Following is a public service announcement from Pascal de Bruijn, the maintainer of the Ubuntu PPAs.

As most of you know, my darktable-unstable PPA was serving as a pre-release repository for our stable maintenance tree, as it usually does. Now as master has settled down, and we’re slowly gearing up for a 2.0 release, I’ll do pre-release (release candidate) builds for darktable 2.0 there.

On my darktable-unstable PPA I will support Ubuntu Trusty (14.04, the latest Long Term Support release) as always. Temporarily I’ll support Ubuntu Wily (15.10, the latest plain release) as well, at least until we have a final 2.0 stable release. Once we have a final 2.0 stable release I will support all Ubuntu versions (still) supported by Canonical at that time via my darktable-release PPA as usual.

darktable (and some other projects, like for example ufraw) don’t do any real lens detection or correction by itself. We depend on two libraries which in most cases are provided by the Linux distribution you’re using.

Lens Detection

Many image files contain metadata about how the image was created. In case of digital camera images, a standard called Exif is used, this standard allows a camera to record many details about how an image was taken. However Exif is not a singular well defined specification, there is a common part that is well defined, and there are the so-called MakerNotes. The MakerNotes are parts of Exif that each vendors gets to do with whatever they like. They are typically completely undocumented, and have to be reverse-engineered to be able to handle them in any way. For most vendors this reverse engineering has been done to some degree and at least parts of the MakerNotes can be deciphered most of the time.

The general picture on the modern Linux desktop

Modern Linux distros featuring either GNOME, Unity or KDE offer fairly easy configuration of color management, this system level configuration mostly pertains to the handling of an ICC display profile.

If you have set a display profile via your system configuration tool (The Color applet in System Settings for GNOME or Unity), there are a few things to keep in mind.

An ICC display profile consists of two main parts. First the so-called “vcgt”, which corrects for whitepoint (this is most noticeable on laptops which shift from being very blueish to a bit more yellowish) and gamma. The “vcgt” is loaded into X11 and applied to your whole screen, so all applications automatically benefit. On a GNOME or Unity desktop this is done by GNOME Settings Daemon during login.

Hi,

there is a new point release with a couple of smaller updates. The source tarball and OSX image can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.4.tar.xz/download

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darktable/files/darktable/1.1/darktable-1.1.4.dmg/download

And the usermanual is still the same.

Fixes:

• keep the styles plugin usable after applying a style
• darktable should now be better able to import some of the data from .xmp’s from other applications
• better redraw logic in darkroom mode
• it should be less likely to get blurry thumbnails in lighttable mode now
• on low end system use lower quality thumbnails
• work around some malformed icc profiles
• add a mandatory cprt tag to our embedded icc profiles
• prevent adobe rgb related trademark issue
• some fixes with regard to the colorpicker
• tooltips should now be more easily distinguisable
• fix build with new glib versions
• more assorted small fixes

Added preliminary camera support:

• Nikon coolpix p7100 blackpoint fix
• Leica basecurve should apply to more camera models now
• Pentax k-5 ii (s)
• Nikon 1 j3
• Nikon 1 s1
• Improved panasonic dmc-g5 support
• Improved panasonic dmc-lx7 support

Improved color rendition:

• Olympus e-m5 enhanced color matrix (frederic crozat)

New white balance presets:

• Panasonic dmc-g5 (thouks)
• pentax k-5 ii (s) (jack bowling)
• sony slt-a77v
• nikon d3200
• nikon d800 update (wolfgang goetz)

darktable wouldn’t be where it is now if we weren’t able to depend on the great work of others, in particular we’d like to thank:

Update: Some of the information on this page is oudated. See the github wiki page on camera support for up-to-date instructions.

Say you’re running darktable, you’ve just bought a brand spanking new camera and it’s not supported yet by darktable. Here is a list of things that need to be done (typically we’d recommend to check this before actually buying anything, often you’ll be able to find sample raw files online):

Some Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) users who use Ubuntu’s default Unity desktop environment may have noticed that it’s commonplace for Unity to crash when closing darktable. It so happens that darktable is exposing a bug in Unity, which got fixed upstream with a one-liner patch.

The above fix will be available in the next major update of Unity (5.14), but in the meanwhile I cherry picked the relevant patch to the current released version of Unity (5.12). The fixed version of Unity is available from a special temporary PPA: