Darktable: Opensource Alternative 4 Photoshop

As mentioned in the previous voyager distro review Darktable is an application used for image managing and image editing.

Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable  and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.we can import images from your computer as single file or a grop of images which is termed as film roll.The software also scans for external devices. Thumbnailing of this app is a bit slow. The app gives us options like lighttable darkroom and tethering.

lighttable

The left panel is for importing images, displaying Exif information, and filtering. Rating and categorizing buttons are at the top, while the right-side panel features various modules such as a metadata editor and a tag editor. A module used to export images is located at the bottom-right.

darkroom

This mode can be accessed by double-clicking on an image. The layout displays the image at center, with four panels around it; most tools appear on the right side. The left panel displays a pannable preview of the current image, an undo history stack, a color picker, and Exif information. A filmstrip with other images is displayed at the bottom, and can be sorted and filtered using lists from the upper panel. The latter also gives access to the preferences configuration. darktable's configuration allows custom keyboard shortcuts and personalized defaults.

tethering

A third mode allows tethering through gPhoto to cameras which support it like Canon (5D, EOS 30D, EOS 40D, EOS 400D, and EOS 550D), Nikon (D60, D70s, D90, D5000, and Nikon Coolpix P100), and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50.

Darktable support raw files from almost every camera,Import a variety of standard, raw and high dynamic range image formats like jpg, cr2, hdr, pfm etc.The powerful export system supports Picasa webalbum, flickr upload, disk storage, 1:1 copy, email attachments and can generate a simple html-based web gallery.darktable uses both XMP sidecar files as well as its fast database for saving metadata and processing settings.

Apart from usual image ,colour and effects options it comes with many features like watermarking ,framing,split toning ,vignetting,monochrome , highpass  , lowpass ,shadows and highlights which helps in image post processing.It also have many correction modules like spot removal,lens correctio,equaliser,sharpen,denoise etc.

On the whole darktable is a very good  photography workflow application and undoubtedly the best in open source

Darktable runs on GNU/Linux / GNOME, Mac OS X / macports and Solaris 11 / GNOME.

http://www.darktable.org/

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