Hi there -

I am almost fully switched over from lightroom and am quite impressed with darktable. I've written a plugin to help with some tasks I need to do for large project and have been trying to dial in a half decent workflow complete with midi control to allow for fast processing/editing of several thousand very old yet newly digitized images. (Basically, I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty).

One of my stumbling blocks is in the retouch module. While is is obviously powerful, I'm trying to determine if there's a way to approximate the fast healing/touchup/cloning that I can do in LR. I think it's because of the 'ai' context awareness where I can correct scratches, image defects, dust/water spots very quickly, and quickly adjust to improve the corrections as needed.

Darktable seems to use either an absolute or relative (geometric translation) source area to feed the retouching, but there is no capability to make context aware initial guesses as to a usable source. (this is an AI thing, I expect).

So the question - is this something that is likely to be added/improved over time? I'm not sure where it falls in the overall AI stance for darktable. (I imagine an external script to an AI model could work, but without it integrated, I imagine it'd be very clunky for heavy use).

At this point, I probably just have to stick with LR for this project just for the sake of efficiency here (when it's done, I don't see why I wouldn't switch). But I'm trying to understand the darktable roadmap here.

Very curious.

I've been working on a personal project to see how far I could get with Claude Code.

I used to be a darktable user years ago, but I moved away from it mainly because editing felt too slow and I found the workflow wasn't a good fit for me. That said, I always recognised the power of darktable.

I recently came back to it because I really like its solid processing pipeline, but I wanted a faster, more intuitive editing experience. So I started building Immage. It's darktable 5.7 (development branch) running in headless mode, with a Rust backend and a React GUI.

The design and tech stack are inspired by RapidRAW (but it borrows no code), while the workflow is closer to other editors.

I've extended the GUI to support a few things I wanted, mainly:
- Immich integration as a DAM
- Importing from SD cards, with duplicate detection both locally and against external libraries in Immich.
- Using CLIP to search my photo collection of around 150,000 images across 2 TB of storage in seconds.
- Exporting images directly to Immich albums, as well as to the drive I use for my digital photo frame.

A rearranged and simplified GUI that more closely follows the layout and workflow of mainstream photo editors.

One thing I really wanted to ensure was compatibility with darktable itself. I've opened images edited in Immage in darktable 5.7, and they render identically, with the full edit history and all modules intact. Immage doesn't expose every darktable control, but you can always open an image in darktable and fine-tune it there.

I also experimented with recreating a Zone System module, which you can see in the video. It's entirely GUI-side, combining existing darktable modules to achieve the effect. As with the rest of the project, no darktable processing code has been changed.

Yes, it's vibe-coded. This is how far I've got in just two weeks. Once my token allowance resets, I have a bunch of bug fixes and features to work on.

I've been an IT professional for decades, mainly working on infrastructure, architecture and machine learning, so most of my own coding experience has been in scripting rather than building applications like this.

If there's enough interest, I'll release it on GitHub in a couple of weeks, once I'm happy with the current state of things.

I hope you forgive a noobie for a basic question. As far as I've read, tonemapping brings a huge load of information into a range that is able to being handled by a normal monitor.

I have no tonemapping preset and don't use it (working a lot with exposure and tone equalizer) and do not feel that I am missing out on anything. Yet many tutorials and youtubers say that using one is a prerequisite.

My question is -is it really? And if so, it is enough to just turn one on and leave it be?

For the life of me I can't understand why a ton of images of mine are now leaning blue when in the darkroom, but on export, and the preview in the top left they're different colors?

On the lighttable preview, it gives me the darkroom image.

This only recently started happening, and I don't think any of my settings have changed. This occurs on import with no modules applied as well. All color profiles are either standard or default.

Some pics I took in Leiden with my a6700.
I still feel a bit like a beginner in darktable, but generally I'm happy with how the pics turn out :)

Idk if it was a skill issue for me or what but I was never able to fully achive my vision for a photgraph with adobe, I'm far from any level of mastery, I thank everything that made me exist in the same time as DT.

I'm open to any opinion regrading the edit.

I've been working on a fork of Darktable to add an API that in turn can be exercised by things like an MCP server or web app. I've been experimenting with adding in AI infill to remove unwanted objects from a photo.

