Darktable is an Open Source Photo Editor for Professional Photographers

Darktable is a great free open source photo editor licensed under GPL v3. For those who don’t know Darktable, it’s an excellent raw photo editor and also a photo manager with a lot of tools you can use to edit your photos. It’s interface is very similar to Adobe Lightroom. Darktable can run on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Solaris and can be used by professional photographers to convert their digital negatives to into bitmap images.

Among the many features of Darktable, we can mention non-destructive image-editing which means you never edit the actual data in your RAW image. It supports popular ICC Profiles like sRGB and Adobe RGB. Darktable comes preloaded with innumerable editing modules to fix incorrect exposure, change lighting conditions and tweak the color balance of the photo. The latest stable version is 2.0.5 which was released on July 5, 2016.

Install Darktable Open Source Photo Editor on Ubuntu 16.04/14.04

Darktable is included in Ubuntu software repository. However, it’s an old version. We can use official Darktable PPA to install the latest version. Fire up a terminal window and issue the following 3 commands one at a time.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmjdebruijn/darktable-release

sudo apt update

sudo apt install darktable

This PPA also works on distros that are based on Ubuntu 16.04/14.04, such as Linux Mint 18 and Elementary OS Loki.

Once installed, you can start it from Unity Dash.

Install Darktable on Debian 8 Jessie

Darktable in Debian 8 repository is rather old (1.4.2). Version 2.0.4 is available from Jessie backports repository. To enable the repo, edit sources.list file with your favourite text editor.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line at the end fo this file.

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main

In nano text editor, press CTRL+O to save the file, then CTRL+X to exit. Now update local package index and install darktable.

sudo apt update

sudo apt -t jessie-backports install darktable

The -t flag specifies that we are installing Darktable from jessie-backports repo instead of the default repo.

To check your Darktable version, run:

darktabe --version

Below is a screenshot of Darktable 2.0.5 running on Ubuntu 16.04.

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