Darktable

What's new in this version:

The Big Ones:
- The following is a summary of the main features added to darktable 5.0. Please see the user manual for more details of the individual changes (where available).
- This development cycle has included a large number of changes which improve the user experience, as detailed in the next section.

UI/UX Improvements:
- Added camera-specific styles for more than 500 camera models to more closely approximate the out-of-camera JPEG rendition. These styles only affect contrast, brightness, and saturation and do not attempt to match sharpening, denoising, or hue shifts. Also added a Lua
- script to auto-apply the appropriate style on import and manually apply styles to a collection of previously-imported images.
- Added an optional splash screen showing startup progress (including estimated time remaining during the scan for updated sidecar files) to dramatically reduce the time between invoking darktable and something appearing on screen when the user has a large library.
- The user interface now gives feedback while processing bulk image operations such as rating, tagging, applying styles, and edit history management (and undoing those operations), rather than silently freezing until the operation completes. While the operation is in progress, darktable will now show either a busy cursor (such as a stopwatch or spinner) or a progress bar with option to cancel the remainder of the operation.
- Paths for drawn masks now display two Bézier handles per control point, which can be moved individually. This allows for more precise control of the paths.
- Added a high-contrast theme with bright white text on a dark gray background.
- Enhanced tooltips for utility module headers to provide more information about the module.
- Added more new-user hints on an empty lighttable.
- Added two new error placeholder images to distinguish between missing, unsupported, and corrupted images. When attempting to edit such an image, an appropriate, more specific error message is displayed.
- When selecting a style in the export module, hovering on the style name in the popup menu displays a thumbnail previewing the effect of appending the style to the active image's edit (first selected image in lighttable, center-view image in darkroom).
- Allow for selecting the utility modules to be displayed on the panels in the different views.
- Right-click on the empty panel area below the modules to get a menu where they can be hidden or shown. This allows additional modules to be added to the darkroom, like metadata editor and
- styles.
- This replaces the options in the "collections" and "recently used collections" modules' preferences to show or hide the latter and show a "history" button in the former instead. Users that want the separate module will need to reenable it once via the new Right-click menu.
- The menu also contains an option "restore defaults" that resets the selection and position of modules in the current view. In the preferences dialog, on the general tab, there's a "reset view panels" button that resets all views, including visibility and width of the panels themselves.
- Added a global preference to swap the left and right side panels in the darkroom view.
- The first time a new user presses Tab, they will be warned that this will hide all panels and how to get them back. Hopefully this prevents some confusion or frustration.
- Drag&drop utility module headers to reposition them across the left and right panels (lighttable) as well as vertically (all views). Each view can have a different layout.
- Drag&drop of processing modules in the darkroom right panel has been improved to auto-scroll when reaching the top or bottom and to not get confused when images get dragged into the area. This functionality no longer requires Ctrl+Shift modifiers.
- Improved the message displayed at startup when the database is locked by another instance of darktable.
- Replaced the icon of the operator button in the color label filter for working with multiple selected color labels (union/intersection).
- Performance Improvements
- Added OpenCL implementation of color equalizer.
- Improved the speed of bulk image operations by improving the speed of sidecar writes, and by moving sidecar updates for many operations into a background task, allowing the user to proceed before the writes complete.
- Significantly accelerated loading of PFM files due to loops parallelization and optimization that eliminated additional processing.

