Really glad there's advanced open-source tools like darktable and RawTherapee.
I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable for a few years now.
I prefer the UI and workflow or RT, but dt has better performance on my machine. And RT has this strange longstanding bug where the image is extremely blurry during editing, and only becomes clear after exporting. According to a github issue, a workaround is to disable lens correction (and anything else in the "transform" tab) but this didn't work for me, prompting my most recent switch to dt.
current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.
> current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.
It's open source, you can change anything. The UI shouldn't be so annoying and hostile out of the box regardless.
I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested by users with developers silently watching.
Most projects have an issue tracker where one proposes changes or reports bugs. The IRC channel is labeled "Support channel for darktable" rather than "Tell the developer how they ought to better serve me for free"
People have a finite slice of their life to give you for nothing. Putting specific suggestions on the issue tracker seems more respectful of their time.
I raised a ticket on an open source project about a defect. It was open for 6 months with no comment. So I fixed it and did a PR. The PR was still sitting there open after 6 months. More interesting PRs to the developers have been merged.
What I usually do when I see promising projects and slow devs.
1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?"
2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues.
3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.
It's the busiest developers who would be interested in receiving PRs. If they go unanswered for six months, it is a clear signal that there is something stopping else them from action.
It is also an opportunity for someone to feel involved and eventually join the group, perhaps even become a maintainer.
Speaking as a project maintainer that is starting to see some traction: I'd love to see people coming with PRs for features. It would mean a big amount of validation.
There are loads of friendly and welcoming OpenSource communities.
I'm sorry you did not stumble into them, but instead in the few hostile ones. It's a pity that made you give up.
A general tip, I give to people wishing to contribute to OSS is to first watch from the sideline. Read issues, threads, subscribe to an ML etc. Then to ask. Don't just throw in PR or feature request, but ask: is this welcome? How do you work? Any particular details that you wish me to pay extra attention to (tabs, spaces, tests, documentation, design).
As a FLOSS maintainer myself, it can be very intimidating to have someone throw a PR at you that rewrites everything (it comes across as: you suck, your software sucks, but watch me fix all that), or that disregards things that I deem critical (tests, architecture) It is really hard to review it, without coming across as an arrogant bastard. And often software that I put on a back burner will require me significant effort to get back into. So merging a simple typo fix or dependency update might cost half a day, just to get the dev env back up.
Darktable is great! This year I restarted photography, ina serious manner, after quite some time. Serious as in I try to get beautiful pictures I could hang on a wall. I also started to do proper post processing, and darktable is quite handy.
My dad used to be a pro photographer, now retired, and gave me crash course in RAW processing. Besides some handling differences between lightroom and photoshop he nothing negative to say about darktable. And neither do I, it's not darktables fault that my photo library is a mess.
This reminds me, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS and now digikam won’t open! This is with the latest app image, and there is some system library version mismatch. I looked up a bug report for the same error message that came up on a different program, and it seems app image isn’t as self contained as I thought! I recently bought a used Canon Pro 100 printer and was having fun printing my photos until this bug preventing me from opening digiKam!
AppImages are only as self-contained as the author put effort into making them self-contained. There's also upper limits to how self-contained they are. While some terminal and bitmap only X11 app can be compiled as static binaries, anything that depends on system libraries needs to be compiled with an older version of glibc. The best example is libGl (GLX or EGL) for hardware 3D acceleration or libvdpau for hardware media decoding. You can't just bundle those, you have to use the system ones. Using any system library forces you to use glibc (AppImage don't work on Alpine). OpenSSL and a few other a libs you usually want to use the system one and have a built-in fallback because of security concerns.
Making perfect AppImages is often possible, but the automated tooling isn't smart enough. A proper AppImage (this one is by me) look like this: https://github.com/Elv13/reclaimail/blob/master/docker-edito... . Obviously this doesn't scale very well to projects with 300 dependencies like Digikam. My NeoVIM appimage linked above "really, really" bundles all dependency and compile your NeoVIM config to luajit bytecode. It's 3.9mb compared to the upstream one which is 15mb without any config. Note than 0.7mb of that 3.9 is the spellcheck dictionary, 0.4 my enormous config, 0.5 the AppImage overhead and 0.7 all the legacy plugins still written in vimscript.
Interesting. Yeah it seems like the solution for digikam on my solution was something like unpack the app image and recompile something and I’ve not had the time to mess with it. I hope the maintainer can release a fixed image at some point. I really like that app!
Wouldn't another option be to use the system package [0] or is the version too old? Or use the Flatpak [1] (or NIH-flatpak [2]), which is probably a better fit than AppImage for GUI programs that sit on top of a heavy toolkit.
I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS. I believe I somehow imported my entire /pictures folder at some point, producing many thousands of images in a film roll; I just downloaded 4.0.0 and have spent some time trying to figure out how to reset the film roll, or darktable altogether. Or how to create a new library. There's no typical top toolbar on MacOS.
In clicking around, I've selected "add to library," and darktable is now beachballed. CaptureOne will continue to be my default.
(Before someone points this out, let me acknowledge that the apparent problems with darktable are undoubtedly my fault in some capacity and that I'm Using It Wrong, or that I can't properly read the manual, or that I should watch more videos on how to use darktable.)
>I'm also glad it exists but have never figured out how to use it on MacOS
Same here. I just downloaded V4 to see if there was any improvement from last time I tried to use it
* Open app, Select 'Add to Library' --> spinning beachball of doom
delete the ~/.config/darktable directory, to give me a clean start...
* Open app. App opens in a weird window the full width of my screen but only half the depth. I try to resize the window. It won't rezise, even though I get resize arrows when hovering over the corner. Finally manage to make it usable by hitting the fullscreen widget.
* Try 'Add to Library' again. This time it allows me to select my photos archive folder. I see there's a tickbox marked 'Recursive' so I click on that as I have subfolders in my photos archive. I can't select the box. Then the spinning beachball of doom starts again...
* Force quit
* Delete app.
Life's just too short to mess about with an app that hangs twice, requiring a force quit, before I've even managed to do a single thing with it.
> It's Linux software. Support for other operating systems is an afterthought.
>>This is the correct answer...
We're not talking non-MacOS [or non-Windows?] -like behaviour here. But the app not actually functioning. So why offer versions for other OSes, if it's Linux only software?
For RAW editing DXO is great and runs native on Apple silicon. Recently bought ON1 and Affinity photos as well so there are other alternatives to Adobe, at least in the processing stage of RAW development.
Pace Interlock is the virulent DRM that DxO chose to bundle with all their software – even the trial versions. It's been so long I don't remember the details, but it's far more intrusive than Adobe's license management stuff. Especially in the context of open source software suggesting DxO anything is in poor taste unless they've ditched Pace.
Here's a little list of the problems Pace can cause:
fwiw - darktable 3.8.1 runs for me on macos 10.13.6 (2011 17" mbp) and macos 10.15.7 (2013 27" iMac). App launch takes some moments on both, but responsiveness and performance is fine+ once running. Imports (without copy) works well enough for me. The *collections* and *film rolls* I've imported from non-local sources (NFS, SMB, ssh/sftp) 'complain' with a strikethrough on re-launch, but the thumbnails and metadata remain present locally even when disconnected.
But my previous experience with editing Sony RAWs on Rawtherappe and Darktable wasn't good.
The color science is missed up in Darktable and in Raw therappe, I just couldn't get something decent out.
I would be editing for an hour and end up with a weird looking image, while in lightroom I would be done in 10 minutes.
People might say that I'm just used to lightroom but I'm not, I was using Capture one, then didn't shoot anything for multiple years, then just went pack to Lightroom and could edit photos without major frustrations and get decent results quickly.
Creative apps in general are a very weak point of the Linux desktop, and when they exist, that have many weird requests and problems that just using them on windows is easier(Davinci resolve requiring the crappy closed source AMD drivers)
I think your problem might be the base curve module and its default "Sony" preset, which looks like garbage. Try setting it to "neutral", it should look a lot better (presets are under the little arrow next to the "base curve" header).
