Santa has delivered an early Christmas present to photography fans in the form of Darktable 3.0.
An open source alternative to Adobe Lightroom, Darktable lets photographers make non-destructive edits to their images, as well as manage, sort and organise photo.
Darktable 3.0 is a huge update to this popular open source RAW image editor. It improves the GUI, adds new features, and delivers some much needed improvements.
Just to put into perspective how big of an update it really is there have been over 3,000 commits to the tool since the release of Darktable 2.6.
Among the features in focus for this release is “a full rework” of the user interface, which is now managed by GTK CSS. To take full advantage of the new theming possibilities provided Darktable 3.0 even ships with a selection of different themes to try out.
Other changes:
- New shortcuts to allow a “borderless editing experience”
- undo/redo support for tags, color labels, ratings, etc
- New timeline view in lightview
- Improved support for 4K and 5K displays
- New ‘tone equalizer’, ‘basic’ and ‘filmic RGB’ modules
- Module for handling 3D RGB Lut transformations
- Denoise tweaks
- Support for exporting to Google Photos
- Can now display hierarchical tags in a tree view
- Tags can be made private
- Colour picker added to various modules
- Preview window available in darkroom
Improved camera support, white balance presets, and noise profiles also feature in this update — but check out the full change log up on Github if you’re keen to glean detail on every nut and bolt.
Install Darktable 3.0 on Ubuntu
You can download Darktable 3.0 for Ubuntu directly from the official Darktable OBS repo:
You can also install an older version of Darktable on Ubuntu (and related distros like Linux Mint) from the Ubuntu repos, just run apt install darktable or search for it in your app store of choice.
For details on how to install Darktable on other Linux distributions, as well as where to get macOS and Windows builds, head over the install page on the Darktable website.