darktable Brings Its Free, Open Source Lightroom Alternative to Windows

If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to Lightroom for managing and processing your raw photos, there’s some good news: the free and open source software darktable is now finally available for Windows users.

darktable was originally released back in 2009 and has been used by photographers running Mac and Linux-based systems. The software contains a set of photo editing features that helps you do non-destructive post-processing on raw files, especially in large batches.

Although photographers have been requesting a Windows build for years, the project has refrained from venturing into Windows due to a lack of people dedicated to maintaining it and keeping it alive. Recently, however, a developer named Peter Budai arrived and brought new hope for Windows users.

Now, after 8 years, darktable has been officially ported to Windows in its new version 2.4.0.

“Hell froze over,” darktable writes in its announcement. “[W]e finally ported darktable to Windows and intend to support it in the future.

“At the moment it’s still lacking a few features (for example there is no printing support), has a few limitations (tethering requires special drivers to be installed) and comes with its own set of bugs (TIFF import and export doesn’t support non-ASCII characters in file names).”

“But overall we are confident that it’s quite usable already and hope you will enjoy it.”

In addition to a Windows build, darktable version 2.4.0 brings a host of new changes, features, bug fixes, and camera support. Major improvements include a new module for haze removal, undo support for masks, intelligent grouping of undo steps, and more. You can find the entire list of changes and improvements in the announcement.

If you’ve never used darktable before, you can find the current feature set listed here.

You can download darktable 2.4.0 on Github, where you’ll now find the new 61.5MB download titled “darktable-2.4.0-win64.exe” for Windows.