It is freely available in versions tailored for most major Linux distributions, macOS, Solaris and Windows and is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later.

The program features built-in ICC profiles, GPU acceleration (based on OpenCL), and supports most common image formats.

Support for drawn masks was added in Darktable version 1.4, allowing application of effects to manually specified areas of an image.

There are five mask types available: brush, circle, ellipse, Bézier path, and gradient; all are resizable, allow fade-out radius for smooth blending and can have their opacity controlled.

One example might be calling an external application during file export in order to apply additional processing steps outside of Darktable.

[11] Multiple histogram types are available, all with individually selectable red, green and blue channels: linear, logarithmic and waveform (new in version 1.4).

The left panel displays a pannable preview of the current image, an undo history stack, a color picker, and Exif information.

As of December 2019,[update] darktable includes 67 image adjustment plugins, which it divides into 5 groups;[9] Plugins for simple well-known photo adjustment operations include: contrast brightness saturation module; shadows and highlights; color reconstruction; base curve with presets to automatically improve contrast and colors; crop and rotate; orientation; exposure; demosaic; highlight reconstruction; white balance; invert and raw black/white point.

Since version 4.4.0, a new locale called "en@truecase" allows users to apply conventional casing to English.