00 CEST

What should I do now?

Depends on the role you play in the project.

You have commit rights into current sf.net repository: please open an account in github if you don’t have any and make me know it. I will give you those permits there, but do not push there for now, your changed will be lost.
You don’t have commit rights but regularly contribute back patches to darktable: please consider doing a fork of our repo in github and make a branch there for your patches. Later on make a pull request to let us know that we should pull from your branch.
If you make some patches, but not in a regular way, you can also benefit of having your own fork … it will allow to publish your changes, access them from remote places, and have a backup place for your repo in case of disaster.
You only track the repo. Wait until the switch is made and follow the instructions in this post.

What is going to happen just before the switch?

Live view

Wed, 30 May 2012 22:10:52 +0000

For quite some time darktable supports tethering your camera. What was missing all the time was live view. This is about to change though. If you use master (and have a camera supporting it) you can now either use the eye button in the “camera settings” module or hit ‘v’ on your keyboard to start live view from within tethering mode. Since the preview is scaled to fit your screen it might be a good idea to hide some of the side panels. If you are using a Canon EOS (I only tested this with my 40D) you can also use your middle mouse button to zoom into the preview. Another click brings you back to regular live view.

darktable and Solaris: It Just Works™ ... and there are some nifty benefits too

Mon, 07 May 2012 23:57:08 +0000

I’m the self-appointed maintainer of darktable on Solaris, which is a fairly easy gig to keep on top of.

Here’s why that is so: darktable’s codebase is very portable. It’s not riddled with operating system-specific assumptions; it uses standard C (with some C++), and apart from the OpenCL support every prerequisite library is buildable on Solaris with gcc or g++. I’d prefer to use Oracle Solaris Studio because that’s my work compiler, but there’s no great incentive for me to beat up on all the prerequisites to make them behave.

darktable 1.0.3 released

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:25:13 +0000

Pascal de Bruijn did some good work backporting some of the progress from git master to the 1.0 release. We packed that into a tarball, here it is:

~~https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.0/darktable-1.0.1.tar.gz/download~~

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.0/darktable-1.0.3.tar.gz/download

(We had a problem packaging sources, so 1.0.3 is now on air. Please use it instead of 1.0.1)

As usual we have Ubuntu Packages are readily available on Pascal’s PPA, for Lucid, Natty, Oneiric and Precise:

https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-release

https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-release-plus

And these are the major changes:

Changing server [update]

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:56:44 +0000

We are about to move our website to a new server. This will give us a performance boost (e.g. in terms of page loading speed) and might give us the chance to provide some more services in the future.

Due to this the comments are closed as of now until everything is in place again. We hope everything runs smoothly – if not, be patient. :)

… and I take this as an opportunity to thank PolarFox again for hosting darktable’s website and taking care of all technical server stuff!

darktable and Memory

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:11:48 +0000

or “How to drive away the evil skull”

At all times main memory was one of the most limited resources in computing. Although from 20 years to now the memory setup of a typical desktop PC has increased by a factor of several thousands (from less than a megabyte to a few gigabytes), we still need to consider how to efficiently handle that resource.

The reason of course lies in the increasing demands of modern applications. Today it might be darktable which is the single most challenging software to hit the boundaries of your system.

darktable 1.0 released

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 07:53:25 +0000

It is done, 1.0 is out. I sent out most of the new features with the announcement for 1.0rc2 a few weeks ago already, but for completeness, here it is again:

New cameras supported
- Leica M9
- NX100/NX5/NX10/NX11
- Panasonic DMC-GX1
- Pentax K-r
- Canon Powershot S100
- Olympus XZ-1
- Olympus E-P3
- Sony DSLR A330
- Sony NEX-5N
- Canon EOS 1000D
- Canon EOS 600D
- Sony Alpha 390
- Fuji Finepix HS20EXR
New and updated translations (we now have chinese!)
New modules:
- shadows & highlights
- enhanced tone curve. now operates in a and b channels as well
Refactored modules:
- import
- snapshots (enable sliding separation line between before/after images)
- metadata
New image cache
- faster concurrent access and insertion
- reduces needed memory
- more thumbnails stored on disk
- read embedded jpegs for creating thumbnails (faster folder import)
Increased general speed on sqlite3 (journaled, pagesize optimizations)
Reworked, modular UI
Keyboard shortcuts support – key accelerators (GSoC)
Unity launcher support (Ubuntu)
Quicktool bar: exposure, presets and styles
New color picker
Web gallery export now with next/prev buttons per image
Removed gconf: not used anymore, we have our own backend
Bugfixes

