Looking for a free Lightroom alternative, check out the new Darktable 3.0.0

Darktable is an open-source alternative to Lightroom, and it seems to be growing in popularity, especially since it became available for Windows.  The new version is now available for Windows, iOS, and Linux, and just like the previous ones, it’s completely free.

The new version of Darktable brings some changes and new features, both big and small. First, the graphic user interface has been completely reworked. You can choose between different themes, and there are eight of them. Also, new shortcuts have been introduced in the 3.0.0 version to speed up your workflow. Then, a new timeline view has been introduced in the lighttable, as well as a new “culling” mode. Since the lighttable view has been rewritten, it’s now made usable on 4K and 5K monitors.

Many existing features have been improved, and a dozen bugs have been fixed. According to Darktable’s website, these are the fixes in v. 3.0.0:

• The color picker support has been fixed by a complete rewrite. It should now give correct values in all cases.
• Fix overexposed display.
• Do not disable SSL for storage modules.
• A long standing bug on mask distort in Liquify module has been fixed. This was visible when a liquify mask was used together with the perspective correction module activated.
• A bug on mask distort from crop & rotate when using flip and some angle has been fixed.
• Fix manual crop in perspective correction module when not in default orientation.
• The modification of date/time is now stored into the XMP. This ensures that removing the picture and reloading will keep the changes.
• Fix orientation to support all cases as exposed in these examples: https://github.com/recurser/exif-orientation-examples
• Store the panel states for each lighttable mode.
• Fix crop&rotate and orientation in the lightroom importer.
• Fix ProPhoto RGB profile.
• Fix exif lens metadata parsing containing comma.

You can check out a very detailed list of improved features and bug fixes on Darktable’s website. If you’d like to download it and try it out, head over to the Install page and follow the instructions. In case you’re new to Darktable, here’s a great, comprehensive introduction to the software if you want to start using it.

[via Reddit]