Instructions for getting everything build is here: https://github.com/mmcc-xx/darktable-api-mcp

This feature relies on some new compositing functionality that is only in the darktable master code branch. As such it has not been released. Also, the databases it creates are not 100% compatible with 5.6.2. Use with caution.

I edit in darktable, but culling a big shoot was always my slowest step. Being a software engineer, I built a small open-source app that does only that step.

It groups bursts, picks the sharpest frame, and lets you go through quickly with P/X/1–5. Ratings and rejects go into standard XMP sidecars next to your files, so when you import the folder into darktable your decisions are already there. It never modifies originals.

What I’d most like to know from people here:

• Does it play nicely with your existing sidecars and darktable’s database?
• Anything that gets overwritten, duplicated or ignored?

GPL-3.0, everything local, no account. Linux (deb/rpm/AppImage), macOS (Apple Silicon), Windows.

https://github.com/denyszorinets/picturesque

I am debating on moving from Linux to MacOS for darktable. I’m curious if i would be giving up anything for it.

Reason why is I have an ROG G14 laptop running CachyOS and it works great but I only get 2 hours of battery life no matter what I do it seems so I’m looking at getting a MacBook Pro, is this worth while transition?

sorry if this is a dumb question but looking to see what people‘s experience is.

Continuing the Basics serie I here look at comparing the interfaces to help people find their way from LR to Darktable.

Hello /r/Darktable! I've been building a RAW photo editor, taking my favorite parts of each editor I'm aware of. For darktable, that was a lot of inspiration from the scene-referred pipeline (and porting a few actual parts of the code). This isn't a Lightroom clone like Lightcraft, and it isn't a buggy mess. I think it genuinely brings some new things to the table, but you tell me!

Website: greycard.org Github: https://github.com/jessolmstead/greycard

I'm a software engineer and a photographer, so this is a passion project for me. I'm not going to stop until it is a complete, battle-tested product. The feedback I've gotten so far (from casual photographers to professionals) has been overwhelmingly positive. If you decide to give it a try, please let me know if you run into any issues, have feature requests, or other feedback. Thank you!

My favorite parts:

• Camera color match. Given a diverse set of photos from your cameras, it will create 3D LUTs to match your camera colors.
• A great workflow for working on edits across machines, synced to cloud or a NAS archive
• Fast. Native Rust + Slint + GPU acceleration means it's really snappy to use
• Culling mode in particular is incredibly fast from the embedded previews. Makes getting through a shoot very smooth.
• Intuitive, coming from Lightroom Classic at least.
• AI masking runs locally and is very good and getting better with each release
• The benefits of Lightroom cataloging without the drawbacks from having all your photos feel "owned" by the database. Sidecars remain the source of truth; the database index allows for finding and filtering frames fast.
• More scope options. Parades, waveform, vectorscope. And you can limit them to just the masked area, for getting perfect skintones for example.
• Absolute white balance values on a mask. Mixed lighting scenes become easy.
• Color mixer works on masks. Always hated that this was missing in LrC
• AI denoising on the raw sensor data. I trained it myself and it works a treat in my experience, on Canon, Fuji GFX, Nikon, Sony, Lumix etc.
• Virtual copies, collections, and smart collections added in 0.7.0
• It's GPL, so I've been able to take the state-of-the-art open source algorithms wherever I saw value in doing so. Parts of the pipeline come from Darktable, Rawtherapee, and more.
• And more... give it a try and tell me what you like and what you hate!

Current limitations:

• The macOS image is not signed yet, so you have to get around Apple's quarantine to install it currently. I'll implement that before 1.0 release.
• Basic X-Trans support was added in 0.7.0, but no denoise or CA correction for it until 0.8.0
• lrcat import is coming, probably in the next week
• Nikon High Efficiency compressed RAWs are not supported unless you build from source with the nikon-he feature flag. This is because the format is licensed from TicoRAW and shipping a decoder would technically require paying royalties. I'm working on a solution.
• It's still young. If you run into a bug, I'll typically have it fixed within a day.

I started learning darktable following the various tutorials (boris mainly) and i am struggling to understand why on darktables my pictures have vero strange colours compared to lightroom. I know that i am editing a raw, bur they are way more desaturated and colours are displayd very diffrently, for example highlights are whiteish, even in a golden hour picture (white balance adjusted btw). Even comparing to the tutorials i am watching my pictures seem always off. Any advice? This is discouraging

Hi All - I've been working on adding an API to darktable to allow it to be used with other applications like web apps and interactive AI assistants.

