We're proud to announce the second release candidate for the upcoming 3.0 series of darktable, 3.0.0rc1!

The github release is here: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases/tag/release-3.0.0rc1.

As always, please don't use the autogenerated tarball provided by github, but only our tar.xz. the checksums are:

$ sha256sum darktable-3.0.0rc1.tar.xz
06d167889d630f58060401a08e81d3bae44c49c0303647f1d0b58960da4b89da  darktable-3.0.0rc1.tar.xz
$ sha256sum darktable-3.0.0rc1.dmg
eb874c80648b26c3b91db7ff77fadef858bd24fcccd63da1ebfdd97a896c00e5  darktable-3.0.0rc1.dmg
$ sha256sum darktable-3.0.0rc1.exe
d68abb6bd62c92bd2969de26f04364a842b46dfeb2912f9481e0a54deaea3044 darktable-3.0.0rc1.exe

When updating from the currently stable 2.6.x series, please bear in mind that your edits will be preserved during this process, but the new library and configuration will not be usable with 2.6.x any more, so making a backup is strongly advised.

Important note: to make sure that darktable can keep on supporting the raw file format for your camera, please read this post on how/what raw samples you can contribute to ensure that we have the full raw sample set for your camera under CC0 license!

• Almost 3 thousand commits to darktable+rawspeed since 2.6
• 553 pull requests handled
• 66 issues closed
• Updated user manual is coming soon™

The Big Ones

• A full rework of the GUI. The whole GUI is now fully controlled by GTK+ CSS rules. There is no more size, color, position in Gtk C code, which makes the whole GUI themable. This version comes with several themes:

  • darktable : the default theme

  • darktable-elegant-darker : more condensed fonts best experience with Roboto font installed

  • darktable-icons-darker : as elegant, with module icons best experience with Roboto font installed

  • darktable-elegant-dark : lighter version

  • darktable-elegant-grey : even lighter version

  • darktable-icons-dark : lighter version. with module icons

  • darktable-icons-grey : even lighter version, with module icons

  New shortcuts have been introduced to quickly collapse borders, sidebars, histogram and navigation modules, allowing a new borderless editing experience.

  Note that the new GUI requires Gtk+ 3.22 or higher to work properly.

• It's now possible to associate dynamic key shortcuts to sliders, then use them with the mouse wheel or arrow keys to move the value up and down. For example, associating the E key to the exposure slider, you can press it and scroll to increase the exposure without having to open the module. You get fast heads-up access to all your favorite settings, as if you were using a dedicated multimedia console.

• The color picker on the 'tone curve', 'color zones' and 'fill light' modules, as well as the parametric mask controls, now allows you to select an area when enabled by using Ctrl+click on the button.

• Added undo/redo support in lighttable for tags, color labels, ratings, metadata, deleted history stack, pasted history stack and applied styles.

  IMPORTANT: The 'preview' and 'preview with focus detection' actions (previously Z and Ctrl+Z respectively) are now assigned to W and Ctrl+W in order to follow the convention of using Ctrl+Z for the "undo" function (Ctrl+Y for redo).

• A new timeline view has been introduced in the lighttable.

• A new 'culling' mode has been added to the lightable view. It displays a fixed number of consecutive images starting from the first selected, and allows you to pan & zoom them. The number of displayed images can be set by the user, and they can be navigated with the mouse wheel and keyboard.

• A quite extensive rewrite of the lighttable view (including the filmstrip in darkroom view) has been made to greatly improve the overall performance. The lighttable is now usable on 4K and 5K monitors.

• Added support for the new 'raster mask', a copy of a parametric mask which is stable during the whole pixel-pipe.

• The processing order of the pixel-pipe can now be changed by using Ctrl+Shift+drag on the module headers to arrange them relative to each other. It is VERY IMPORTANT to understand that this feature is NOT for creating a more convenient GUI layout, but for changing the actual processing of the image. DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE unless you understand the reason behind the default ordering, and have a specific reason for changing it. The default order is still the correct order for most purposes.

• The 'color zones' module now shows a histogram based on the chosen ‘select by’ channel, and if the color picker is in 'select area' mode, the range within the selected area will also be shown. By default, the spline adjustment is now similar to the curve controls, allowing you to add and delete nodes, but these nodes can still be moved with the old-style size control by selecting the 'edit by area' checkbox. There is also a new 'strong' processing option, and a new color picker which creates a curve based on selected image area.

• A new module 'filmic RGB' which, like the previous 'filmic', is designed to replace 'base curve', 'shadows and highlights' and other global tone-mapping modules. This new version replaces the one introduced in 2.6.2; it should be easier to use, and it will reduce color casts. The old 'filmic' module is now deprecated and is only available on images where it was already used for editing.

