I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets, different steps, color correction in various color spaces, it's simply fantastic and the documentation absolutely shines.
Not only does the documentation explain how to use it in a way that non-professional photographers understand, it also explains edge cases, things to be careful about, and in general whoever wrote the documentation is sharing a lot of knowledge. I keep pushing this software and it just keeps doing it, I don't seem to stop finding features and little things that do what I wanted, and do it well.
I learned more from reading darktable documentation than from any lightroom/draktable/davinci resolve tutorial.
With the new local-model AI features for denoising and subject selection, it filled the last little missing piece for me. Absolutely fantastic software, can recommend it.
I'm on arch, so to get the latest build I built it myself which was painless.
Darktable also cannot correctly color any of my DJI Mini Pro imagery. None. They all have really bad greenish hues. I haven't been able to publish any of my DJI images for 4 years now because Darktable won't fix it, and it's a known issue that they explicitly plan to not fix (https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/13319).
I'm currently starting to love RapidRAW (https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw); the developer is super active and releases new features every couple of weeks. I'm also able to add a few minor nitpick features I want quite easily with AI code tools. I have a good feeling I can get AI to fix the DJI issue on RapidRAW since the code is quite nicely organized.
Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the open-source software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow, and automatically updated it over time? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream, fixes any conflicts, does the rebuild, hosts the build, etc... This justifies a cost) This incompatibility with DJI images that the Darktable devs #wontfix is a perfect example use-case.
Needless to say this would be for professional use, with professional expectations, but if your business depends on having that slightly-tweaked tool, then it may be worth it; just exploring the idea, here
I get being against AI, but Darktable is very responsible about it according to their release notes. Local only, opt-in only, no nagging. It's not like Adobe trying to push AI on you when you don't want it.
Another way to get the up-to-date version on Debian would be to use Nix (install nix, add the stable or unstable channel or whatnot, and make darktable installable)
I just replaced Lightroom with it after several years. So much happier.
If coming from lightroom or the likes it does take some dedicated learning to adapt to the "Darktable" ways of doing things. Deceptively similar UI, yet very different approaches and naming.
Darktable is however, bad at photograpy organization and collections. Something Lightroom shines at.
Built many processes around it for my own post-processing needs.
It has a very clunky UX for this. But it actually has a lot of useful features for organizing large amounts of photos. There's a guy Bruce Williams on Youtube who has been doing tutorials on Youtube for Darktable for many years that has many relevant videos on this topic. But you can do rule based collections with filters on tags, camera type, and whatever other meta data is there.
It's probably a bit different from what you are used to and IMHO it's over engineered and there are some bad ideas for usability that never really got addressed and are made worse by the developers just putting buttons and controls in all the wrong places. But once you get over that, it actually does have a lot of powerful features for getting organized.
There's actually a fork of Darktable called Ansel that addresses a lot of the UX issues that has been in the works for a few years. The creator of the fork got annoyed with the level of indifference on this topic. There were other reasons as well (he was the creator of the filmic module in Darktable). But most of his UX work at least looks to me as something that the Darktable people might consider adopting.
It's like saying Microsoft Word is bad as an IDE. That's because it's not and IDE.
And Darktable is very explicit that it is not for photography organization and collections.
Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.
This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).
The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.
I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.
But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.
I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*
(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).
In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.
For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.
>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.
What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.
I had folders based on dates YYYY.MM.DD - Eventname. No need for cli.
I still do the same now for CaptureOne to be honest.
"If you give up on these features, it's a replacement" doesn't make it a replacement.
People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available. I still would say Firefox can be a chrome replacement.
My images are also stored in date-based folders, but C1/Lightroom allow me to very quickly move between folders and identify the file I want, search for files I've rated highly or tagged with keywords/colors, and more.
OpenCL is unsupported for M1/2/3/4/5, which makes RAW file processing, batch workflows, basically everything, unusably slow.
Unless something has changed in the past few months, Darktable is dead on MacOS with no fix in sight.
Some ex-maintainers hated the direction of Darktable and thus made their own fork, namely https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
https://github.com/hanatos/vkdt
* Vulkan instead of OpenCL has way better performance.
* Graph-based editing akin to Blender. This fixes the issue of it being annoying and weird to reorder modules in darktable
It is, of course, still early on in its development and way less mature and featureful than Darktable.
I struggle with Darktable's workflow, but it works without issue on Fedora with Wayland (including with my monitor's color calibration), so I'm sticking with it for now.
Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)
Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.
Good, ergonomic, efficient tools are worth their weight in gold. C1 is one of them. Importing/triage, editing, color profiles, tethered shooting - it's an incredibly powerful suite and works well.
For particularly problematic noisy/dark shots I'll do manual editing in DXO, but I do everything else in C1.
(Yes, still better than Krita).
But this is all a digression, as Lightroom/Darktable are not Photoshop/Gimp replacements. Not even the same category.
??? Krita is painting/raster image creation software, why would you use it for photo editing?
Krita's better for painting. Gimp's better for photo editing.
I do miss macOS system controls like zooming in and out via touchpad. In general though, I'm not doing a ton of editing and for my large library, digiKam is working nicely. I tried capture1 for editing but it was more than I needed. I'm glad Darktable exists for folks needing raw editing. I wonder if it produces the Fujifilm specific colors as well as C1?
Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it.
lol