A Digital Darkroom. Like Lightroom. But Free. [1]

You're no doubt familiar with photo and image editors such as Microsoft Paint, Paint.Net, PhotoShop and others. A few years ago, Adobe launched LightRoom, which is not just a photo editor but more of a digital darkroom. It keeps all your image files in its database, and lets you edit them such as adding effects or changing the colour balance.

But unlike a photo editor app, LightRoom is non-destructive. When you make an edit to an image, you can see the edits straight away but, unless you explicitly do so, the original image file doesn't get changed. Instead, the database stores details of the changes that you made, so you can view or change or re-apply them any time in the future.

While LightRoom is a great program, it's also expensive. And as you know, we don't write about expensive software on this site. In fact, we don't even write about cheap software. And I've managed to find a digital darkroom program which is freeware (although a donation is requested, it's not mandatory).

The program is called DarkTable and you'll find it at https://www.darktable.org/install/#windows [3]. The download is around 62 MB and it runs just fine under Windows 10. The file is malware-free according to VirusTotal, and the download site is rated as reputable by Web of Trust.

I think it's really good. Try it for yourself and see what you think.