The base curve presets, if I understand correctly, aim to make the photo look similar to the out of camera JPEGs. In my opinion, they look like garbage.
But these days I use Filmic for everything. My process is basically switch off base curve, switch on Filmic, adjust exposure so that mid exposure looks reasonable, adjust white and black exposure in Filmic to taste and done.
The important thing to me is that this works for every photo, not just the easy ones. ETTR photos of high dynamic range scenes work just the same.
I'll occasionally run the photo through DXO and export a DNG with DXO's noise reduction for further work in Darktable too. Makes the shadows noise-free no matter how hard you push them.
DxO is good shit, the only raw editor that ticked all the intuitive UI/UX boxes for me. Must have been through 10+ trials. The open source options in particular could do with some UI love
Out of curiosity what stops you from using dxo for everything?
Likely the "filmic rgb" module in darktable. One of the most popular modules, it's pretty easy to get good results with the workflow they described. I also use it on most of my RAW pictures.
> The color science is missed up in Darktable […], I just couldn't get something decent out.
If you want help you need to explain what you did or tried. Did you work in display referred or scene referred? I can recommend submitting one of your raw files to a Play Raw[0]. People will edit your raw file and send back an .xmp file with the edit metadata so that you can see what they did.
In my opinion, the Lightroom edit in the OP is the best. Many of the replies with Darktable edits look extremely bad. Some have extreme color artifacts.
Highlight reconstruction was a major and well-known shortcoming in versions they were using. Better highlight reconstruction for large blown-out areas was finally added in darktable 4.0.
First time I'm hearing this. I think Sony owners make up a sizable portion of the user base.
I never had an issue with the RAWs from an a6300 and another entry level Sony mirrorless. Though I never used anything other than dt, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.
I've had a similar experience, especially with skin tones. The out of camera jpegs can be a little aggressive in making skin and grass colors "pop", but they still beat Darktable (even with significant tinkering).
I totally agree, after hours of editing, i still wouldn't match the JPEGs by the camera, while in light room you start with thr same look as the JPEG even if it s a RAW file, And I would reach my desired looks in few minutes.
darktable has a pretty steep learning curve and it introduces concepts from cinema (the scene referred workflow) that may be known to video editors and colorists, but that are surely alien even to seasoned still image editors and retouchers.
About once a year I try DT but always bounce off of it pretty hard for one very simple reason: my Canon raw images in DT don't look anything like what they do in-camera.
I did a studio shoot on Monday: clean strobe light, a tame white background, all settings manual (so no auto-lighting-optimizer), and fired up my raws in 4.0 on my calibrated monitor.
I loaded the roll into Light Table and things look fine (because, I suspect, that the CR3 file has an embedded JPEG with Canon's recipe cooked in).
Then I double clicked to bring it into Darkroom and it goes crazy: the backdrop goes a crazy purple hue, the exposure is wrong by about a third of a stop, and the skin is zombified.
It's utterly incomprehensible to me. Every year I check and every year I'm baffled at how dreadful it is. Cya next year I guess.
I understand why this turns you off, but I wanted to note that what you want: some default magic settings that make the photo look like Canon's in camera processing, is an explicit non-goal for the DT devs. Don't get your hopes up.
What you are looking at when entering the darkroom is an "undeveloped" raw. Darktable's philosophy is that developing this raw photo should be 100% the user's responsibility and that whatever the camera maker's JPEG engine does is irrelevant.
I still use DT because it is very powerful, but I do agree that it has a very steep learning curve, and therefore is frustrating for anyone who isnt fully committed to learning about digital color science, etc, myself included.
This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same.
Both Lightroom and Photo Lab do exactly this. If Darktable cannot support reading that information and importing it as a preset, that's fine, but pretending it is an artist choice seems to misunderstand what is going on here. To get specific Picture Control settings (e.g. sharpness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc), High ISO noise reduction, White balance, and color space are typically important as defaults or presets.
> This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same.
You are right, but I'm very sorry to say that attempting to faithfully recreate the look of the manufacturers JPEGs will likely never be the goal of darktable (or any serious photographer for that matter). What happens when you buy a camera from a different brand? You will likely want to normalize the output between your cameras and not to have every other picture rendered with Canon's interpretation of the the scene and the rest with Nikon's.
