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Darktable

Last modified: Dec 10th, 2025

Notes on the FOSS photo editing and organization application Darktable.

RAW editing: first steps

These are the steps I always apply when beginning to edit a RAW photo. Editing is best done with your monitor at full brightness (I think?) and in color assessment mode (Ctrl-B), at least for color-related edits.

I use sigmoid over the default filmic rgb because it’s simpler and looks better out of the box. You can change the default in settings.

1. Set color calibration (CAT tab only)
   • Default is what the camera provides which is usually fine
   • Can use the color picker to select a neutral color area or the whole image (default)
   • Can pick a preset like Daylight
   • This is great way to remove a color cast
2. Adjust exposure if needed
   • Darktable can automatically adjust the exposure if you click the eyedropper tool (in the default “manual” mode)
3. Enable lens correction
4. Enable denoise (profiled)
5. sigmoid: minimal changes here only, as advised in the docs
   • Try the “smooth” preset, especially for photos with heavy highlights like sunsets
   • Adjust contrast if needed
   • Reduce “preserve hue” slider as desired to make highlights sort of glow more (?)
     • Good for “sunsets and fire” apparently
6. Set up crop if desired, as well as rotate and perspective
7. Add color balance rgb and play around
   • Try the “basic colorfulness: standard” preset
   • General settings like brightness, contrast, and saturation are in the “Master” tab
   • Vibrance can be helpful as well
8. Sharpening: some sharpening is always required for RAW files. The options are:
   • sharpen: simple UI, but not recommended by Darktable anymore
   • local contrast: doesn’t seem to actually sharpen, but has a similar color effect
     • The quick and easy option
     • Sometimes I’ll need to reduce global contrast after
   • contrast equalizer: try the sharpen preset or one of the deblur ones
   • diffuse and sharpen: more complicated
     • Try the “lens deblur: hard” preset
     • This is probably the best quality option, although it is slow
   • Ideally sharpening is done after resizing an image for export

I rarely change the order of these modules in the active module tab because Darktable says not to.

More advanced edits

• color balance rgb
  • An aesthetic tint or color grade can be done in the “4 ways” tab, usually starting with the “global offset” component
• color look up table
  • Make changes to specific colors in the image, akin to applying a filter but manually, color by color
• color equalizer
  • Adjust hue/saturation/brightness of pixels based on their current hue
  • Middle-click to see sliders
  • Seems better than color look up table
• tone equalizer
  • Fix contrast or brightness levels in a more advanced way than a slider
  • Try presets like “compress shadows/highlights > EIGF > soft”
  • Mess with the graph
  • Scroll on the image to brighten/darken specific levels
  • Sometimes you can use EIGF to get a good graph (?) then double-click on the line to reset levels, and then just touch the specific thing you want
    • I used this to brighten a dark image without overexposing the sky