Other Changes:
- Switched default scope for new installations from histogram to waveform to display more detailed information about image color and tonality.
- The ISO 12646 color assessment condition is kept until unset by user action.
- Exposure bias can now be used to form collections and as a display filter.
- Improved visualization of the color equalizer's effect.
- Improved debugging support for verifying CPU vs. GPU results.
- Add Calibrite alias for X-Rite ColorChecker in color calibration.
- The scan for updated sidecar files now ignores timestamp differences of two seconds or less.
- The macOS installation package now has a background image to direct the user on installing darktable.app.
- Changed the user interface of the import dialog to make it easier to delete custom places.
- Numerous rounds of code cleanup.
- The copy-parts dialog does not select any module by default now.
- Add support for undo/redo for actions done on the filmstrip while in darkroom.
- In darkroom, add action (binding to Ctrl+x by default) for synchronizing the last edited module on current edited module to the selection.
- Adjusted the internal AVIF encoder parameter to significantly boost encoding speed without compromising the output quality.
- Tag names can now easily be copied to the clipboard via popup context menu in the tagging module.
- The Piwigo export storage now supports to specify a file name pattern for the exported file.
- The directory where darktable will write the log file under Windows has been changed to %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Darktable. This allows the user to easily see where the log file is located without even having to search for it in the documentation or FAQ. The previous
- location was deep in the system subdirectories of the user profile, and also under a hidden directory (so it was impossible to click to it in File Explorer with default system settings).
- Allow import of JPEG 2000 files with .jpf and .jpx file extensions.
- Add a visible indicator to the color calibration module when its color mapping section has non-neutral settings which will affect color rendition.
- Added new substitution variables $(IMAGE.TAGS.HIERARCHY) to insert tags with full hierarchy and $(IMAGE.ID.NEXT) to insert the image ID to be assigned to the image being imported, allowing the image ID to be part of the filename generated during a copy&import operation.
- Exporting to floating-point JPEG XL with a quality of 100 will try to do it as losslessly as possible. That is now consistent with the behavior of integral JPEG XL formats.
- Improved visibility of shortcuts that can be changed by users by using bold text.
- The histogram-exposure interface now supports all standard bauhaus features (Ctrl+click, Right-click...).
- Introduce image module order v5.0 to have the final-scale done before color-out to fix some issues with color difference between darkroom view and exported files.
- Add support for editing any live color-picker samples. Using Right-click on a sample it is possible to edit it (changing location and/or size of the box) and either add a new
- sample based on the edit or store the edit into an existing live sample.
- Added more substitution variables for using EXIF data fields, enabled autocompletion of variables in the watermark module.
- The new variables are $(EXIF.FLASH), $(EXIF.METERING), $(EXIF.EXPOSURE.PROGRAM), $(EXIF.WHITEBALANCE) and $(GPS.LOCATION.ICON).
- Increase maximum focal length for filtering auto-applied presets to 2000mm.
- Added an expanded color-checker preset to the Color Look Up Table module with seven-level red/green/blue/gray ramps, IT8/CC24-like skin tones, and miscellaneous color patches for more targeted color adjustments across the full spectrum.
- Added support for EXIF tags 'AnalogBalance' used for color calibration and 'LinearResponseLimit' used in highlights reconstruction.
- If we find currently unsupported color calibration data in DNG specific tags, we tag the image by darktable|issue|no-samples for better support.
- Added read support for HEIF files with AVC (H.264) compression and .avci file extension.
- Added read support for JPEG 2000 encoded images in HEIF containers with .hej2 file extension.

Fixed:
- Fixed a performance regression for redrawing mipmaps.
- Fixed handling of old (2020) edits using Filmic RGB.
- Various OpenCL fixes to reduce differences between CPU and GPU processing: colorspace conversion, saturation gradient filter in color equalizer.
- Fixed gallery export not working on Windows.
- Fixed printer discovery in the print module, which could cause available printers to be missed.
- Work around out-of-spec EXIF date field caused by buggy software.
- Fixed reading embedded color profiles from PNG images.
- Fixed certain boundary cases in the crop module.
- Fixed crash when loading corrupted .gpx file in the geotagging module
- Fix preset handling in the export module not saving all parameters.
- Fix an issue in FilmicRGB where one of the parameter could be above the maximum allowed range making the validation failing and the whole set of parameters reset to default.
- Fix overlay recording to work in all cases (discarding history or copy/paste history for example) ensuring that an image not referenced anymore as overlay in a composite module can be removed.
- Properly reset darktable internal tag darktable|style| and darktable|changed when resetting history.
- Fixed crash in the Piwigo export storage when not logged in to the Piwigo server.
- Fixed a bug in the export module where it was impossible to export a file again if "on conflict: overwrite if changed" was selected.
- Fixed a bug where double clicking on a label in darkroom modules does not reset the control
- The composite module now prevents assigning an overlay that would lead to a loop. Previously, only direct references (image #1 <-> image #2) were checked; this has now been extended to also cover chains (image #1 -> image #2 -> image #3 -> image #1) of arbitrary length.
- Fix a bug in overlay module which incorrectly apply a color profile and so creating an unwanted and wrong color cast. This bug was a regression added just before the 4.8 release.
- Fixed a bug in color calibration module where switching between various illuminants could lead to unpredictable settings
- Various fixes In the demosaic module. Non-usable options are hidden now. Fixed dual demosaicing for xtrans sensors and OpenCL code.
- Fixed a bug in the history module where style creation fails if a style with that name already exists
- Fixed guides drawing in case a module is expanded and active
- Ensure that the list of images in the culling view remains up to date when hidden
- Fixed minor glitches in color calibration module
- Fixed issues with wrong corrections in highlight opposed OpenCL code
- Fixed surface blur radius calculation possibly resulting in garbled output