Darktable 4.0 Released to Celebrate 10 Years of Open Source RAW Image Editing

Darktable 4.0

The darktable team announced today the release and general availability of darktable 4.0, in celebration of the project’s 10th anniversary since version 1.0, a major release that brings numerous new features and enhancements.

Coming more than five months after darktable 3.8.1, the darktable 4.0 release is here to introduce a new feature called Color and Exposure Mapping to ensure uniform color rendition, which is implemented in the Exposure and Color Calibration modules and lets you define and save a target color/exposure for the color pickers. For example, you can use it to perform white balance against non-gray objects of known color.

Darktable 4.0 also introduces a new color science called Filmic v6, which replaces the mandatory desaturation with a true gamut mapping against the output color space, a new “guided laplacian” method to the “highlight
reconstruction” module to help you extract valid details from non-clipped RGB channels, as well as color glossary support in the Global Color Picker.

Among other noteworthy changes, the new darktable release adds white balance presets for the Nikon D4S, Panasonic DC-S5, and Sony ILCE-7M4 digital cameras, introduces the darktable Uniform Color Space 2022 (UCS 22), and a new guided laplacian reconstruction method in the highlight reconstruction module.

The graphical user interface has been completely revamped to improve darktable’s look and consistency, along with alignment, color, contrast, collapsible sections, icons, margins, and padding. Moreover, the vignetting module was split into two sections for clarity, there’s support for the IPAPGothic font, and Elegant Grey was assigned as the new default theme.

Among other changes, there’s support for DNG GainMap EXIF information and EXR 16-bit (half) float export, tagging suggestion mode was improved, and there’s new “collection filters” module and “contrast” parameter. Numerous performance improvements are present as well in Darktable 4.0, along with countless bug fixes.

Check out the release notes for more details on all the changes introduced in Darktable 4.0, which you can download right now from the official website as a source tarball that you’ll have to compile on your GNU/Linux distribution. If that’s not your cup of tea, you will be able to install it as a Flatpak app from Flathub or from your distro’s repositories in the coming days.

Last updated 2 years ago

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