As some of you might have noticed, darktable got accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code (warning, site doesn’t work with every browser …). Currently we are seeing a few possible students lurking around in IRC, preparing their proposals in our Wiki and getting familiar with the program, code and community. …

“Why does darktable need a blog?” you might ask. The answer is quite simple: While we do have a mailing list (actually there are three) which is quite active, most decisions and background informations happen in IRC (#darktable on FreeNode). This is great for fast communications, but it doesn’t allow interested …

Every now and then the question arises why we don’t have a button in darktable to open the current image in GIMP. Everytime I answer more or less the same.

The arguments of those requesting the button are along the line of “$PROGRAM has it, so it shouldn’t be hard to do” and “I really need to do some small …

we released version 0.8, which obsoletes 0.7.1 in a lot of ways:

• much faster image loading due to rawspeed, an awesome new library by klaus post @rawstudio
• lots of performance improvements in our caches and pixel pipelines (together with the above like 5x–10x)
• gpu computing using opencl (for graphics boards …

we released version 0.7.1, a small bugfix release to fix up some nuisances in 0.7:

• some more white balance presets
• layout fixes for overlong profile names
• styles now actually work
• extensive documentation in form of screencasts

enjoy the release, but be aware that you’ll be missing out on a lot of …

we released version 0.7 this weekend. some of the changes:

• .xmp is now used instead of .dt for sidecars
• libraw with dcraw 9.05
• plug-ins of darkroom mode are now in groups/tabs
• new darkroom plug-ins: zone system, relight, graduated neutral density, watermark
• changes can now be saved into named processing styles …

finally a new release … it has been so long that i hardly remember all the changes. let’s try to list the most important ones:

• libraw 0.10.0-beta3
• tethered shooting mode
• import from camera via gphoto2
• new, improved modules: vignetting, velvia, grain, denoise (via bilateral filter), color transfer, …

features, features, features ;)

• image tagging
• flexible database queries by exif and custom tags
• powerful color zones plug-in, to selectively alter only some colors
• french translation
• libraw 0.8.5
• new light table mode layout: file manager
• inotify support
• tiff 8-bit and 16-bit export
• new, more powerful widgets to …

as usual, the new release comes with lots of new features:

• lens defect correction (lensfun)
• internationalization (russian and swedish translation)
• backup files for image editing history and tagging (.dt and .dttags) apart from database
• gconf preferences handling
• lighttable mode modules
• libraw 0.8.4 and low-level …

there have been some major internal changes in dt since 0.2, and some of them result in cool new features for the user, so it is time to pass it on to the non-git audience. this includes:

• most processing is now being done in a new color space (L a/L b/L). this results in nicer exposure/tonecurve/denoise/color …