Also, a couple of caveats to keep in mind this time:

color correction

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 05:34:56 +0000

this is one of the oldest modules in darktable. it appeared to me that it probably lacks an example to discover how useful it can be … so here goes the example.

this started off to be a wrapper around the gegl:whitebalance operation, which works in Lab color space and is able to give dark and bright colors a different color tint, interpolating between the two for mid tones.

so suppose you have the following image:

Second release candidate dt1.0~rc2

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:57:50 +0000

Our second release candidate is out! We have had a couple of tiny bugfixes, better translations, new rawspeed (brings support for the new Canon 5D Mark3), and slight consistency fixes in the GUI since rc1.

You can get the tarball from here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.0/darktable-1.0~rc2.tar.gz/download

Getting closer!

Upcoming features: Conditional Blending

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:36:43 +0000

or “If one slider is not enough”

Diligent readers of our small blog series are already aware of the blending feature that darktable offers as part of many modules. Instead of just handing over their result to the subsequent module in pixelpipe, “blending modules” take a moment to reconsider. Based on the blend setting they will take their original output together with their input and do a re-processing. As an example refer to here, where we took blend mode “overlay” with module “lowpass” to do shadow recovery.

Release Candidate darktable1.0~rc1

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 08:46:51 +0000

There are still bug fixes coming, which is good. But nevertheless we just released a release candidate tarball, available for download from here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.0/darktable-1.0~rc1.tar.gz/download

which will hopefully help us to get rid of the last couple of remaining bugs before 1.0. For install instructions have a look on how to compile from source.

This is a rough outline of the changes since 0.9.3 (quite sure we forgot something, it’s been > 1000 commits):

darktable and OpenCL (updated)

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 20:29:00 +0000

Many readers will have already heard about GPU processing and the fact that darktable can make use of OpenCL to improve performance. As we still lack a detailed documentation of that topic, please find here a few explanations and howtos.

The Background

Processing high resolution images belongs to the more demanding tasks in modern computing. Both, in terms of memory requirements and in terms of CPU power, getting the best out of a typical 15, 20 or 25 Megapixel image can quickly bring your computer to its limits.

bauhaus widgets

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 03:48:49 +0000

disclaimer: this is only to tease you and will not make it into the next release, but the one after …

when reading gui-guidelines, most of them seem to be too general, or too specific for a certain kind of programming environment (gnome and gtk, qt, etc).

for our purposes, i found the fundamental principles of the bauhaus school to be more appropriate. radical simplicity, no unnecessary shape or line, such as a pseudo 3d-bevel-border around ui elements. the underlying grid should be visible because all elements are aligned, not because it is drawn. only simple shapes are allowed, and everything should integrate seamlessly into the background of the panel.

String freeze for darktable 1.0

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 01:13:43 +0000

We are in string freeze for the master branch now. Translators might now update their translations for the upcoming release of

darktable 1.0

There will be tons of new features, stay tuned!

If you’re willing to help getting this out of the door soon you might want to install the development version and help out to track down some bugs. You can find an installation guide here and some informations for contributing backtraces for bugs here.

Shadow recovery revisited

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:21:49 +0000

One of the remaining shortcomings of digital cameras is their rather low dynamic range in comparison to analog – especially black-and-white – film. Scenes with strong differences between highlights and shadows are very difficult to capture. Even if they are exposed properly with no blown-out highlights they will too often only give acceptable results after extensive post-processing.

Fortunately, darktable is progressing with a high pace. Some days ago I wrote an article on how to recover shadows with a technique using lowpass filter plus blend mode (" Using lowpass filter to recover shadows "). In between a new, even better module called “shadows and highlights” was integrated into darktable, that obsoletes this technique.

