Few days ago the release of the new version of Darktable 3.6 was announced, in which in addition to the new and improved functions it provides a greater comfort in operation and a revised import module, as well as a new engine raw that is supposed to offer very good results at high speed and more.
For those who are unfamiliar with Darktable, you should know that this acts as a free alternative to Adobe Lightroom and specializes in the non-destructive manipulation of raw images.
About Darktable
Darktable provides a large selection of modules to perform all kinds of photo processing operations, allows you to maintain a source photo base, visually browse existing images and, if necessary, perform distortion correction and quality enhancement operations, while maintaining the original image and the entire history of operations with it. The project code is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Binaries are expected in the near future.
Main news in Darktable 3.6
In this new released version of Darktable 3.6 developers counted around 2680 confirmations for Darktable and Rawspeed since version 3.4, plus 954 pull requests processed and 290 issues resolved, With which se has done a lot of optimizations internal throughout the code along with many speed improvements for the code path CPU standard adjusting the OpenMP code, as there are big gains with the new code in some modules.
For the part of the novelties that are presented in this new version is the addition of a quick access panel that will replace the 'basic settings' module»Existing and adds much more functionality as the new design brings a revamped interface to existing processing modules and bundles them into a single unified design.
Besides that users will be able to add controls from any application module to the new Quick Access Panel and customize it to your liking for what Darktable hopes will help increase productivity. The company says that with this update, modules can also be added to or removed from a group in the maintenance window, and the ability to automatically apply module group presets has been added.
Another of the changes that stands out is the new import module now shows thumbnails of images before importing and makes it easy to handle various import tasks. The same dialog is now used to import disks, memory cards, or cameras.
On the other hand, it is also noted that this new version has aa new section that has been added to the Color Calibration module which allows users to use a color check chart and a vector scope has been added to "complement the current histogram, waveform, and parade views."
Of the other changes that stand out:
- New standard demosaic algorithm for better quality.
- A new RGB color balance module now meets all the requirements for color correction.
- A censorship module for the simple pixelation / blurring of parts of an image for censorship purposes.
- Ability to create and display an opacity mask based on the details or sharpness of an image. Darktable says that the function uses an algorithm similar to the one used in the dual demo function.
- Last but not least, a new clipping module for new features.
Finally if you want to know more about it of this new version of Darktable 3.6, you can check the original announcement In the following link.
How to install Darktable on Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version, they should know that currently the precompiled binaries for Ubuntu and its derivatives are not yet available even though it is a matter of days before they are available within the repositories.
To install from the repositories, just type:
sudo apt-get install darktable
While for those who already want to try this new version, they can compile the application in the following way. First we get the source code with:
git clone https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable.git cd darktable git submodule init git submodule update
And we proceed to compile and install with:
./build.sh --prefix /opt/darktable --build-type Release