It doesn't have to be "faithful" and I agree it's not most people's "goal", but here's why I still want it and appreciate that Lightroom does it very well:
- I've been shooting mirrorless, and consequently using EVFs, since the NEX 6 came out. When I take a photo, I have already seen it. I have a vague idea of what tweaks I want to make, so having to start from scratch just interrupts that. Of course, sometimes those tweaks will override basically every default setting, but that doesn't mean having them wasn't valuable
- I often shoot RAW not because I want to painstakingly develop each photo to perfection, but because I simply need more latitude to "fix things in post". Especially when shooting events in suboptimal lighting or when I need to raise the ISO to make sure a critical event gets captured.
Of course! I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. But these kinds of discussions are still important because if enough of us got together we could start a community initiative to develop this and either get it merged or maintain a live fork with these features.
Simply not true. That’s exactly what I want and DT already has a reset button by which I can undo those base edits anyway. It’s again, another thing that puts people off and is confusing as hell at first.
It's not a simple case of reading data from the raw though. Out of those you listed, yes, white balance can be trivially read from the metadata and applied to the processing automatically, and in fact DT does do exactly that.
"Color space", by which I assume you mean input color profile aka the color matrix of the camera's sensor, has to be calibrated or reverse engineered by shooting standardized color targets under standard illuminants. DT does have this data and applies it automatically, but the calibration is provided by users and might not be ideal. You would probably get better results by doing your own calibration, but that is somewhat involved.
Picture control things like saturation etc that you select in camera are post processing steps that the camera applies to the raw in order to get a "developed" jpeg. They are proprietary to the camera maker and not published. Even if you can read settings like "saturation" and "portrait mode" from the metadata, you don't know which algorithm exactly that implies. Lightroom and other commercial software works with camera makers under NDA in order to reproduce the camera's processing. Could it be reverse engineered by open source software? Maybe, but the DT devs decided that they prefer to go in another direction.
Do you have any link explaining this reasoning? It does seem weird to me because not handling camera specific color management seem contradictory to a good experience. Raw files are actually not in any way "neutral" or standard, they are pretty specific to the camera and brand depending on how they calibrated their censor and other considerations such as potential treatments etc.
Not handling that at the software level and leaving it to the user means that you would have to do a repetitive and complex work for every single picture when other softwares give you a "neutral" basis (even though any attempt at neutrality is always limited. True neutrality could not display the image with RBG at all...) to work from based on calibrated color profiles for the cameras (some are better at giving you a good basis than others of course).
This would seem like a weird choice as anyways you have to do a bunch of conversion, so not using camera profile just means the conversion is less faithful.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, DT does handle the color space of the camera sensor, via the "Input Color Profile" module but this camera calibration data is not published by camera manufacturers. For Canon for example, DT has a single generic "Canon" color matrix profile, which was probably created by a user. You would get better results by calibrating your specific camera. Commercial software makers are able to obtain camera profiles (and other stuff like processing algorithms to match in-camera processing) under NDA from camera makers.
Sorry, not specific link, just stuff I picked up by following the pixls.us forum, where the DT and RT devs hang out.
> ... is an explicit non-goal for the DT devs. Don't get your hopes up.
The older I get the less time I want to be in front of a computer. I would prefer my photography software to do the workflow I want it to do, not what someone else thinks I should do -- regardless of whether it's free or not.
Besides, the more I'm behind a camera in nature, the better I usually feel. The more I'm behind a screen, the worse.
That's quite OK. It's just that DT then is not the right software for you, since the dev team has an opposing viewpoint to yours.
Rawtherapee I think has a feature that tries to apply curves in order to match the built in jpeg preview.
Otherwise you might be better served by commercial software such as Lightroom or Capture One, as they work with camera manufacturers in order to match the in-camera processing.
And that's what I do. I just find it too bad because it's interface is really not bad, and it's fairly capable at what it does.
To me, I don't care really, but in 2022, photography is still an underserved segment in the open source software world. I feel like they can have their opinion, but then allow others to have a UI element to turn it on if they so choose.
