14 DAY TRIAL // As a Christmas surprise for all photography fans, the development team behind the darktable open-source and cross-platform RAW image editor released the final darktable 2.4 update.
darktable 2.4 is a massive update that incorporates numerous new features, but the biggest of them all is support for the Microsoft Windows operating systems. While there's no printing support and a few bugs and limitations are still present, users can now run darktable on their Windows PCs.
"At the moment it’s still lacking a few features (for example there is no printing support), has a few limitations (tethering requires special drivers to be installed) and comes with its own set of bugs (TIFF import and export doesn’t support non-ASCII characters in file names). But overall we are confident that it’s quite usable already and hope you will enjoy it," reads today's announcement.
Here's what's new in darktable 2.4
darktable 2.4 comes with a new module for haze removal, a new X-Trans demosaicing algorithm called Frequency Domain Chroma, support for loading floating point HDR DNGs and Fujifilm's compressed RAF RAW files, undo support for masks, more intelligent grouping of undo steps, as well as a new local laplacian mode for the local contrast module.
Furthermore, the base curve module now offers users more control over the exposure fusion feature, the RGB and Lab color spaces now feature channel specific blend modes, and it's possible to display individual channels using false colors when blending. darktable 2.4 also implements support for auto color adjustment in RGB for the tonecurve module.
Among other noteworthy features, we can mention the ability to choose from pre-defined scheduling profiles for OpenCL Speaking of OpenCL, along with the ability to force-use OpenCL for a particular pixelpipe, and the ability to use absolute color input as an option to the color lookup table module. darktable 2.4 also improves the network storage and backup systems that use timestamps for files by no longer writing XMP sidecar files to the disk when there aren't any changes.
As expected, darktable 2.4 comes with support for a wide range of digital cameras from Canon, Fujifilm, Sony, Nikon, Panasonic, Pentax, Samsung, Kodak, Olympus, as well as some LG smartphones. New white balance and noise profiles were added for various digital cameras as well, and you can see the entire list below. Meanwhile, you can download darktable 2.4 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows right now through our website.
