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darktable 2.0

An awesome present for the end of 2015!

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!

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Pat David
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