Darktable 5.6.2 has been released as the latest maintenance update to the open-source RAW image editor, which fixes support for recent Intel drivers, corrects OpenCL input gamma-corrected scaling on some devices, and resolves an issue in the Filmic RGB module that could produce incorrect masks.
The release also addresses several crashes. Neural Restore no longer crashes at the end of RAW denoising on certain sensor sizes where tile-seam blending could write beyond the image boundary. Another fix prevents corrupted output or crashes when an AI model returns more data than Darktable allocated, affecting object masks and Lua-based models.
Importing malformed styles with an empty module order should also no longer crash the application, while Windows users get a fix for crashes or hangs caused by faulty custom ONNX Runtime libraries.
Several Windows-specific usability problems have been corrected. Darktable could previously steal focus and keyboard input from other applications while users hovered over Lighttable thumbnails, imported or exported files, or when log messages appeared. Alt+Tab could also fail when the pointer was over a thumbnail.
External commands on Windows have received attention. Instead of repeatedly opening new console windows whenever Darktable or a Lua script launches an external command, the application now keeps a single console session for its lifetime. On Windows 11 24H2 and newer, no console window is created.
Darktable 5.6.2 also fixes a few small memory leaks, including those triggered while expanding variables during large import or export operations and when repeatedly pasting history stacks onto an image in Darkroom.
Lua scripting receives a handful of fixes. The script manager should no longer start twice and cause a stack overflow, user-installed script updates now run from the correct directory, and the user’s luarc file is executed in all cases.
Camera support remains largely unchanged compared with version 5.6.1. No new cameras have gained base support, although white balance presets have been added for the Leica SL3-P in DNG format and the Sony ILCE-7RM6.
Documentation versioning has also resumed. The stable Darktable 5.6 manual is now available separately from the development documentation, with a version switcher allowing users to move between the two.
Users upgrading from the older 5.4 series should note that while existing edits are preserved, the updated library and configuration files will no longer be usable with Darktable 5.4. The developers therefore recommend creating a backup before upgrading.
For more details, see the changelog.
Darktable 5.6.2 is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, with official AppImage builds provided for both x86_64 and AArch64 Linux systems.