Using lowpass filter to recover shadows

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:50:28 +0000

Outdoor photographers are often confronted with unfavorable light conditions. This often entails too high contrast. Two of the most frequent consequences are blown highlights and deep shadows in your digital images. Overexposed highlights are challenging to repair in digital post post-processing, still darktable offers a decent set of valuable tools as long as you take your pictures in raw (see Jo’s blog post “ why you want raw ”). Fortunately, it’s much easier to take care of the deep shadows.

Mastering color with Lab tone curves

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:38:25 +0000

or “How to bring the jungle back”

Since its early beginnings darktable has a tone curve module that is able to alter the gray level distribution of an image. Recently we did an enhancement: tone curve is now able to control the full Lab color space with separate curves for the L, a and b channel. People who are used to curve tools in RGB, at first might get puzzled over the results of these three curves; they show marked differences to the typical RGB curve. Especially a and b channels need to be dealt with in the right way; not doing so will give you strong off-colors. To spare you frustration here are some explanations and examples.

why you want raw

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:31:06 +0000

or: how to rescue your shot after the fact.

also: how to use color zones for black and white.

sometimes i’m surprised by what kind of data is hidden in my raw images, and i want to pass this on to those of our users who happily take pictures in jpg. actually it’s just a short story about a typical communication problem between me and my camera and the way darktable moderates that, after the fact.

Interview with Richard Hughes

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:26:45 +0000

Mukund Sivaraman from banu.com held an interesting interview with Richard Hughes, the maker of the ColorHug colorimeter:

The ColorHug is a colorimeter that can be used to calibrate computer displays. It was created by Richard Hughes (hughsie). It is a fully open hardware project, and the design, drivers and firmware are available on the Gitorious code hosting website.

Read the full interview here: https://banu.com/blog/41/interview-of-colorhug-maker-richard-hughes/

Thanks to Mukund for the excerpt!

More information on the ColorHug can be found on Richard’s website: http://www.hughski.com/.

Color Management On Linux

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:42:57 +0000

Pascal de Bruijn wrote an extensive article about color management on Linux systems, covering basic explanations as well as the description of some tools.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what color management is, what it is supposed to do, and most particularly how to use it on Linux.

Find the article here:

https://encrypted.pcode.nl/blog/2012/01/29/color-management-on-linux/

darktable Book Maintenance Release (v1.1.1)

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:56:28 +0000

Stefano Fornari has just released a new version of the book Digital photo development with darktable.

Version 1.1.1 is a maintenance update. The release fixes a number of typos and other small editorial changes suggested by the community.

Check out the pdf or packaged version and, as usual, send your comments and feedback to the darktable user list.

Released 0.9.3

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:30:29 +0000

As most of you probably noticed by now, we released 0.9.3. The tar file can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/0.9/darktable-0.9.3.tar.gz/download

Pascal updated his ppa for ubuntu here: https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-release or https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-release-plus (with Exiv2 0.22, and Lensfun 0.2.5 + lens data from svn).

and made great new screencasts explaining a couple of features and differences to 0.9.2. You can find them on our resources page or Pascal’s website

It is a comparatively minor update to our stable 0.9.x series. It does not contain many very cool new features and big changes we have in git, because we don’t consider them stable enough yet. Nontheless, it contains 272 commits over the previous release 0.9.2, mainly containing:

darktable and research

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 04:20:06 +0000

you might have noticed our equalizer tool, and been confused by it and the many controls. that’s probably partly because you didn’t see a similar thing before, we had to develop it first.

very short history

behind the ui is a powerful frequency domain processing technique, based on wavelets. the most commonly used wavelets are based on the lifting scheme [swe97], work in a data-independent way, and are decimated (i.e. the coarse coefficients are much more sparse than the fine ones). while this allows for very fast implementations, data-independent wavelets can lead to blurring or ringing around edges (depending on what you do to the coefficients during image enhancement). raanan fattal had quite an inspiring paper at siggraph 2009 [fat09] introducing edge weights into the lifting scheme to overcome this. while the method is fast, produces okay results (the legacy equalizer version I was based on this), it has some problems caused by the decimation. in particular, decimated wavelets are not shift-invariant, which means your results will change if you slightly crop the image for example. actually the same author also had a solution for that earlier already [far07], in a different context, and not quite as fast.

