No. Other than both being raw editors with DAM features, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common. Darktable is a powerful and flexible raw processing toolbox, that leaves the user in charge of their workflow and provides a level of power and control that few others can match. This also means that the initial learning curve can be steep, since very little workflow and tool knowledge can be transferred from other programs.
Please see the camera support page.
Some file formats are not supported. The camera support page has a full list.
This is explained in the manual.
The default theme has been carefully designed to limit certain optical illusions that affect how brightness, contrast and saturation are perceived. Changing to a darker theme, in particular, can lead to images that are too dark or over-saturated. This is explained in detail in the manual here, here and here.
Use your file manager (or the command line). Image renaming is not a feature we are developing for darktable. Make sure to first remove the files from darktable’s library, then rename them (and the associated sidecar) and re-import them afterwards.
No.
See the user manual for more details.
See the section below about the manual, book and tutorial videos.
You have to import a single image or a film roll (directory) using the buttons on the left side of the lighttable Add to Library.
Try to set the display filter in the top panel to “all” and check the “initial rating when importing filmrolls” setting in the preference pane (the small gear wheel at the top).
You don’t have to. Everything you do is immediately saved. You can just quit darktable and go on editing later. Once you are done you have to export your final image using the export module.
Yes, here. You might also want to read through the blog section of this website.
The best place is the Pixls.us discussion forum. There you can get help with both editing and technical issues. It is also a good place to get help with other open-source graphics software.
There are also a number of video tutorials. You can find a list of some of them at the bottom of the resources page.
There is only one way, and that is “darktable”. All lower case, in one word, except when starting a sentence.
For fast discussions and short questions it’s best to visit us in IRC (on irc.oftc.net, channel #darktable), especially in the Western European evening hours. If you don’t want to use IRC, don’t know what it is or want something less transient you can use our mailing lists. See our contact page. For Issues/bugs, please use GitHub Issues
Due to the large number of mathematically intense operations which the Image Operators (IOPs) perform, the minimum requirement for a CPU to run darktable is one which supports SSE2. If your cpu does not support SSE2 more than fifteen years after the feature’s introduction, then it really is time to upgrade. Please see the Wikipedia page for more details on SSE2-capable CPUs.
If the camera in question is supported by libgphoto2, then the most likely cause is that some other process is blocking the device.
If you’re using Linux, check that your desktop environment hasn’t auto-mounted it.
In case of Mac OS X, there’s PTPCamera daemon which starts for every attached camera, so you must kill it before you can use the camera in darktable. Either run killall PTPCamera or implement more automated solution like described at the bottom of this page: https://micro-manager.org/wiki/GPhoto.
On Windows the situation is a little more complicated. libgphoto2 doesn’t work with the default Windows drivers used for connecting them via USB. For tethering to work (in general for libgphoto2 and libusb to work):
In rare cases that might break other software accessing the camera though! If you experience this, you can roll back, and remove the WinUSB driver following this description – but then your camera won’t work with darktable.
Yes, there are two libraries we heavily rely on:
exiv2 and report any problems upstream on their bug tracker – there isn’t much we can do to fix those things ourselves.~/.config/darktable/~/.config/darktable/themes (themes folder needs to be created if it doesn’t exist)@import url("/path/to/darktable.css");, where the /path/to/darktable.css is the path… to the default darktable CSS (or one of the other themes you want to edit).Since darktable 3.2, released in august 2020, CSS tweaks are far easier. Forget the steps described just above for that and just go into the preferences window. In the general tab: select your theme, check modify selected theme with tweaks below and add your tweaks in text field below. That’s all!
By the way, CSS file should be easier to read and lot of comments will help you find faster CSS part you want to tweak and so copy/modify in preferences.
darktable uses GTK3 to create its GUI. We make heavy use of styling to change the look to what you are used to. Unfortunately there were several incompatible changes in the past with how GTK3 handles that. As a result darktable needs to be compiled for the same version of the library as what it’s being used with later. Otherwise you risk GTK3 not supporting the stylesheet darktable uses. When you see those red borders that’s exactly what’s happening.
darktable is developed for Linux, but it was ported to build on Windows. The MSYS2 URCT environment is used to compile the program. Nightly builds are performed in github to ensure the program builds under Windows against the current master code. If you experience problems, please check the next few known issues below specific to the Windows port. If you don’t find your answer or believe that you have found a new bug, please report it through our bug tracking system.
