darktable is an open source raw photo processing program
The release of the new version of Darktable 4.4 was announced, which since the release of version 4.2 has made about 2700 commits, 813 pull requests and various bug fixes.
For those who are unfamiliar with Darktable, you should know that it provides a great selection of modules to perform 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 enhancement operations, while maintaining the original image and all operations content.
Main news in Darktable 4.4
In this new version of Darktable 4.4, highlights the ability to define multiple profiles automatically applied to a processing module. The applied profiles form a chain of new module instances. To determine which profile is associated with a module instance, the appropriate module tag is automatically added to the profile name.
To make it easier to use profiles, styles, and the clipboard, default settings have been redesigned used in some processing modules. In many modules, the default options they now take into account the metadata of the image or the current workflow.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version is the "Default module set" setting now is formed based on the configuration of the space model previously set, for example, you can use the “Tone Curve (Film)”, “Tone Curve (Sigmoid)” and “Base Curve (Old)” modules.
In addition to that in Darktable 4.4, we can find that the work of many internal procedures has been accelerated, for example, implementation of interpolation algorithms, Gaussian function generator (used for noise suppression), blur filter, bilateral filter, blending modes, brightness mask calculation, accelerated JPEG2000 format loading has been implemented.
It is also highlighted that Numerous interface improvements have been madeFor example, the filter selection dialog in the profile has been redesigned, the color eyedropper code has been completely redesigned, the histogram display has been redesigned and the histogram calculation code has been modernized, the zoom widget and the thumbnail generator have been redesigned.
Of the other changes that stand out of this new version:
- An option has been added to the scale module for color matching in RYB vectorscope mode, which supports 9 modes of operation.
- Added a "right click and drag" operation that allows you to correct the rotation of an image without having to go to the Rotate and Perspective module.
- Performance optimization was carried out on 33 processing modules, which allowed to achieve work speed-up from 5 to 40%.
- Added support for OpenCL and the ability to use the internal cache in darkroom mode in the highlight rebuild module.
- Added built-in ability to read Exif metadata from AVIF, HEIC, and JPEG XL images.
- Support for reading images in BigTIFF format has been returned.
- OpenCL support has been added to the Sigmoid module.
- Added OpenMP support to RGBE loader and XCF export code.
- Memory consumption reduced by 40% in the local Laplace filter.
- Improved responsiveness of widgets and sliders on the interface.
- The Painted Mask tool has been completely redesigned.
Finally if you want to know more about it of this new version of Darktable, 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, although it will be a matter of days before they are available in 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