different kind of saturation

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:08:53 +0000

different kind of saturation

there are many different ways of tuning saturation, darktable does offer a few alternative ways to alter saturation and the reason for this post is to clarify what they do and how they work. the image on left is the original untouched image used for the different examples below, use it as a reference for comparing the results of the different kind of saturation described below, the resulting effects is exaggerated to make it easier to spot the differences.

a new caching backend

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 06:31:42 +0000

since i probably tend to make this more technical than any reader would like to, here’s the take home message:

much faster import of folders
much faster thumbnail creation for first-time images
much improved scalability wrt concurrency
much improved scalability wrt total number of images in your database (should be good up to around 500 million images)
much improved robustness (no more deleting ~/.cache/darktable/mipmaps all the time, yay)

some context:

darktable’s light table mode shows you your image collection in arbitrary order and filtered by arbitrary queries to the underlying database. that means that there is quite some uncertainty about which thumbnails you are going to need in the next second. so we rely on a caching mechanism that stores a few thumbnails, regenerates them as needed, and evicts not so frequently used thumbnails from the cache.

released 0.9.2

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 12:28:08 +0000

we released version 0.9.2, with a few bugfixes on top of release 0.9.1. this is a new point release in the stable branch thus there are no new features, just

updated translations
tiling for memory hungry operations and as workaround for old opencl 1.0 drivers
new color matrices and white balance presets
a lot of stability issues have been resolved
a lot of performance improvements (more sse code, better opencl code)

new packages are available, check the installation instructions for more infos!

released 0.9.1

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:09:17 +0000

we released version 0.9.1, with a few bugfixes on top of release 0.9. and 184 patches, among them

new rawspeed, dcraw, libraw
fixed various segfaults and deadlocks
the pipeline is now more real HDR (unbounded color management, no more gamut clipping in between)
fixed a nasty bug which could cause complete loss of history for an image
darktable-faster now plays nicely with darktablerc (non-gconf)
lots of opencl improvements
updated translations
second part of our GSoC: customizable keyboard shortcuts!

check the installation instructions for more infos!

Introducing The Levels Module

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 21:22:56 +0000

![Screenshot](Screenshot.png)

For my final GSOC 2011 task, I set out to build a levels module for darktable, which would behave more or less like the levels tool in GIMP and similar image editors. The user sets a white point, black point, and middle grey point for their image on a histogram, and the tool adjusts the image to match the chosen boundaries. In my git branch, I now have the levels module functional.

A Tour Of The New Colorpicker

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:25:12 +0000

For my third GSOC task, I’ve replaced darktable’s old bottom-bar colorpicker with a new one one that acts as a module in darktable mode. The new picker adds some features over the old version, which some of you will hopefully find helpful. Specifically, we have four new additions:

You can now choose point or area color picking modes.
I’ve added a simple storage system for color samples.
The big new addition is live samples, which will allow you to mark an area or point in your image and keep updated as the color at that location changes.
When picking, the image histogram will only display the area or point that you have selected.

Now, lets take a quick tour of the new interface. This is more or less what you should see initially.

That other OS

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:56:43 +0000

The last time I posted to this blog it was my April Fool’s Joke about a file manager (which happened to be just an embedded shell). Since a few people didn’t like that at all I want to assure you that this is no joke at all. However, if you are a Windows user and feel easily offended, then stop reading now.

Still here? Great. I managed to compile darktable for Windows.

darktable’s New Keyboard Shortcut System

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:15:19 +0000

It took longer than I expected thanks to some unforeseen twists and turns, but the new keyboard accelerator system is basically finished. There may still be some need for minor bug fixes and string changes (in particular, the new translation system needs to be tested out), but by and large everything that needs to be in place is, and next week I plan to start working on changes to the color picker module. Now that the accelerator interface is stable, lets take a little tour of it.

The State of darktable Keyboard Input

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 21:32:50 +0000

I’m about a week in on my work on darktable’s keyboard input system, and I’m hoping by the end of this week to be more or less done. Here’s a quick look at where I am and where I’m going.