There's a lot of high quality gear floating around ebay for fairly cheap compared to when they were new.
> This gamut sanitization is the third and last to be added to darktable, which now has a fully-sanitized color pipeline from input (color calibration), through artistic changes (color balance rgb) to output (filmic v6). Users can now color-grade pictures safely in the knowledge that invalid input colors can be recovered in the least destructive fashion possible early in the pipeline, and valid colors can’t be pushed out of gamut along the pipeline.
Darktable is amazing. It takes some getting used to after Lightroom -- it doesn't hold your hand as much -- but once you get past that, the tools surpass LR in the power they give the user.
Parametric masks, LAB curves, wavelet decomposition are very powerful ways to work with the raw stuff of images.
On several ocassions I've tried switching to Darktable or RawTherapee, but they never seemed to offer the practicality and ease of workflow that Lightroom has. They have tons of features and kudos for that, but when it comes to editing hundreds of photos, LR is the only choice for me.
Agree. To manage tousands pictures, LRC wins. DT and RT are full of features that are mostly pointless for professional use.
It has that linux philosophy - from nerds to nerds. But not for practical use unfortunatelly. No Fuji profiles, not many lens correction profiles, wired demosaic for X-Trans, not consistent UI, no native folder sync, no AI clone tool...
Darktable replaced Lightroom in my workflow and I haven't looked back since. It is definitely one of my favorite pieces of open source software. I don't know how it's written but it would be awesome to have a browser version without the remote desktop rdp stuff; I might take a look to see how hard it would be to implement when I have the time.
I gave Darktable a try (never used Lightroom), and as an amateur, it is still kind of hard for me to achieve something better than the "out of camera" JPGs when post-processing RAW photos from my rather old Canon DSLR camera.
I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only.
Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture. Saturation is maxed in OOC-JPGs anyways leading to clipping if it's increased more for the overall image.
And what I almost forgot, lense correction and rotating towards drawable vertical or horizontal lines are great features.
So what it does for me is basically barely noticably adjusting the saturation/contrast values, fixing the horizon and applying lense correction.
Keep in mind that darktable really insists on doing things from the ground up, and pretty much requires you to understand the underlying pipeline and what you want to achieve. If you are just experimenting with random sliders, you aren't likely to get good results.
It mostly sticks to standard industrial and scientific definitions instead of marketable names, and contains very little "magic" that is common to commercial photography software (such as saturation intentionally not being actual saturation, hidden curves, and so on). So you can use any good book on photography/videography and color science, and directly apply it to most of the stuff it has.
Additionally, the developers spend a lot of their time explaining their reasoning and writing about the theory in general, for example:
I occasionally try to come back to DarkTable, RawTherapee etc, but similarly for my requirements they feel like overkill, and require much more time than I have to properly understand the underlying theories.
For a simpler interface that gets me (a naive user) half-way decent results pretty quickly, I'll drop back to LightZone. Whole bunch of ready-made presets that combine primitives (sharpness, contrast, saturation, curves etc), and easy to save new presets once you find a combination you like.
It's over hyped. Yeah, it's cool and all but anything else would do the same thing. The only thing that I actually found is better in Lightroom is the AI detection features. Same can go with Photoshop and paint.net (or gimp if you're into that kinda thing.)
> I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture.
You can't change the aperture after the image has been captured. I don't think you're the intended audience for darktable. Give https://filmulator.org/ a try!
I love DarkTable, it's an amazingly powerful tool, but for 99% of people the terms they use to describe editing are entirely alien. I take photos on my X100F for fun, want to do little edits here and there and filmic rgb etc. are completely foreign concepts.
I'd like to see far more work on the UX. I can imagine a scenario where you load it for the first time and you're presented with a choice for beginner or advanced UI. Beginner UI would drop you into a Lightroom-esque filtered set of modules, and take you through a tutorial of the UI.
The alien terms are actually familiar to videographers, colorists, and people who understand color theory in general. For some reason I don't understand, video folks have always had much better tools for handling color, dynamic ranges etc, and also the much saner pipeline than photographers.
