darktable 2.4.0rc0 released

we’re proud to announce the first release candidate for the upcoming 2.4 series of darktable, 2.4.0rc0!

the github release is here: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases/tag/release-2.4.0rc0.

as always, please don’t use the autogenerated tarball provided by github, but only our tar.xz. the checksum is:

$ sha256sum darktable-2.4.0rc0.tar.xz
66795f96dfd46b921a006836eb062f40cab1e93d018f61ccb7e650fb01a0016d darktable-2.4.0rc0.tar.xz
$ sha256sum darktable-2.4.0rc0.dmg
23894c0ec808c8420719646ee289aba68fc15761ce812358ba3456691ad5849c darktable-2.4.0rc0.dmg
$ sha256sum darktable-2.4.0rc0.exe
ed560de786340cbdd94e446615cec8eef52fbbeb3ac81f7d10edfeee1e5b74ee darktable-2.4.0rc0.exe

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!

and the changelog as compared to 2.2.0 can be found below. Some of the fixes might have been backported to the stable 2.2.x series already.

The maintainership of the RawSpeed library was transferred to the darktable project. The work on code cleanup, hardening, modernization, simplification and testing is ongoing.
Well over 2 thousand commits to darktable+rawspeed since 2.2.0
244 pull requests handled
320+ issues closed
Updated user manual is coming soon™

Hell Froze Over

As you might have read on our news post we finally ported darktable to Windows and intend to support it in the future. At the moment it’s still lacking a few features (for example there is not printing support), has a few limitations (tethering requires special drivers to be installed) and comes with its own set of bugs. But overall we are confident that it’s quite usable already and hope you will enjoy it. A very special thanks goes to Peter Budai who finally convinced us to agree to the port and who did most of the work.

The Big Ones

A new module for haze removal
The local contrast module can now be pushed much further, it also got a new local laplacian mode
Add undo support for masks and more intelligent grouping of undo steps
Blending now allows to display individual channels using false colors
darktable now supports loading Fujifilm compressed RAFs
darktable now supports loading floating point HDR DNGs as written by HDRMERGE
We also added channel specific blend modes for Lab and RGB color spaces
The base curve module allows for more control of the exposure fusion feature using the newly added bias slider
The tonecurve module now supports auto colour adjustment in RGB
Add absolute color input as an option to the color look up table module
A new X-Trans demosaicing algorithm, Frequency Domain Chroma, was implemented.
You can now choose from pre-defined scheduling profiles for OpenCL
Speaking of OpenCL, darktable now allows to force-use OpenCL for a specific pixelpipe
Xmp sidecar files are no longer written to disk when the content didn’t actually change. That mostly helps with network storage and backup systems that use files’ time stamps

New Features And Changes

Show a dialog window that tells when locking the database/library failed
Don’t shade the whole region on the map when searching for a location. Instead just draw a border around it.
Also in map mode: Clear the search list and map indicators when resetting the search module.
With OsmGPSMap newer than version 1.1.0 (i.e., anything released after that OsmGPSMap version) the map will show copyright info.
Running jobs with a progressbar (mostly import and export) will show that progress bar ontop the window entry in your task bar – if the system supports it. It should work on GNOME, KDE and Windows at least.
Add bash like string replacement for variables (export, watermark, session settings).
Add a preferences option to ask before removing empty dirs
The “colorbalance” module got a lot faster, thanks to SSE optimized code
Make gradient sliders a little more colorful and use them in the white balance module
Make PNG compression level used for exporting configurable
On OSX, load single images from command line or via drag&drop in darkroom mode
Add an option to omit the intermediate tag hierarchy in exported files and only add the last level
In the watermark module, sort the list of SVG files and omit the file extension
Support XYZ as a proofing profile
Local contrast now got a new slider to set the midtone range
darktable got two new helper scripts (those are not installed by default, grab them from the sources): One to purge thumbnails that no longer have an associated image in the database, and a second script that uses inotify to watch a folder for new files to open them in a running darktable instance.
In the curve editors of base curve and tone curve you can now delete nodes with a right click and see coordinates of nodes while editing. Note that you can use keyboard modifiers ctrl and shift to change the precision of your changes
Creating a new instance of a module can now be done with a quick click of the middle mouse button on the multi-instance icon
New darktable installations on computers with more than 8 Gb of memory will now by default use half of that per module
Several background colors and the brush color are now configurable in the CSS
Some new cameras can bump the ISO level to insane highs. We try to follow as good as we can by no longer limiting it to 51200 in the GUI
Base curve and the highlights module now support multiple instances and use blending and masks
Having the 1 key toggle between 1 and 0 stars wasn’t very popular with many people. You can disable that extra feature and have it behave like the other rating shortcuts now
You can decide if you want to be asked before resetting the history stacks of images from the lighttable
The grain module was slightly changed to have a more pleasing, photographic-paper like appearance
Using the color look up table module you can now convert your images to monochrome, honoring the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect
Some more small improvements were made

