“lighttable” and “darkroom” are the menus you will be using most frequent. You will see 6 main menus at the upper right-corner of the Darktable interface.

Darkable comes with a dominant black interface, just like Lightroom. The very first thing you need to do before being able to use Darkable is to learn its interface. You can download the binary files of Darkable on its official site. It’s an ideal option if you are just a photography hobbyist since you don’t need to buy it to be able to use it. In addition to Linux, it is also available for Windows and macOS.

Those files store the edit info you have made on each image. xmpfiles in the folders of the images you have opened with Darktable. Darktable accesses your images “read-only” and the changes you made will be saved in. In other words, whatever the changes you made, the original images remain the same. What is non-desctructive? It’s a mechanism of image editing that won’t affect the original images you are editing.

It’s because of Darktable is non-destructive image editor. You can fix your images by adjusting certain parameters whereby the changes can be displayed in a real-time, but they (the changes) won’t really be applied until you export concerned images. The concept of Darktable is also the same as Lightroom. Darktable can also be used as a bridge that connects your computer and camera. Second, it is also capable of organizing your images - be it RAW or JPG - as well as making adjustments like adjusting the exposure, white balance so on.

Without any aim of underestimating other tools, Darktable is by far the best open source alternative to Lightroom.įirst, the tool has a similar interface to Lightroom. There are a bunch of Lightroom alternatives you can install and use on your Linux computer. Same as Photoshop, Lightroom is also exclusively only available for Windows and Mac. It’s a versatile tool which you can use as a photo management as well RAW processor. Lightroom is another Adobe’s popular product. In terms of photography, we already know there is GIMP as the best open source alternative to Photoshop.

Darktable linux