I think it is pretty slick, but check out the video to judge for yourself.

I've tested this on Mac and Ubuntu. There are step by step instructions for getting it going here: https://github.com/mmcc-xx/darktable-api-mcp

Hey guys

I was looking for a simple solution to export images from Darktable directly to WordPress. Since nothing like that existed, and I am a Plugin developer for the CMS, I thought that would be a nice way, to give something back to the community.
The Plugin just got approved and is now live on wordpress.org. It requires an add-on for Darktable in order to work, this can be found here:
https://github.com/dans-art/darkwp

I hope this is also useful for some of you and I am happy for any feedback.

Hi guys, I need your help.

Darktable 5.6.1 with Agx scene-reffered on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

I am working on a batch of images to which I wanted to apply my previously created style and during the editing I noticed that color equalizer is causing some weird spots/artifacts on some areas of my image. At first I noticed in in the red colored areas, so I did reset the red color, but then I noticed this happens also on green.

I thought that I did only some mild adjustments on the image, but it looks like I am wrong. Of course reseting the module removes the spots completely, but I would like to know, what am I doing wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. Did I somehow overdo the edits and stretched the colors too much, or what?

The first image is without the color equalizer turned on. The remaining ones are with the module turned on and showing all its settings for you to see. All attached images are at 100% magnification.

I would be grateful if anyone would be able to explain what is happening here.

Thank you.

Edit 1: turning the denoise profiled module on/off moves the spot from one position to another, but they are still visible. Turning off either of the diffuse or sharpen, sharpen, color calibration module removes the spots.

Edit 2: I checked my other styles and some of them cause the same spots, but in a different quantity and position, but others seem to be clean. Softproof shows the spots in a different position. Spots are visible on an exported jpeg file viewed in a different program.

I spend a lot of time to fine-tune those styles. Sadly I was not able to compare it to the physical result... but from what I see over internet I think I'm pretty close. What do you think?

I only do photography as a hobby and every time I try to use darktable, it feels like I am a passenger inside a cruise engine control. There's so many things that I vaguely remember and I lowkey kind of miss the streamlined and intuitive controls from lightroom. I don't even remember how to copy and paste settings from one picture to another. I just wish that they had a dumb down version for people like me.

I seem to be mastering DT quite well, but there's one thing I keep struggling with, which is white balance. Have I got it right that I'm supposed to specify the colour of the light I took the photo in, rather than the colour cast that I'm trying to achieve? It feels counter-intuitive to select blue colours when I'm trying to warm up a sunset, for example, and I never seem to get the outcome I'm after. Please help!

Lightcraft is a new vibecoded Lightroom clone that's just been open sourced. I got the appimage, edited some photos, using different masks, worked my way down using all the sliders. Then I exported it. And it all worked fine. I have never used Lightroom but it's not hard to understand as a darktable user.

This is big. They have only started and are so far along in such a short time. Wow.

The second picture is the preview that I get on lightable and what I would expect opening the image. Instead, when I open the image i get this fuzzy washed out look. This was not happening 2 days ago when editing some images, so I think i may have tweaked something accidentally, although I did reset Darktable and the problem still remains.

Also I dont think its an issue with the photo itself because it happens on every photo i open, from different days, different light conditions etc.

By popular demand I made also a B&W play raw. Feel free to play along and post the result.

Each image on this post show a scene first taken without any filters, and then with a 1/2 strength Black Pro Mist filter. I really like the effect, but can't buy a pro mist filter right now. So, if you were on my shoes, how would you simulate this effect in darktable? Which module, which settings, which changes to your normal workflow? Please, be as thorough as you like, I really learn a lot from the details people post on this sub.

EDIT: just a disclaimer, both images shown here were found on the internet. I just googled "How to use a pro mist filter", and looked for photos I could use as examples.

Hi !

I'm continuing to work on some Youtube videos but I am wondering if you would be also interested into a newsletter? It would cover what I cover in the videos and some extras.

I put together a very ugly signup form.

https://mariengb.com/newsletter/

Feel free to register and I'll see how much people could be interested.

Have a nice week-end!!