When I stumble into the kitchen table at midnight, I’ve been known to cry, “It’s a virtual dark room in here!” But that has nothing to do with darktable, which is virtual darkroom software that lets you develop your digital negatives (comparable to UFRaw), and also bundles in the same application a virtual light table to organize your image collections (comparable to F-Spot).
Darktable is well-suited to the hobbyist photographer who values a smooth workflow from viewing and filtering to raw-level development. It sports a simple and pleasant interface and a few unique features, including original graphical interfaces to color correction and monochrome conversion, an equalizer widget with an edge-avoiding wavelet back end, and full 3×32-bits-per-pixel floating point precision, enabling high dynamic range (HDR) input and processing.
Darktable makes heavy use of plugins to expand its capabilities. It’s simple to program your own darkroom image operation – say, a bilateral filter or some fancy hole-filling texture synthesis – with just a few additional lines of code.
German developer and photographer Johannes Hanika says he created darktable because he needed it himself, for his own images. “I wasn’t quite happy with the workflow using existing applications, because it usually involved multiple applications and the command line. Using Windows and commercial products was not an option. So I figured, hey, I’m a programmer, how hard can it be? And since I was going to code it for myself, I thought people might be happy if I shared it.
“I’ve been working on dt for about a year now, using gcc (c99), vi, and Autotools. Parts of the core GTK interface are designed in Glade. The application uses several external libraries, including libraw, because it was threadsafe and feature-complete, and exiv2, because it reads the lens mount information needed for lensfun. I chose GTK over Qt because I like c99 more than c++ and I think usually the applications look better.”
The software is very much a work in progress. “dt is not quite feature complete yet,” Hanika says. “The darkroom mode is usable as it is now, with a few minor rough edges (you can’t set an aspect ratio for crop, for instance), but as everything is a plugin, this can easily be extended in future versions. The more rudimentary parts – light table mode, library management, directory watching, import, export, tagging, and free search by image properties – are the focus of the next release. I also hope to ship a translatable plugin template with the next version.”
Hanika offers a few tips for new users. “The GUI is self-explanatory. A few keyboard shortcuts are documented on the web site. One general hint is to use the mouse wheel. Several widgets use it to scroll, zoom, or change some radius.”
Hanika is happy to accept help with translations and bug fixes. Post your questions and patches to the project’s mailing list.