DarkTable LightRoom 4

Darktable (stylized as darktable) is a photography application software and raw developer. Rather than being a raster graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, it comprises a subset of image editing operations specifically aimed at non-destructive raw image post-production. It is primarily focused on improving a photographer's workflow by facilitating the handling of large numbers of images.

Darktable involves the concept of non-destructive editing, similar to that of some other raw manipulation software. Rather than being immediately applied to raster data of the image, the program keeps the original image data until final rendering at the exporting stage — while parameter adjustments made by a user display in real-time. The program features built-in ICC profiles, GPU acceleration (based on OpenCL), and supports most common image formats.

Masks There are five mask types available: brush, circle, ellipse, bezier path, and gradient; all are resizable, allow fade-out radius for smooth blending and can have their opacity controlled. An arbitrary number of masks can be created and are collected into a "mask manager" on the left hand side of the darkroom UI

Color Darktable has built-in ICC profile support for sRGB, Adobe RGB, XYZ and linear RGB color

Importing and exporting Raw image formats, JPEG, HDR and PFM images can be imported from disk or camera, and exported to disk, Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, email, and to a simple HTML-based web gallery as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, PPM, PFM and EXR images.[8] Images can be exported to Wikimedia Commons using an external plugin.[9]

Scripting Darktable LightRoom can be controlled by scripts written in Lua version 5.2. Lua can be used to define actions which Darktable should perform whenever a specified event is triggered. One example might be calling an external application during file export in order to apply additional processing steps outside of Darktable LightRoom

Multi-mode histogram Multiple histogram types are available, all with individually selectable red, green and blue channels: linear, logarithmic and waveform (new in version 1.4).[6]

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 The second mode, "darkroom", 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 The third mode allows tethering through gPhoto to some of the cameras which support it.