Darktable 5.6.1 was released today as the first maintenance update in the 5.6 series of the popular open-source photography workflow application and RAW developer.
One noticeable improvement concerns Darktable’s newer AI-based processing features. AI model downloads can now resume after interruption instead of restarting from the beginning. Temporary network problems trigger automatic retries. The preferences window no longer becomes unresponsive when checking for AI model updates over slow or unreachable connections because that check now runs in the background.
AI RAW denoise has received several fixes as well. Darktable now prevents the feature from being used with older Fujifilm Super CCD sensors because their sensor layouts were not part of the models’ training data. Images generated through AI denoise and upscale retain color labels, ratings, manually assigned geotags, EXIF information, and tags.
Several issues affecting Neural Restore have also been addressed. These include crashes with RAW files whose visible area extends all the way to the sensor edge, issues with certain four-color Bayer sensors, and incorrect previews on linear RAW formats such as Apple ProRAW and other computational RAW images.
Support for sRAW images in Neural Restore has also been corrected, while cropped images should now show the proper selected area in the AI RAW denoise preview instead of displaying a different part of the image.
On the GPU processing side, Darktable 5.6.1 fixes a bug that could disable AMD OpenCL devices on Windows and addresses corrupted pixels on some AMD GPUs using Mesa’s Rusticl OpenCL driver.
OpenCL memory handling has also been improved. The application now avoids some excessive GPU memory allocations that could previously cause instability or crashes on devices with limited memory, while also handling uninitialized OpenCL events more safely under heavy memory pressure.
Performance on lower-end systems should improve. The developers reverted an earlier increase to the preview processing pipeline size after it negatively affected interface responsiveness.
Related fixes address larger-than-necessary mipmaps and reduce memory usage during image processing, helping avoid out-of-memory terminations on systems with limited RAM.
Moreover, Darktable 5.6.1 fixes several potential crashes caused by invalid memory access, including issues in wavelet decomposition, path masks, raster-mask caching, CPU highlight processing, and certain 3D LUT formats.
Mask handling received additional attention with fixes for feathering glitches, masks unexpectedly altered by module blending, and incorrect behavior when two mask nodes occupy the same position. Two-finger scrolling while drawing masks now pans the image instead of zooming when the active mask doesn’t consume the gesture.
Other changes include a fix for tethering failing to connect with a non-English interface, corrected rating messages when modifying multiple images, improved image and filmstrip selection in culling mode, and several fixes affecting Lighttable navigation.
Finally, Linux users running the AppImage build on Wayland will also benefit from a change that stops Darktable from defaulting to X11/XWayland when a native Wayland session is available.
For additional details, see the changelog. Darktable 5.6.1 is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, including official AppImage builds for x86_64 and AArch64 systems.
Users upgrading directly from the older 5.4 series should keep in mind that while their edits will be preserved, the updated library and configuration files will no longer be usable with Darktable 5.4.
