Darktable 3.0, a great option for RAW image processing

aboutdarktable 3.0

In the next article we are going to take a look at Darktable 3.0. This is a photographic processing program in RAW format. This format is known as digital negative, that is, an image without pretreatment. For many, darktable is one of the best applications for editing RAW images on Gnu / Linux.

Darktable 3.0 is a new version of this software that offers users a good amount of improvements to the program's functions and a complete overhaul of the user interface. The GUI is now completely controlled by the GTK and CSS rules. In addition, we will find eight themes available by default.

In this new version 66 bugs have been fixed and many new features have been added. This is why Darktable 3.0 is a great update to this popular open source RAW image editor.

Some of the features in Darktable 3.0

darktable 3 preferences

Some of the features offered by this new version are:

  • Available a reworked UI.
  • A new module to handle 3D RGB Lut transformations.
  • Many improvements to the 'denoise (profiled)' module.
  • Added a new mode of 'selective elimination' and a timeline view. We will also have support to undo / redo more operations on labels, color labels, classifications, etc.
  • New Basic RGB and filmic tone equalizer modules.

options and actions on images

  • Better 4K / 5K display support.
  • We will find in the program many code optimizations for CPU and SSE paths.
  • In this version we will also find support to export to Google Photos.
  • More camera compatibility, white balance presets and noise profiles.
  • New timeline view in light view.
  • Can now show hierarchical labels in a tree view.
  • Tags can be made private.
  • Color picker added to various modules.

dark room in darktable

  • Windows of preview available in darkroom.
  • Many bug fixes and feature improvements.

These are just some of the changes in this new version. You can read all of them in the note on Darktable 3.0 release in the releases page on GitHub.

Installing Darktable 3.0 on Ubuntu-based distributions

information about an image

Darktable is available in this distribution, but at the moment the latest version of the program is not yet available from the Ubuntu repositories. For the LTS version, it may take months before we make this update available.

If you dont mind have an older version of Darktable on Ubuntu (and related distributions like Linux Mint) you can install the program from the Ubuntu repositories by running in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):

sudo apt install darktable

installation from software option

Or you can also look directly in the Ubuntu software option. From where we will also find previous versions of this program in snap format and in Flatpak.

Darktable also provides your own PPA to install this program on Ubuntu. Unfortunately today, in the Ubuntu 18.04 option that I am testing, this latest version of Darktable still does not appear.

However, from Ubuntu Handbook They offer an unofficial PPA to easily install Darktable 3.0 on Ubuntu and other distributions based on this system.

For install the program from this unofficial PPA, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the following command to add the repository:

add repo darktable 3

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/darktable

After updating the software available from the list of repositories, we can now proceed to install Darktable 3.0 typing in the same terminal:

darktable 3.0 installation

sudo apt install darktable

After installation we can now search for the program launcher on our computer.

program launcher

Uninstall Darktable 3.0

For remove the installed program through this unofficial PPA, we can uninstall the application first. We will do this by typing in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):

sudo apt remove darktable; sudo apt autoremove

Another option to remove the RAW image editor will be to use the Ubuntu software option.

To finish, we only have remove the PPA. We will do this by typing in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) the command:

sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/darktable

To get more information about this program, its use, its features or about the installation, users can consult the project website.


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