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The best free Adobe Lightroom alternative

Darktable Icon Darktable 64-bit version

Rating
Rating:77%

Darktable is an open-source virtual light table and darkroom software for photographers, and it is well known as the best free Adobe Lightroom alternative. It is a free photo workflow and RAW image processing application which is available for multiple platforms.

Download x64 Darktable for Windows

It stores and manages your digital negatives in a database, allowing you to view them and quickly develop and enhance your raw images.

This software includes image editing options specifically aimed at raw photo post-production. The focus of Darktable is improving a photographer’s workflow by handling many images at once.

Just like Lightroom, the Darktable offers a non-destructive photography editing, meaning that the original image file is never changed by editing. Instead, the software keeps all editing changes and information about each image.

As of the time of drafting this article, Darktable includes forty-eight image adjustment plugins, divided into five distinct groups:

  1. Basic group – Functions such as crop, resize, white balance, invert etc.
  2. Tone group – Adjust tone mapping, curves, levels, and filling
  3. Colour group – Colour profile setup, colour correction, colour contrast etc.
  4. Correction group – Spot removal, lens correction, denoise, sharpen etc.
  5. Effects group – Add effects, such as watermarks, bloom, shadows etc.

Overall, Darktable is a genuinely nice piece of software which can do a lot. If you are looking for an open-source alternative to Lightroom, you should give Darktable a try.

Pros

  • Low system resources footprint
  • A lot of options and features
  • Easy user interface

Cons

  • Might take some time to get used to it
  • Module grouping edit is confusing