Open source Lightroom alternative Darktable comes to Windows

Free open source Lightroom alternative Darktable is now available for Windows. Previously only on Linux and MacOS, the raster graphics editor is aimed at non-destructive raw photo post-production and is primarily focused on improving a photographer’s workflow by facilitating the handling of large numbers of images.

The free application features:

  • Non-destructive editing throughout the complete workflow, your original images are never modified.
  • Take advantage of the real power of raw: All darktable core functions operate on 4×32-bit floating point pixel buffers, enabling SSE instructions for speedups.
  • GPU accelerated image processing: many image opertions are lightning fast thanks to OpenCL support (runtime detection and enabling).
  • Professional color management: darktable is fully color managed, supporting automatic display profile detection on most systems, including built-in ICC profile support for sRGB, Adobe RGB, XYZ and linear RGB color spaces.
  • Cross platform: darktable runs on Linux, Mac OS X / macports, BSD, Windows and Solaris 11 / GNOME.
  • Filtering and sorting: search your image collections by tags, image rating (stars), color labels and many more, use flexible database queries on all metadata of your images.
  • Image formats: darktable can import a variety of standard, raw and high dynamic range image formats (e.g. JPEG, CR2, NEF, HDR, PFM, RAF … ).
  • Zero-latency, zoomable user interface: through multi-level software caches darktable provides a fluid experience.
  • Tethered shooting: support for instrumentation of your camera with live view for some camera brands.
  • Speaks your language: darktable currently comes with 21 translations:Albanian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portugese (Brazilian and Portugese), Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
  • Powerful export system supports G+ and Facebook webalbums, flickr upload, disk storage, 1:1 copy, email attachments and can generate a simple html-based web gallery. darktable allows you to export to low dynamic range (JPEG, PNG, TIFF), 16-bit (PPM, TIFF), or linear high dynamic range (PFM, EXR) images.
  • Never lose your image development settings darktable uses both XMPsidecar files as well as its fast database for saving metadata and processing settings. All Exif data is read and written using libexiv2.
  • Automate repetitive tasks: Many aspects of darktable can be scripted in Lua.

The Windows port is still very fresh, and has a few bugs such as no printing support and a few limitations, such as no support for non-ASCII characters in TIFF file names, but these will hopefully be corrected in later versions.

Darktable 2.4.0 can be downloaded from GitHub and more information can be found in the version 2.4 blog post here.

via DPReview