The Current Status

If you check out my git branch (it’s called bieber), you’ll find that so far I’ve removed all of the explicit calls to darktable’s old accelerator registration system, and replaced them with calls to gtk_accel_map_add_entry and gtk_accel_group_connect_by_path. These functions create an entry in a global accelerator table, linking an accelerator to a path that looks something like, for instance, /iops/clipping/commit, rather than a specific keycode. Other GTK function calls will later give us the ability to change the actual key mappings for these paths at runtime, so user remapping will be a breeze. If you compile and run darktable from my branch at the moment, you’ll see a file called “testkeys” pop up in your current working directory. This is what the GTK keybindings file looks like, at this point just auto-generated from the default key mappings specified in the source code. Soon you’ll be able to modify this file (either directly or from an interface within Dartable’s preferences) to change your shortcut key mappings.

Glade Removal Complete, Moving on to Keyboard Accelerators

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:33:37 +0000

As of last week, the removal of libglade from darktable is functionally complete. The gladefile has been deleted, along with all references to libglade in the code and the Cmake files. Some refactoring may still be ideal, and I’ll be rearranging some code in my free time, but the task is basically completed. Now it’s time to move on to handling keyboard shortcuts.

My plan is to make all keyboard accelerators in darktable application-wide, so that the user won’t have to worry about the current focus when entering a shortcut. There will be mode-specific shortcuts, but nothing module specific. Instead of entering the specific key to use for the shortcut, code registering shortcuts will now instead make an entry in a table with a name for the shortcut and a default key to use, which may be remapped by the user. Remapping will be handled in a tab of the preferences dialog, in similar fashion to the keyboard shortcuts dialog in GIMP.

released 0.9

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:08:28 +0000

we released version 0.9, with many new features:

run-time switchable opencl to exploit all the power of your GPU whenever you decide to install the driver
many new modules, including a spot removal tool, better denoising (on raw pixels and non-local means) and many more
blend operations, overlay your module only 20 percent if you want
spot removal tool
low light vision tool
non-local-means denoising (relatively fast for nlmeans, but still slow)
first part of the google summer of code project already merged
framing module (adds postcard borders to match given aspect ratio)
tonemapping a lot faster now (probably the fastest high-dimensional bilateral filter available today)
changed images come with the darktable|changed tag

more updates to the page/install instructions to come, but you should be good by just extracting the tarball and typing ./build.sh. enjoy! and thanks to all our many contributors!

libglade Removal: The First Week

Tue, 31 May 2011 21:34:22 +0000

I’m now a week into my first task of removing darktable’s dependency on libglade, so here’s a quick look at my progress so far. In the first week I started out by diving in and figuring out how to instantiate all the widgets I would need, starting with the lowest levels and working my way up. It took a little while, but with a combination of the Gtk documentation and some guesswork aided by autocomplete I’ve more or less figured out all the function calls that I need to create widgets, modify their states, attach them to containers, and so forth.

GSOC 2011 Starts Today

Mon, 23 May 2011 21:36:18 +0000

Today I’ll be starting on my Summer of Code project for darktable, so I thought I’d start off with a blog post about just what I’ll be doing. This Summer I’ll be focusing on UI improvements in darktable, and I have four separate tasks to complete, in this order.

Removing the libglade dependence.

There are two ways to construct a graphical interface in software: one is to build your interface one element at a time in your source code, and the other is to use a graphical tool to build a description of your desired interface that you can use a library (libglade in our case) to construct when the program actually runs. Currently, darktable uses both techniques. Much of the user interface is provided by libglade, but some elements are also created in code. My first task for the Summer will be to remove this dependence on libglade and construct the entire interface entirely in code. You won’t see any changes in the UI as a direct result of this, but it should make it easier for other developers going forward to make modifications to the user interface.

