Welcome to the second installment of From the Community, a (hopefully) quarterly-ish blog post to highlight a few of the things our community members have been doing!

@arctic has posted some research about how to better simulate grain in our digital images and the ensuing conversation is both fascinating and way above my head! This discussion is thus far raw processor independent and more input and code is welcome!

We’ve somewhat recently welcomed the painters into the fold on the pixls’ forum and @Elle rewarded us all with a tutorial RGB color mixing. She delves into subjects such as mixing color pigments like a traditional painter and how to handle that in the digital darkroom. You can read the whole article here.

There has been a lot of on-going work to bring support for Pentax Pixel Shift files in RawTherapee; the thread has now reached 234 posts and it is inspiring to see the community and developers coming together to bring support for an interesting technology. The feature set has been evolving pretty rapidly and it will be exiting when it makes it to a stable release.

Some preliminary work has begun to bring generic midi controller support to darktable. The funding for the midi controller to spur the development of this feature is a direct result of the members of the forum directly giving to further community causes. Once the darktable developers are finished with the midi controller, it’ll be offered to other developers to use to help implement support!

@Morgan_Hardwood has written a very nice post detailing several methods for dealing with clipped highlights in RawTherapee. These include tone-mapping, highlights and shadows, and using the CIECAM02 mode.