Darktable

Long-term owners

Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back.

Jul 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• Capture OneFast raw editor with strong Fuji and Sony colour and a workflow many prefer; praised for a buy-once licence option. Caveats: subscription pricing shifts and no Linux version.33recommend
• RawTherapeeFree, open-source raw photo editor that covers most needs for many users. Main caveat: complex to learn and weaker denoising.29recommend
• Fujifilm X RAW STUDIOFree no-install browser app that uses the camera's own processor to apply Fujifilm film recipes to RAW files, though camera connection can fail and profile edits are slow.9recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 158 comments. Each links to the original.

1. opening a file processed years ago will still go through the pipeline with the base curve module and come out the same

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

2. I can only recommend it, and there's nothing missing for me, even for editing thousands of RAW photos with presets

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

3. purely in terms of raw outcome and capabilities (to an extent), Dark table actually comes ahead of Lightroom

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Blender 5.0”

4. darktable has a more comprehensive set of controls over editing. However, it is harder software to use.

   Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Show HN: Free open source Adobe Lightroom alternative, completely local with AI”

5. forced through a bunch of changes that in his view took the product in a poor direction in terms of UX

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

6. i fucking love darktable. After 6 month I actually like it more than lightroom and never looked back.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve 21”

7. I'm putting the effort into learning Darktable and look forward to canceling my Adobe subscription.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe”

8. darktable’s learning curve kept me from using it, not because it’s worse; it has far more control.

   Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Show HN: Free open source Adobe Lightroom alternative, completely local with AI”

9. Darktable is a critical part of her editing workflow. It's a truly outstanding piece of software.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

10. the editing is much more powerful. However, it's also a completely different editing paradigm

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

11. the wonderful right-click fine tune popup UI alone were enough for me to forget Lightroom

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

12. Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

13. I cant beleive its a free product; you will do very well going to market with this.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

14. has become very good and continues to be my go-to solution for digital photography

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop”

15. Only Darktable seemed to push the technical capabilities of photo editing forward

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve releases Photo Editor”

16. there are open source tools that implement these things properly? Take Darktable

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?”

17. it's one hell of a powerful raw editor with some really cool masking features

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “A Lament for Aperture”

18. compress contrast at the bright end in a way undesirable for high-key photos

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve 21”

19. they have no one on the project doing any kind of user research or spending time thinking about what good UI/UX looks like

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust”

20. Very steep, at least in my experience. Even compared to Cinema 4D and Blender which I grasp the basic just in 1-3 days.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

21. very weak default look. This is a problem because the default unedited look is the basis of further editing decisions

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve 21”

22. I put it in the same category as Darktable, which gives off that exact same bad first impression.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “GIMP Development Update”

23. fail incredibly with default options thus making this software inappropriate for photographers

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve 21”

24. even after more than a year I couldn’t get the hang of it. It almost killed the hobby for me.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve 21”

25. it misses USER EXPERIENCE part, it's basically unusable, unless you use it since early days.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve 21”

26. 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.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

27. open source projects who might have a miss guided design philosophy (Darktable comes to mind) but are otherwise build from people that care

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage”

28. People often use other software as replacement for establishes software, even though not every single feature is available.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

29. Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

30. very extensive, well written documentation walks you through how, when and when not to use each module

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

31. Other editors (such as ART and Darktable) have other idiomatic workflows for masking, and they work

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve 21”

32. You can easily do pro-level photo editing. Anything you need for editing RAW files, you can do.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

33. Darktable should already basically do all of this with their existing copy and import function.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

34. Darktable is fantastic, and their darktable-cli is really clutch as a photographer turned SWE.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

35. Use Darktable, Capture One, or some other equivalent that you're not just renting for life.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “I Quit Editing Photos”

36. the way the interface is laid out is antithetical to getting into an efficient flow state

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust”

37. For some reason it never clicked with me and made me almost lose interest in photography

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

38. I found Darktable absolutely amazing, although the learning curve is incredibly steep.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Darktable”

39. Darktable is great, but notably, it doesn't have any neural network-based denoising

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “DaVinci Resolve releases Photo Editor”

40. Darktable is the best photography editing and classifying software I've ever used.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”