File management

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 22:06:55 +0000

Whoever has followed the mailing lists or IRC has seen remarks that darktable lacks a feature complete file manager. Currently we only have a button which lets the user delete files from disk, but there is no way to move them, copy them, rename them, … Every time someone has shown up to suggest something beyond that we made clear that “darktable is not a file manager”. We even have a FAQ entry about that.

darktable user manual revisited

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 22:08:40 +0000

Up till recently the usermanual has been only available for those who got the source and the necessary tools to generate and even than it would generate a HUGE pdf file due to the amount of high resolution of screenshots. I revisited the build system with the goals of shrink-en the size of the final PDF and to produce an html output that could be integrated in our website.

GSoC 2011

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:10:59 +0000

As some of you might have noticed, darktable got accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code (warning, site doesn’t work with every browser …). Currently we are seeing a few possible students lurking around in IRC, preparing their proposals in our Wiki and getting familiar with the program, code and community. If everything keeps going so smoothly this will be just f****ing awesome. If not we still have the excuse that it’s our first time, so we didn’t know what we were doing.

“Hello, world!” – yet another new blog?

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 22:11:29 +0000

“Why does darktable need a blog?” you might ask. The answer is quite simple: While we do have a mailing list (actually there are three) which is quite active, most decisions and background informations happen in IRC (#darktable on FreeNode). This is great for fast communications, but it doesn’t allow interested users to follow what we actually (want to) do.

I hope that this blog will be an annotated commit log on the one hand showing the progress we make and a persistent archive of important decisions taken by us on the other hand.

Why GIMP doesn’t play well with darktable

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 22:11:10 +0000

Every now and then the question arises why we don’t have a button in darktable to open the current image in GIMP. Everytime I answer more or less the same.

The arguments of those requesting the button are along the line of “$PROGRAM has it, so it shouldn’t be hard to do” and “I really need to do some small retouching, so it would save me lots of time”.

Well, to understand why we don’t have it I have to stress two features of darktable. First of all, every action is done non-destructive. What that means is that you never edit the actual data in your raw file, but “record” a list of actions (the history in darkroom mode and the XMP files) which shall be executed to get the final image. This list can be changed afterwards without negative side effects since those actions can just be recomputed. The second nice thing in darktable is that we work with high bit depths (32 bit floating point) to get the best possible result.

released 0.8

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:07:53 +0000

we released version 0.8, which obsoletes 0.7.1 in a lot of ways:

much faster image loading due to rawspeed, an awesome new library by klaus post @rawstudio
lots of performance improvements in our caches and pixel pipelines (together with the above like 5x–10x)
gpu computing using opencl (for graphics boards that support it) for a lot of common modules, to give a huge performance boost
overhauled collection module for more flexible image collections
metadata editor (set author and copyright information etc)
fast demosaicing now done on roi and in floating point
HDR bracketing and tone mapping (somewhat experimental)
flickr upload
new languages: thai and japanese
lots of new color matrices and white balance presets
lots of bugfixes

according to the git log, this release introduces over 900 new commits brought to you by (in order of commits): johannes hanika, Tobias Ellinghaus, Henrik Andersson, Pascal de Bruijn, Ger Siemerink, Bruce Guenter, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo, Boucman, Alexandre Prokoudine, Simon Spannagel, Olivier, Jochen, Karl Mikaelsson, Jochen Schroeder, Brian Teague, Pascal Obry, calca, Ville Pätsi, Uli Scholler, Thierry Leconte, Pacsal de Bruijn, and Alex Chateau. special thanks to Pacsal ;) and to Robert Park for an awesome amount of color matrices created with his help, also for Klaus Staedtler for the new icons.

released 0.7.1

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:07:31 +0000

we released version 0.7.1, a small bugfix release to fix up some nuisances in 0.7:

some more white balance presets
layout fixes for overlong profile names
styles now actually work
extensive documentation in form of screencasts

enjoy the release, but be aware that you’ll be missing out on a lot of significant speed improvements and cool new features when using the release instead of git :)

released 0.7

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 22:06:38 +0000

we released version 0.7 this weekend. some of the changes:

