Darktable For Open-Source Photography

For those less than impressed by Corel releasing some professional-grade Linux photography software earlier this month, Adobe still not providing native Linux clients for their popular applications, and haven't been fond of the major open-source photography programs out there, you may want to try out Darktable.

For those that haven't heard of Darktable previously, it's an in-development open-source photo workflow program. The software can also fully support RAW images and provides a virtual lighttable and darkroom for those interested in photography.

Darktable is currently supported under Linux and Mac OS X and has fully non-destructive editing, the core functions use 4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers, SSE instruction support on modern processors, supports OpenCL for run-time GPU acceleration, built-in ICC profile support, and can handle sRGB / Adobe RGB / XYZ / linear RGB. There's also extensive filtering / sorting / searching options for collected images. Additionally, this open-source program also can handle tethered shooting, has a powerful export system, and many other offerings that can be enabled through Darktable plug-ins.

The last release was Darktable 0.9.3 in November of last year when it brought SSE optimizations, bug-fixes, and other updates.

For those wishing to learn more about this high-end open-source Linux photo management/editing program, visit Darktable.org. There isn't any breaking news to share about this project today, but Darktable has been brought to my attention a few times by Phoronix readers since Corel's AfterShot Pro Linux release earlier this month, which ended up being mostly a re-branded version of Bibble Pro.