• A new module 'tone equalizer' is designed to merge the features of 'zone system', 'shadows and highlights', and (local) 'tone mapping' modules in a scene-referred RGB space. It brings an easy and safe way to remap tones locally, performing a quick zone-based dodging and burning using Ansel Adam's zone system logic. The module provides an interface similar to audio graphic equalizers, with 9 bands (available as fixed sliders or nodes on a spline view), allowing you to selectively push or pull the exposure for each band in the range from blacks to specular highlights. It also features an interactive cursor that allows to push or pull the exposure gains directly from the image preview by simply hovering over an area and scrolling. It uses a guided filter internally to refine the dodging and burning mask, which preserves local contrast without producing halos along edges.

New Features And Changes

• A new module for handling 3D RGB Lut transformations (PNG Hald-CLUT and Cube files are supported).

• Many improvements to the 'denoise (profiled)' module. The degree of shadow denoising can be controlled, including the correction of color casts (mainly improves high-ISO images). "Auto" modes which infer some parameters from the profile are available, allowing users to create presets which are adaptive to various ISO values. The default values of the sliders are also adapted dynamically on module activation, giving a good trade-off between noise smoothing and detail preservation. The non-local means mode has 2 new options: one to coarse-grain denoising, and one to control the amount of fine detail to preserve. The controls now have soft boundaries, which means that users can use the keyboard to enter values outside the range of the sliders if they need to.

• Along with selecting the 'soft proof' color profile, users can now select an additional profile for the color space of the histogram, color picker and overexposed checker. When gamut or softproof checks are active the histogram and color picker use the softproof profile, otherwise they use the new histogram profile (which is always used for overexposure checking).

• A new setting for 'working profile' has been added to the input color profile module. This color space will be used by RGB modules between the input and output color profile modules.

• A new color picker has been added to the parametric masking controls which adjusts the range sliders based on the selected area from the image. Click the picker button to adjust the input image slider, Ctrl+click the button to adjust the output image slider.

• The 'picasa' target storage in the export module has been completely rewritten to support the new Google Photo API, and renamed 'google photos'. It is again possible to create albums directly from the export module.

• A new single-line image information display can be positioned at the top (left, right, or center) or bottom (center) of the darkroom view to replace the information previously overlaid on the histogram. The specific information shown can be configured in preferences.

• The 'tagging' module is faster, and can now display hierarchical tags in a tree view. Tags can now be designated as 'private' (not exported by default), 'synonym' (to help search engines), and 'category' (not exported, for organizing the tag library). The metadata exported with images can now be configured in the 'export selected' module, allowing you to choose which main types are exported, as well as define values for specific tags based on formulas.

• Many code optimizations for CPU and SSE paths. The tone equalizer module introduces a new optimization paradigm (GCC target clones), aimed toward users of pre-built Linux packages. The image-processing code will be cloned for several CPU generations (SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, AVX, AVX2) at compilation time, and the best-suited version of the code will be chosen by the system at run time. This experiment is to be generalized to other modules if proven successful, and will allow users of pre-built packages to get the same performance as if the program was specifically compiled for their computer. It needs GCC 9 compiler and does not yet work on Windows due to the lack of support of target clones on the OS side.

• A new preference to expand/collapse a darkroom module when it is activated/deactivated.

• The 'collect images' module has a new single-click option featuring range selection for date-time and numeric values.

• The orientation of drawn masks using the 'gradient' shape is now clearly displayed with an arrow.

• The 'graduated density' module has better accuracy when computing the rotation to avoid sporadic flipping of the gradient.

• Make sure the OpenCL kernel code is recompiled when the driver version is updated.

• Add color pickers for 'split toning', 'graduated density' and 'watermark' modules.

• The color picker positions are kept during editing within a module.

• The map view can zoom on the images of the selected collection.

• The slideshow will now start at the selected images if any, and supports changing the delay between images. It will also now be more responsive when manually moving backward and forward through the images.

• A new 'basic adjustments' module has been added. It allows to adjust the black level, exposure, highlight compression, contrast, middle grey, brightness and saturation. It also has an auto feature based on Rawtherapee's auto levels that can work on the entire image or a user selected area.

• A new 'rgb curve' module has been added. It has modes for linked and independent RGB channels. The curves and histogram can be displayed using the working profile or can be scaled to be 50% grey. A secondary color picker will add 4 nodes to the curve based on the area selected in the image: min, average, middle, and max.

