darktable

For the last four and a half years since I’ve owned a digital camera that can store images as raw files, I’ve needed a method of post-processing these images to produce jpgs suitable for general viewing/sharing/wallpaper.

My camera, a Pentax K-30 came with a program called silkypix. I tried it and discarded it early on in the piece. I then looked to other free solutions and came across rawtherapee. It came with a bit of a learning curve but it served me well for a number of years. It was cross-platform and did the job but it was fairly slow to process a single image let alone a folder full.

It obviously went through several iterations and program changes to the extent that profiles I had previously developed and used in rawtherapee ceased to work. I didn’t want to have to recreate my wheel with new releases of the software so I looked for anelternative. I investigated LightZone but it seemed a little slow to me and there weren’t many tutorials available. I came across darktable and put it through its paces.

Whilst it is predoinantly for Linux and Mac, there are versions that run on Windows. I tried in on my Linux-based notebook and have stuck with it. It is fast, comprehensive, has plenty of support/tutorials/videos available and is in active development.

i’ve had it running for a couple of weeks, now and really like it. It does all I need, is reasonably intuitive once you get a handle on the screen options and is free. You’ve got to be happy with that!