Bugfixes

Fix the problem with rating images by accident when moving the mouse while typing an image size in the export module
Fix several oddities in folder and tag mode of the collect module.
Print mode’s color profile settings no longer interact with the export module
Update the style lists when importing a style
Fix some bugs with multiple module instances used in a style
On OSX only the main window should be fullscreen, not the popups
Some speedups with VERY big libraries or having A LOT OF tags
Significantly speed up tagging many images
Fix searching locations using OpenStreetMap
Fix partial copies of large files in “import from camera”
Fix a crash in the import dialog when using Lua to add widgets there
Fix some false-positive warnings about another running darktable instance and it having locked the databases
No longer switch to the favourite modules group when duplicating one of its modules
Fix loading of XYZ files
Fix Lab export when the profile was set from the lighttable
Create tmp snapshot files with mode 0600 to stop other people looking at them
Fix several bugs with Wayland. However, there are still issues, so darktable will prefer XWayland
Google deprecated the Picasa Web API so it’s no longer possible to create G+ albums
Fix the default for sliders with target not being “red” in the channel mixer
Fix the removing of directories
Make the escape key cancel history dialogs
Block keyboard accels when editing camera controls
Properly delete XMP sidecars
Make sure that the rating set in darktable is used for the exported file, not something set inside the raw file
Don’t re-write all XMP files when detaching a tag
Sync XMPs when a tag is removed from the database
Sync XMPs after a tag is attached/detached via the Lua API
Many more bugs got fixed

Lua

darktable now uses Lua 5.3. The bundled copy got updated accordingly
Add dt.print_log. It’s like print_error but without the ERROR prefix
Reorder callback parameters for intermediate export image: add the actual image to the parameters of the event
Call lua post-import-image event synchronously
Add darktable.configuration.running_os to detect the OS darktable is running on
New widget type: section_label, adds a label which looks like a section change

Changed Dependencies

CMake 3.1 is now required.
In order to compile darktable you now need at least gcc-4.9+/clang-3.4+, and gcc-5.0+ is highly recommended.
ZLIB is now required for the DNG Deflate compressed raw support.
darktable now uses Lua 5.3

Camera support, compared to 2.2.0

Warning: support for Nikon NEF ’lossy after split’ raws was unintentionally broken due to the lack of such samples. Please see this post for more details. If you have affected raws, please contribute samples!

