The p-Code Machine

In the past I’ve always been a very assertive advocate of UFRaw (+F-Spot). I’ve never found rawstudio/rawtherapee any good for my purposes. However in recent months a new contender has emerged, and it’s called Darktable (obviously a pun on Lightroom (Lighttable & Darkroom)). It’s primarily authored by Johannes Hanika, who judging by the git log is a one man coding army.

There are a couple of things that interest me in Darktable, the first is that it is a combo of both photo management (lighttable) and raw development (darkroom), it’s really integrated, not two programs (F-Spot + UFRaw) stuck together with some ducktape.

The second would be the fact that Darktable seems extremely well designed, it’s entirely plugin based, even the raw import itself is a plugin. This means the code is well separated into these plugins, this inherently means functionality can be disabled by just disabling a plugin. No need to comment out some code before compiling.

Another strong point of Darktable is it’s imaging pipeline, except for the first and last few steps, the pipeline is entirely in 32bit floating point LAB colorspace, properly integrating color management. Which means it’s calculations can be extremely accurate. A nice extra benefit is the fact that some image operations just work better in LAB than other colorspaces, the Unsharp Mask being the principal example of this.

Something that’s also very important to me is the user interface, I really care about this. While Darktable does not always conform to common practice in user interfaces and often prevents novel idea’s for it’s user interface, it’s easy to work with. It works particularly well fullscreen (F11 just like Firefox), it’s dark theme makes sure you’re not distracted from your photograph. And the edge/buttons for expanding or collapsing the sidebars are at the screen’s edges, which means you can just quickly drag your mouse to the edge (without any particularly aim), and click to expand or collapse a sidebar, this works really fast!

Darktable is still a very young project, but it’s well worth taking a look at. Rolf Steinort from Meet The GIMP recently did a show on Darktable.

If you want to try Darktable yourself can get nicely packaged git checkouts (development versions) from my PPA for Ubuntu.