The release of the program for organizing and processing digital photos Darktable 4.0 is presented, which is dedicated to the tenth anniversary since the formation of the first release of the project. Darktable acts as a free alternative to Adobe Lightroom and specializes in non-destructive work with raw images. Darktable provides a large selection of modules for performing various photo processing operations, allows you to maintain a database of source photos, visually navigate through existing images and, if necessary, perform distortion correction and quality improvement operations, while maintaining the original image and the entire history of operations with it. The project code is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Binary builds are expected soon.
Major changes:
- The user interface has been completely redesigned. Indents, colors, element alignment and icons have been revised. The design of collapsible sections has been changed. To reduce the clutter of elements in the interface, new collapsible sections βMixing RGB channelsβ, βExposureβ and βColor calibrationβ have been added. The vignetting interface is divided into two sections. Added support for the IPAPGothic font. The display of tooltips has been redesigned. The default theme is Elegant Gray.
- A new color and exposure calibration module has been added, allowing you to match any object in an image to a randomly selected color, which can be used, for example, to adjust white balance for non-gray objects or to achieve color consistency across images.
- The RGB Film Tone Curve ("filmic") module used for color matching has been redesigned to produce richer colors such as blue skies by matching with the color space used and preserving the overall color gamut.
- A controlled Laplace mode has been implemented to restore overexposed areas of the image, allowing you to extract information about lost detail from uncropped RGB channels and use this information to restore cropped channels, taking into account color gradients from neighboring areas of the image.
- We have proposed our own uniform color space - Uniform Color Space 2022, created with an eye to research into the characteristics of information perception to improve saturation control while maintaining the artistic qualities of photography.
- Settings related to performance, optimizations and use of OpenCL have been completely revised. New optimizations have been added. It is possible to separately configure OpenCL parameters for each device. It is possible to apply performance settings on the fly, without the need to restart the program.
- The color picker tool provides hints with color names (necessary for people who have problems with color perception).
- A new module βCollection Filtersβ has been added, which simplifies the analysis of information in large collections and allows you to set arbitrary filters and sorting methods. You can filter images by parameters such as color marks, text, time, exposure, ISO level, etc.
- Added support for exporting in EXR format with color representation in the form of 16-bit floating point values.
- The module for viewing recently used collections has been replaced with the βHistoryβ button in the standard collection management interface.
- Improved support for monochrome images and photos taken on cameras with a removed color filter.
Source: opennet.ru