posted on Sun 16 November 2014

We are happy to announce the first release candidate for the upcoming darktable 1.6.

In case you are wondering about the versioning scheme: we use odd numbers as development versions and even numbers for stable releases. This means the release candidate, tagged as “darktable-1.5.1”, is an unstable development version – the final stable version will bear the tag “darktable-1.6.0”.

Grab the tarball and OS X package from the github release page:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases/tag/release-1.5.1

Concerning Pascal’s Unstable PPA: only Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS) is supported, and there will be no support for future non-LTS releases. Of course the stable PPA will still serve all active Ubuntu versions starting at the most recent LTS.

And here are the preliminary release candidate release notes:

New features:

initial support for x-trans sensors

input colour gamut mapping

slideshow

better basecurve tool to create basecurves from raw/jpg pairs

soft boundaries in sliders (right click and type 8 in exposure compensation for example)

support huge images (> 32 bit pixel index)

pwstorage libsecret

new defringe image operation

automatic levels

big exr export speedup (multicore support)

color conversion speedup (openmp for lcms2 case)

tiff read/write rewritten, works on 32-bit float now

embedded icc profile support for png/tiff (read/write)

Internal improvements:

module parameter introspection

clang/address-sanitizer/etc compiler warnings fixed

flip iop used for raw auto-orientation (simplifies code)

libraw not used any more for a lot of file formats (faster loading via rawspeed now)

Bug fixes:

hdr bracketing fixes

masks cleanup and bugfixes

lens iop presets are working

correct lens detection for compact cameras

updated usermanual

lots of performance improvements and code cleanup

New camera support / new noise profiles

There is support for several dozens of new cameras, and loads of new noise profiles for denoising have been added. Check out the full list in the release notes on github.

We are still looking for aspect ratio mode samples for the following camera models:

Panasonic DMC -G1 #10149

-G1 #10149 Panasonic DMC -G3 #10150

-G3 #10150 Panasonic DMC -G5 #10151

-G5 #10151 Panasonic DMC -G10 #10152

-G10 #10152 Panasonic DMC - GF5 #10154

- #10154 Panasonic DMC - GF6 #10155

- #10155 Panasonic DMC -L1 #10156

-L1 #10156 Panasonic DMC -L10 #10157

-L10 #10157 Panasonic DMC - LF1 #10158

- #10158 Panasonic DMC - LX2 #10159

- #10159 Panasonic DMC - LX3 #10160

- #10160 Panasonic DMC - LX5 #10161

Please give this some testing and let us know on FreeNode in #darktable or on the darktable-devel mailing list if there are remaining issues with it.

And as always, thanks to our great community and all the contributors for making this possible! enjoy the release!