darktable 2.0

Sneaking a release out on Christmas Eve, the darktable team have announced their feature release of darktable 2.0! After quite a few months of Release Candidates the 2.0 is finally here. Please join me in saying Congratulations and a hearty Thank You! for all of their work bringing this release to us.

Alex Prokoudine of Libre Graphics World has a more in-depth look at the release including a nice interview with part of the team: Johannes Hanika, Tobias Ellinghaus, Roman Lebedev, and Jeremy Rosen. My favorite tidbit from the interview:

There is a lot less planning involved than many might think.

— Tobias Ellinghaus

Robert Hutton has taken the time to produce a video covering the new features and other changes between 1.6 and 2.0 as well:

A high-level look at the changes and improvements from the release post on the darktable site:

gui:

• darktable has been ported to gtk-3.0
• the viewport in darkroom mode is now dynamically sized, you specify the border width
• side panels now default to a width of 350px in dt 2.0 instead of 300px in dt 1.6
• further hidpi enhancements
• navigating lighttable with arrow keys and space/enter
• brush size/hardness/opacity have key accels
• allow adding tone- and basecurve nodes with ctrl-click
• the facebook login procedure is a little different now
• image information now supports gps altitude

features:

• new print mode
• reworked screen color management (softproof, gamut check etc.)
• delete/trash feature
• pdf export
• export can upscale
• new “mode” parameter in the export panel to fine tune application of styles upon export

core improvements:

• new thumbnail cache replaces mipmap cache (much improved speed, stability and seamless support for even up to 4K/5K screens)
• all thumbnails are now properly fully color-managed
• it is now possible to generate thumbnails for all images in the library using new darktable-generate-cache tool
• we no longer drop history entries above the selected one when leaving darkroom mode or switching images
• high quality export now downsamples before watermark and framing to guarantee consistent results
• optimizations to loading jpeg’s when using libjpeg-turbo with its custom features
• asynchronous camera and printer detection, prevents deadlocks in some cases
• noiseprofiles are in external JSON file now
• aspect ratios for crop&rotate can be added to config file

image operations:

• color reconstruction module
• magic lantern-style deflicker was added to the exposure module (extremely useful for timelapses)
• text watermarks
• shadows&highlights: add option for white point adjustment
• more proper Kelvin temperature, fine-tuning preset interpolation in white balance iop
• monochrome raw demosaicing (for cameras with color filter array physically removed)
• raw black/white point module

packaging:

• removed dependency on libraw
• removed dependency on libsquish (solves patent issues as a side effect)
• unbundled pugixml, osm-gps-map and colord-gtk

generic:

• 32-bit support is soft-deprecated due to limited virtual address space
• support for building with gcc earlier than 4.8 is soft-deprecated
• numerous memory leaks were exterminated
• overall stability enhancements

scripting:

• lua scripts can now add UI elements to the lighttable view (buttons, sliders etc…)
• a new repository for external lua scripts was started: https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts
• it is now possible to edit the collection filters via lua
• it is now possible to add new cropping guides via lua
• it is now possible to run background tasks in lua
• a lua event is generated when the mouse under the cursor changes

The source is available now as well as a .dmg for OS X.
Various Linux distro builds are either already available or will be soon!