The install of darktable creates the following folders:
C:\Program files\darktable\ - the program files to run darktableC:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\darktable- configuration (darktablerc.txt), databases (data.db and library.db), styles, and backups files are stored here. If the user manual references .config/darktable/ , it means this location on Windows.The Windows port of darktable fully supports OpenCL with all the performance benefits, assuming you have a GPU with appropriate OpenCL drivers installed. Popular NVIDIA and AMD GPUs are working fine, but please note that in some cases the default drivers which are installed/updated by Windows Update do not necessarily contain the OpenCL driver. The best solution is typically to install the driver directly from the GPU manufacturers (like) NVIDIA drivers or AMD drivers), and check the OpenCL support in the driver first.
C:\Program Files\darktable\bin\darktable-cltest.exe from a command line window, this will give you detailed information on your current OpenCL status.The darktable Windows packaging can not print. The Print module in darktable is using CUPS on all operating systems, but that is not available on Windows. This means there was no easy way to port that functionality, and it will require further efforts to find a proper solution for printing in the Windows version as well. Until that time you can use your favorite image printing software separately to print the exported images.
The configuration file of darktable is located at C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\darktable\darktablerc. If you change it please use a text editor which can handle Unix line endings, like Notepad++ or similar.
By default darktable uses your operating system’s language and if a localization is available in that language it will start using that localization for the user interface. You can override that and switch to an English user interface in multiple ways:
darkable --conf ui_last/gui_language=C--conf ui_last/gui_language=C to the Target fieldC:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\darktable\darktablerc, find the line ui_last/gui_language= and modify it to ui_last/gui_language=C. Please use a text editor which can handle Unix line endings, like Notepad++ or similarThe Windows version of darktable (up to and including release 4.8.1) by default logs its debug information to the following places (This is a hidden folder in Windows, therefore copy and paste the link to windows explorer for access):
Windows 10:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\darktable\darktable-log.txt
Windows 7:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\darktable\darktable-log.txt
Since darktable 5.0 the default location is:
C:\Users\[username]\Documents\Darktable\darktable-log.txt
Windows handles path names very differently than Unix-like systems. One of the biggest challenges of porting to Windows was making sure that path and file name handling works both on original Unix-like operating systems and also on Windows. While we have tested the Windows port with various Unicode path and file names, it still can happen that it won’t work in all cases, mostly due to external libraries used by darktable. In such cases you can fall back using plain ASCII characters in path and file names, but please also file a bug report.
Don’t panic, sometimes it happens. If you can reproduce the crash, please file a bug report, and send the so called “backtrace” file as well. You can find the location of this backtrace file in the folder where the crash dialog indicates. Generating a log of the crash can also aid in discovering the cause. The simplest way is to start Windows Command Prompt (cmd), navigate to C:\Program files\darktable\bin and start darktable via darktable.exe -d common or darktable -d opencl or darktable -d perf or to see all the options darktable -h. The log file will be generated in the hidden path listed above.
OpenCL will speed up the processing in darktable. Sometimes Windows 11 preinstalls an OpenCL Compatibility app and it causes faults in darktable. Uninstall the OpenCL Compatibility from Windows or start darktable using darktable --disable-opencl.
Windows 11 Pro security blocks installs. To resolve, go to Windows Security > App & Browsers Control > Exploit Protection Settings > Force Randomization and Set the Force Randomization for images (Mandatory ASLR) to “Off”, and reboot Windows.
The darktable files live at: ~/.var/app/org.darktable.Darktable
To start darktable from terminal use: flatpak run org.darktable.Darktable. You can also invoke options like: flatpak run org.darktable.Darktable -d perf
darktable is developed for Linux, but it was ported to build on Mac. If you experience problems, please check the next few known issues below specific to the Mac port. If you don’t find your answer or believe that you have found a new bug, please report it through our bug tracking system.
This question is probably not affecting many people these days, but we kept it for historical reasons.
This is intended. In the pre-1.1 era, modules that were enabled by default didn’t get recorded in the history stack, which meant that changing these presets would retroactively change your pictures. It was decided that this is totally broken behaviour and since darktable version 1.1 auto-enabled modules for newly imported pictures are saved in history stack. However this change left all old photos without any user-defined auto-applied presets enabled. To fix this you will have to manually edit them. We suggest making a style out of preset, filtering photos to which it should apply using collect module, then selecting all in resulting collection and applying the style, repeat for every needed preset.
We moved the demosaicing into our internal pixel pipeline. The benefit is that it is faster and more accurate. The downside is that we have to implement the demosaicing algorithms ourselves. Since the differences are really small with real world photos we didn’t bother to port more than PPG and AMaZE. If anyone feels the need for more choice we will gladly accept patches.
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