> For some reason I don't understand, video folks have always had much better tools for handling color, dynamic ranges etc,
I suspect this is because photos usually stand on their own. You edit a photo to something that pleases you and that is it.
With video, you have multiple pieces of footage recorded at different times, in different circumstances and locations that need to match in their look to make a video feel like a consistent whole. Getting the color right is much more critical for video.
Sure, but that doesn't mean the UX is good. "This is meaningful to videographers and colorists" is a not a great defense of UX for an app that is targeted towards photographers, not videographers or colorists.
Lightroom and Capture One (and heck, even Affinity Photo), make common photography tasks like highlight recovery easily accessed with a single slider. Sure, the Darktable UI may be "meaningful to colorists", but that doesn't necessarily result in a good UX for the main people that are likely to want to use it.
I think UX and terminology are two different points actually - I agree UI/UX can be clunky overall.
> "This is meaningful to videographers and colorists" is a not a great defense of UX for an app that is targeted towards photographers, not videographers or colorists.
I think you underestimate the amount of photographers who know the fundamentals, as well as those who are familiar with related fields. After getting better in painting, I now resent tools like Lightroom which obscure everything behind some magic. I almost always see what I want from the photo, and I need a specific result. Photography tools are generally inconsistent, and most are light years behind video tools in getting predictable results. I want pastel colors in Lightroom and I know exactly what makes them; it's a single operation. Yet in Lightroom and Photoshop it needs multiple tweaks which feel like a workaround. The saturation in photo software can mean arbitrary things except being an actual axis in the color space. It can use several intermediate curves without telling you, making you fiddle with the sliders yet still not get the result you want. And so on. I mean, I tried Luminar AI recently, and it has a slider called Punch; what the hell does it do exactly?!
There's a reason people are using things like Firegrade for Photoshop. Software like RT/ART and Darktable also does what it says on the tin and nothing more, this is a niche they fill, and I'm glad they exist. (although I'll admit RT still looks like an explosion of sliders to me, despite the fact I know what they are for)
The name "Darktable" is a play on Adobe Lightroom, since "lightroom" is a combination of "light table" and "darkroom", both concepts from film photography.
One of the contributors to the project had not very nice things to say about the changes in this version. Ranty, but worth listening: https://youtu.be/56e5Yc-IQ84
He is still contributing and collaborating on the technical stuff. His fork is exclusively about the UI, and claims to be 100% compatible with image editing.
That video is a text book case of burnout, it looks like.
Building an open source software with a GUI and announcing that said GUI has been reworked in this release, and then not attaching screenshots of said changes :(
Does anyone use darktable for inverting color film? I currently use a plugin for Lightroom and while I love the plugin, it would be great to be able to get rid of the Lightroom subscription.
For B&W negadoctor is very easy, nothing major with it other than setting white balance, then setting the film base colour and then adjusting D-MIN/D-MAX to the exposure you want. You can then leave it there or go crazy.
Colour is a bit more hands on and with negadoctor you really can get a nice starting base but it's much more manual. You need to make sure colour profiles and white balance match your scaner/dslr scan. The you need to set up the shadow casts and highlight colours. Much more manual just to then get a rather flat image with correct colours to your liking. Then it's more regular raw workflow so altering contrast and saturation but it's nothing too hard still. But it's 100% more hands on the using NLP (this is what I'm assuming you are using. Check YouTube see what you think.
If you want a quick-and-dirty inversion, you can take a tone curve tool, set it to the XYZ color space and make it go top-left to bottom-right instead of the normal bottom-left to top-right. That should work afaik.
> 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.
I had an issue with RAW decoding when the dji mini 2 came out. Dec's were extremely responsive and helpful, and the software is free and extremely powerful to boot.
I've switched back and forth between RawTherapee and darktable for a few years now.
I prefer the UI and workflow or RT, but dt has better performance on my machine. And RT has this strange longstanding bug where the image is extremely blurry during editing, and only becomes clear after exporting. According to a github issue, a workaround is to disable lens correction (and anything else in the "transform" tab) but this didn't work for me, prompting my most recent switch to dt.
current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.