• A new 'rgb levels' module has been added. It has linked and independent channels, preserve colors option and is native RGB.

• A new search box has been added to the module groups in the darkroom view, with configuration options to show only the module groups, only the search box, or both. Modules are searched for by (localized) name, and when displaying only the search box, the active modules are shown when the box is empty. A shortcut can be set for focusing the box.

• A preview window has been added to the darkroom that displays the edited image on a separate window.

• A new option 'skip' is added to the 'on conflict' setting on the export module which skips the exporting to existing destination files.

• Allow to switch between clone/heal and blur/color modes in 'retouch' module after creating a shape.

• An accels window has been added to summarize all available shortcuts and mouse actions available in the current context.

• Dynamic shortcuts have been added for darkroom module sliders. They allow to change slider values with an accel + mouse scroll.

• A zoom & pan feature has been added to lighttable full preview..

Bug fixes

• The color picker support has been fixed by a complete rewrite. It should now give correct values in all cases.

• Fix overexposed display.

• Do not disable SSL for storage modules.

• A long standing bug on mask distort in Liquify module has been fixed. This was visible when a liquify mask was used together with the perspective correction module activated.

• A bug on mask distort from crop & rotate when using flip and some angle has been fixed.

• Fix manual crop in perspective correction module when not in default orientation.

• The modification of date/time is now stored into the XMP. This ensures that removing the picture and reloading will keep the changes.

• Fix orientation to support all cases as exposed in these examples: https://github.com/recurser/exif-orientation-examples

• Store the panel states for each lighttable mode.

• Fix crop&rotate and orientation in the lightroom importer.

• Fix ProPhoto RGB profile.

• Fix exif lens metadata parsing containing comma.

Lua

• The displayed image in darkroom view can now be changed.

• GUI panel visibility can now be queried and changed.

• Lighttable view toolbox (rating filter, rating comparator, sort field, and sort direction) can now be changed.

• Lighttable layout and zoom level can now be changed.

• All images containing a specific tag can be searched and returned.

Changed Dependencies

• CMake 3.10 is now required.
• OpenMP 4.0 is now required (optional dependency).

RawSpeed changes

Changed Dependencies

• CMake 3.10 is now required.
• Pugixml 1.8 is now required.
• OpenMP 4.0 is now required (optional dependency).
• POSIX threads are no longer required.
• zlib 1.2.11 is now required (optional dependency).

Changes

• Threading was migrated to OpenMP from POSIX threads.
• Phase One IIQ decompressor fixes (quadrant scaling, bad column).
• Large-scale code cleanup, hardening is still a work in progress.
• A CMake infrastructure was added to allow integration of RawSpeed into LLVM LNT / Test-Suite.
• Widespread performance tuning, most affected decompressors:
  • Sony ARW2
  • Panasonic V5
  • Samsung V1
  • Phase One
• Continuation of collaboration with LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project.

Camera support, compared to 2.6.0

Base Support

• Epson R-D1s
• Epson R-D1x
• Fujifilm FinePix F770EXR
• Fujifilm FinePix S7000
• Fujifilm GFX 50R (compressed)
• Fujifilm X-T30 (compressed)
• Fujifilm XF10
• Kodak DCS Pro 14N
• Kodak EasyShare Z981
• Kodak EasyShare Z990
• Leica C (Typ 112) (4:3)
• Leica CL (dng)
• Leica Q (Typ 116) (dng)
• Leica Q2 (dng)
• Leica SL (Typ 601) (dng)
• Leica V-LUX (Typ 114) (3:2, 4:3, 16:9, 1:1)
• Nikon Z 6 (14bit-uncompressed, 12bit-uncompressed)
• Nikon Z 7 (14bit-uncompressed)
• Olympus E-M1X
• Olympus TG-6
• Panasonic DC-G90 (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-G91 (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-G95 (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-G99 (4:3)
• Panasonic DC-ZS200 (3:2)
• Panasonic DMC-TX1 (3:2)
• Phase One P30
• Sony DSC-RX0M2
• Sony DSC-RX100M6
• Sony ILCE-6400
• Sony ILCE-7RM4

White Balance Presets

• Leica Q2
• Nikon D500
• Nikon Z 7
• Panasonic DC-LX100M2
• Sony ILCE-6400

Noise Profiles

• Leica Q2
• Nikon D3
• Nikon D3500
• Nikon Z 6
• Nikon Z 7
• Olympus E-PL8
• Olympus E-PL9
• Panasonic DC-LX100M2
• Sony DSC-RX100M5A
• Sony ILCE-6400
• Sony SLT-A35

Translations

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• Galician
• German
• Hebrew
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
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• Thai