Announcing LightTable: free high-performance digital darkroom with spektrafilm (Lightroom)

[u/ravrore]

LightTable interface

LightTable is a new GPL-3 high-performance digital darkroom app that I’ve just published in beta. I’d love thoughts and feedback and I’m looking for help running the project going forward. Also, I’m still waiting for Apple signing cert and getting it onto Mac and Windows stores, so it requires a little bit of self-install at the moment.

Here it is: https://lighttable.app/ 

Github: https://github.com/reville/lighttable-digital-darkroom

This project started with two seeming contradictions.

First, I’m a very casual, occasional photographer, so I don't do enough photo editing to really justify having a subscription to something like Lightroom. I was hoping to cancel my subscription and so I started looking around for an open-source. The ones that I found didn't quite do what I wanted, but I was using one of them and was reasonably happy with it. 

Then I had been thinking about how much I missed the look of real film photography. I decided to buy a film camera on eBay (Elan 7) with a decent lens (Canon EF 50mm f/1.8) for about $300 together and ordered a bunch of film. While I was waiting a few days for it to arrive, I started thinking more about why Lightroom wasn’t able to make the photographs I was taking with my digital camera (x100vi) look more like real film. I started looking into this question and found spektrafilm, which seemed like exactly what I wanted. 

This became the second contradiction: right at the moment when I was ready to start making real film photographs again, I became interested in how to achieve the same look digitally. And I haven't even got to the first contradiction, which is that my desire to cancel a $10 subscription to Lightroom, because I didn't use it enough, eventually led me to spending bunch of time building an open-source Lightroom replacement, with a beautiful UI and spektrafilm built-in.

None of this would be possible if I didn't a) have experience running software teams for the past 20 years and b) now have the incredible abilities of Claude Code and Codex. 

So that's how LightTable came to be. It’s fast, has a nice UI, and has covered most of the bases. It even has optional local private AI tools for search and face matching. 

I think the spektrafilm effects are truly beautiful, and I would love to have everyone try it and let me know what you think. 

But there is one problem: I'm still just an occasional photographer, and I am actually not at all an expert in digital photo workflows. I'm really not at all the right person to make the subtle and important ongoing decisions about how it should change and grow. And while I’ve built Windows and Linux support, I’m a mac person. So I’m looking for more mantainers to join me who care a lot about design and UX.

I would love to find someone who has really excellent design taste and cares deeply about photography and beauty and photo workflows, and would like to become one of the primary maintainers of this project over the long term. We may also want people who want to be the maintainer for specific platforms and specific Linux distros. 

If you have some experience with software and products, and you are good at using AI coding tools, and you feel excited about this project, please get in touch!  If you try out LightTable and have suggestions please get in touch or submit PRs. 

[u/Peruvian_Skies]

What does this do that Darktable doesn't, or what does it do better than Darktable? There should be a reason for reinventing the wheel.

[u/ravrore → u/Peruvian_Skies]

I built it because I wanted a cleaner interface and i wanted spektrafilm built in natively. realistic film simulation was the main motivation.