.xmp is now used instead of .dt for sidecars
libraw with dcraw 9.05
plug-ins of darkroom mode are now in groups/tabs
new darkroom plug-ins: zone system, relight, graduated neutral density, watermark
changes can now be saved into named processing styles
initial preferences dialog was added
custom shooting settings can be added in tethering mode
initial user manual was written, available in english, german, french, dutch, and swedish
moved to xdg config file standard
languages: ca cs de es fi fr gl it nl pl ru sq sv
reset labels: double click the label to only reset this option, not the whole plug-in
a cropped image can now be recropped without resetting the whole plug-in (press backspace)
lots of new cameras with enhanced support (input profiles and base curves)
recursive image import
962 commits since release-0.6 :)

again thanks for the great support from all our contributors (see about dialog, press on darktable version number in gui), and stay tuned for 0.8 to come soon, with a lot more features!

released 0.6

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 22:05:31 +0000

finally a new release … it has been so long that i hardly remember all the changes. let’s try to list the most important ones:

libraw 0.10.0-beta3
tethered shooting mode
import from camera via gphoto2
new, improved modules: vignetting, velvia, grain, denoise (via bilateral filter), color transfer, channel mixer …
crop/rotate: straighten tool, perspective correction, guide lines (ported from digikam)
lots of new input color matrices and base curves
openexr export
database format changed, which greatly improves speed (and cuts down used disk memory)
film strip view in darkroom mode for quick image switching
cool alternative demosaicing algorithms (ported from rawtherapee): dcb, amaze, vcd, c/a autocorrection
customizable preset system for all darkroom modules with auto application to matching images, selected by exif
reworked export system to modularly support export to picasa webalbum, email, or disk in jpg, png, 8/16-tiff, pfm, exr, or 16-ppm.
lots of performance enhancements (modules denoise and local contrast are still slow)
translations: de es fi fr gl nl ru sv

as always, the release comes with a warning: it will be outdated horribly in very short time (even now git master has some really cool new features over the release tarball …). thanks to all contributors, translators, and everyone on #darktable!

released 0.5

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:03:37 +0000

features, features, features ;)

image tagging
flexible database queries by exif and custom tags
powerful color zones plug-in, to selectively alter only some colors
french translation
libraw 0.8.5
new light table mode layout: file manager
inotify support
tiff 8-bit and 16-bit export
new, more powerful widgets to replace sliders and spin buttons (derived from libphat)
reworked, fully color managed processing pipeline
supplied some useful base curves
image cache can now enforce a strict memory limit
snapshots: side-by-side comparisons in darkroom mode
fixed aspect ratio and horizontal/vertical flipping in crop module
spot auto exposure
highlight reconstruction
white balance presets with fine-tuning (from ufraw)
… countless small improvements

released 0.4

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:02:53 +0000

as usual, the new release comes with lots of new features:

lens defect correction (lensfun)
internationalization (russian and swedish translation)
backup files for image editing history and tagging (.dt and .dttags) apart from database
gconf preferences handling
lighttable mode modules
libraw 0.8.4 and low-level option interface from dt
color filter-based monochrome conversion
dt now reads _ICC_PROFILE atom from X server
more sophisticated white balance
core database layout prepared for tagging system (to come in 0.5)
lots of bugfixes
lots of gui tweaks and presets

0.3 beta released

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:02:30 +0000

there have been some major internal changes in dt since 0.2, and some of them result in cool new features for the user, so it is time to pass it on to the non-git audience. this includes:

most processing is now being done in a new color space (L a/L b/L). this results in nicer exposure/tonecurve/denoise/color correction results.
the pixel pipeline is now free to change dimensions of the image, which makes a crop/rotate operation (and lensfun in the future) possible.
the code is now organised as modules (image operations and views such as lighttable and darkroom).
the lighttable view can filter and sort by rating.
color management using lcms.

0.2 beta is out!

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:00:19 +0000

there have been some major changes in the last months. first, the processing backend has been replaced completely, based on an interface which is able to use libgegl (but currently doesn’t, until gegl is fast enough). all operations are encapsulated in run-time loaded plug-ins. raw reading is now based on libraw-0.8. the lighttable got a slightly different look, and more image operations have been implemented (e.g. luma/chroma denoising). this release is still marked beta, which should indicate that not all features are yet in (especially some lighttable related tasks such as filtering, sorting etc.), and not everything will work bug-free and stable yet.