Digital darkroom software is designed for simulating darkroom techniques with digital photos. This software offers sophisticated tools for advanced amateur, fine-art, and professional photographers. It generally does not have painting, drawing, and pixel-level editing tools that a general-purpose photo editor would have, and it may or may not offer features for organizing and publishing your photos. Some are plug-ins to other software such as Photoshop, and most include RAW camera file support.
1. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Windows and Macintosh)
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About Photography Guide Liz Masoner states: "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom was developed with photographers in mind. From organization to developing to printing, Lightroom makes the process simple. Intuitive controls and powerful tools make Lightroom a must for photographers working with large numbers of RAW images. Lightroom also supports quick capture to take images directly from your camera as you shoot for on-location previews."
2. Apple Aperture (Macintosh)
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Designed for the needs of professional photographers, Aperture supports RAW formats from all leading camera manufacturers and offers non-destructive image processing, comparison, photo management, and publishing tools. Photographers can import photos, review and compare them, add metadata, experiment with image adjustments, and finally publish photos as prints, contact sheets, books, and websites.
3. Alien Skin Exposure (Windows and Macintosh)
© Alien Skin
Alien Skin Exposure is a plug-in designed to accurately simulate the look and feel of film in your digital photos. Exposure comes with a number of presets to imitate the appearance of Velvia, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, GAF 500, TRI-X, Ilford, and many other film types. It also offers controls for tweaking the color, tone, focus and grain of your photos. Through these settings, you can develop your own signature style and reproduce traditional darkroom effects. Being a plug-in, it runs inside a host program such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, or Fireworks.
4. ACDSee Pro 2 Photo Manager (Windows)
ACDSee has evolved over the years from a simple image viewer, to a full-fledge photo manager, and now there is the Pro version with advanced features and camera RAW support for photographers. ACDSee Pro 2 offers tools for viewing, processing, editing, organizing and publishing your photos at a price much lower than its competitors.
5. LightZone (Windows and Macintosh)
LightZone offers non-destructive photo editing in a very unique and visual way. LightZone presents photo editing options as instant styles which apply affects to a photo based on analysis of the image. LightZone integrates with other photo databases like Lightroom, iPhoto and Aperture, and it includes tools for browsing photos, working with metadata, rating and sorting photos, batch processing, and RAW editing. LightZone is available in a Basic and Full version. The full version offers photo management and batch processing.6. virtualPhotographer (Windows)
virtualPhotographer is a fun and easy plug-in that helps you add drama and artistic effects to your photos. The free software lets you experiment with a wide variety of color and black & white photographic effects by manipulating color, film speed, film type, and effects.7. Picture Window Pro (Windows)
Picture Windows Pro was designed for photographers and offers image management, image editing, batch processing, RAW image support, and tools for printing and electronic output. It's one of the less expensive professional level image editors priced under US$90 and a 30-day free trial is available.8. ArcSoft PhotoStudio Darkroom (Windows and Macintosh)
PhotoStudio Darkroom provides non-destructive image processing for RAW, JPEG and TIFF image files. It includes a photo browser with side-by-side comparison view mode, and a number of image adjustment tools.Reader Suggestions
If you know of advanced digital photography software that I neglected to include here, add a comment to let me know.
Last Updated: Dec. 2007