Base Support

Canon EOS 200D
Canon EOS Kiss X9
Canon EOS Rebel SL2
Canon EOS 6D Mark II (sRaw1, sRaw2)
Canon EOS 77D
Canon EOS 9000D
Canon EOS 800D
Canon EOS Kiss X9i
Canon EOS Rebel T7i
Canon EOS M5
Canon EOS M6
Canon PowerShot G9 X Mark II
Canon PowerShot SX40 HS (dng)
Fujifilm GFX 50S (compressed)
Fujifilm X-A3
Fujifilm X-E2S
Fujifilm X-E3 (compressed)
Fujifilm X-Pro2 (compressed)
Fujifilm X-T2 (compressed)
Fujifilm X-T20 (compressed)
Fujifilm X100F (compressed)
GITUP GIT2P (chdk-a, chdk-b)
Kodak EasyShare Z980
LG D855 (dng)
LG H815 (dng)
LG Nexus 5X (dng)
LG US996 (dng)
LG VS995 (dng)
Leica D-LUX (Typ 109) (4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 1:1)
Leica X2 (dng)
Nikon COOLPIX B700 (12bit-uncompressed)
Nikon D500 (14bit-uncompressed, 12bit-uncompressed)
Nikon D5600 (12bit-compressed, 12bit-uncompressed, 14bit-compressed, 14bit-uncompressed)
Nikon D7500 (12bit-compressed, 14bit-compressed)
Nikon D850 (12bit-compressed, 12bit-uncompressed, 14bit-compressed, 14bit-uncompressed)
Nikon LS-5000 (dng)
Nokia Lumia 1020 (dng)
Olympus E-M10 Mark III
Olympus E-M1MarkII
Olympus TG-5
Panasonic DC-FZ82 (4:3)
Panasonic DMC-FZ80 (4:3)
Panasonic DMC-FZ85 (4:3)
Panasonic DC-GH5 (4:3)
Panasonic DC-FZ91 (4:3)
Panasonic DC-FZ92 (4:3)
Panasonic DC-FZ93 (4:3)
Panasonic DC-TZ90 (4:3)
Panasonic DC-ZS70 (4:3)
Panasonic DMC-FZ330 (4:3)
Panasonic DMC-GF6 (16:9, 3:2, 1:1)
Panasonic DMC-TZ61 (4:3, 3:2, 1:1, 16:9)
Panasonic DMC-ZS40 (4:3, 3:2, 1:1, 16:9)
Panasonic DMC-TZ80 (4:3)
Panasonic DMC-TZ81 (4:3)
Panasonic DMC-TZ85 (4:3)
Panasonic DMC-ZS60 (4:3)
Pentax K-5 (dng)
Pentax K-r (dng)
Pentax K10D (dng)
Samsung G920F
Samsung G935F
Samsung GX10
Sony ILCE-6500
Sony ILCE-9

White Balance Presets

Canon EOS 6D Mark II
Fujifilm X-T20
Fujifilm X100F
Nikon 1 AW1
Nikon Coolpix A
Panasonic DMC-GX80
Panasonic DMC-GX85
Panasonic DMC-TZ100
Panasonic DMC-TZ101
Panasonic DMC-TZ110
Panasonic DMC-ZS110
Pentax K-3 II

Noise Profiles

Canon EOS 1300D
Canon EOS Kiss X80
Canon EOS Rebel T6
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
Canon EOS 6D Mark II
Canon EOS M5
Canon PowerShot G16
Canon PowerShot G3 X
Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II
Canon PowerShot G9 X Mark II
Fujifilm X-M1
Fujifilm X-Pro1
Fujifilm X-T20
Leica X2
Nikon Coolpix A
Nikon D2X
Nikon D3000
Nikon D3400
Nikon D500
Olympus E-M1MarkII
Olympus E-P5
Panasonic DMC-FZ200
Panasonic DMC-FZ300
Panasonic DMC-G7
Panasonic DMC-G70
Panasonic DMC-G8
Panasonic DMC-G80
Panasonic DMC-G81
Panasonic DMC-G85
Panasonic DMC-GX80
Panasonic DMC-GX85
Panasonic DMC-LX100
Panasonic DMC-TZ100
Panasonic DMC-TZ101
Panasonic DMC-TZ110
Panasonic DMC-ZS110
Pentax K-70
Sony DSC-RX100M5
Sony ILCA-68
Sony ILCE-5000
Sony ILCE-6500

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