Darktable, a powerful open-source photography workflow application designed primarily for RAW photo processing and non-destructive editing, has officially released version 5.4 as a new feature update, bringing significant changes to image processing, workflow handling, and platform support.
A key addition is a new AgX-based tone-mapping module derived from Blender’s AgX display transform. It provides explicit control over white and black points, an adjustable mid-gray pivot, and independent contrast control for shadows and highlights, aiming for natural mid-tones and film-like highlight roll-off.
Capture Sharpening has also been added to the demosaic module to recover detail lost to diffraction, optical low-pass filters, or other in-camera blur.
Moreover, Darktable 5.4 introduces support for multiple workspaces. Each workspace maintains its own database and configuration, allowing users to separate projects or workflows. An in-memory workspace option is also available for temporary sessions without creating a persistent database on disk.
Wayland support has seen extensive fixes, including correct ICC profile handling and improved overall stability. According to the project, darktable on Wayland now behaves comparably to the X11 experience.
UI and usability improvements include clearer visual feedback when switching views, improved zoom behavior, better responsiveness when panning or rotating images, refined slider interactions, and new default keyboard shortcuts.
Performance has been improved in several areas. The Lut3D module is roughly 5-20% faster. First startup on new installations is significantly quicker, especially when libraries are stored on HDDs or network storage, and interaction latency is reduced when zooming or panning in the darkroom.
Regarding supported devices, Darktable 5.4 expands camera and RAW support with new and updated profiles for Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Sony, Leica, Panasonic, OM System, and other models.
RawSpeed updates include revised color matrices and new noise profiles. Some RAW compression formats remain unsupported, and support for several older cameras has been suspended due to missing sample files.
Finally, the release updates the Lua API to version 9.6, adds manual chroma subsampling control for AVIF exports, and drops support for Intel Macs and macOS versions older than 14.0.
For more information, see the announcement. The full changelog is here. Darktable 5.4 is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Linux users can download and install it as a distro-agnostic AppImage or Flatpak.
