RELEASE_NOTES.md

We're proud to announce the new feature release of darktable, 4.4.0!

The github release is here: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases/tag/release-4.4.0.

As always, please don't use the autogenerated tarball provided by github, but only our tar.xz file. The checksums are:

$ sha256sum darktable-4.4.0.tar.xz
??? darktable-4.4.0.tar.xz
$ sha256sum darktable-4.4.0.dmg
??? darktable-4.4.0.dmg
$ sha256sum darktable-4.4.0.exe
??? darktable-4.4.0.exe

When updating from the stable 4.2.x series, please bear in mind that your edits will be preserved during this process, but the new library and configuration will no longer be usable with 4.2.x.

You are strongly advised to take a backup first.

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!

Since darktable 4.2:

• Almost ??? commits to darktable+rawspeed
• ??? pull requests handled
• ?? issues closed

The Big Ones

The following is a summary of the main features added to darktable 4.4. Most of these features are described more fully in the user manual.

• Allows for multiple presets to be defined and applied automatically on matching images. Each preset after the first one will create a new module instance just on top of the current module (so it applies after).

  To better view which module instance corresponds to which preset the module label is set to the preset name. This preset name will be changed if some parameters on the module are changed (and so does not correspond to the preset anymore). If the module label is hand edited it will be kept.

• Rework the module default parameters and make them usable in copy/paste, presets and styles.

  Many modules have default parameters based on image metadata or current workflow:

  • Exposure: use a specific default in scene referred workflow,
  • Denoise profile: is camera and ISO specific,
  • Lens correction: is camera and lens specific,
  • Base curve: is camera sensor specific,
  • White balance: is metadata specific,
  • Orientation: is metadata specific,
  • Color calibration: is metadata specific.

  For all those modules it is now possible to paste parameters and ensure that proper default metadata based will be used. This is achieved by selecting the "Reset" corresponding column in the preset and style dialog.

  For presets a new option can be selected in the dialog for the preset to be using the module's default parameters on which it is applied. The option is named "Reset all module parameters to their default values"

  This new generic feature has permitted to clean-up some hacks to try to do the same kind support at the module levels and which was anyway limited.

• Rework the workflow setting, we now have the choice between:

  • Scene-refrerred (Filmic)
  • Scene-referred (Sigmoid)
  • Display-referred (Legacy)
  • None

  The chromatic adaptation preference has been removed and is implied by the workflow. The Color calibration module is used when in Scene-referred and While balance otherwise.

  Finally, using None workflow and the two new features above (multiple presets support and reset to default parameters metadata based) one can create any other kind of workflow. For example it is possible to use Sigmoid with the White balance module.

• Add support for Color Harmony Guide lines in RYB vectorscope.

  There is 9 color harmony guides proposed:

  • Monochromatic
  • Analogous
  • Analogous complementary
  • Complementary
  • Split complementary
  • Dyad
  • Triad
  • Tetrad
  • Square

  Those guides can be used to shift colors of a picture to match one of the color harmony. One can see the color harmony guides a bit like the composition guides but related to colors and not to composition.

Other Changes

• Add global right-click and drad to fix image rotation. This can now be used at any moment in darkroom as long as the currently focused module is not using this shortcut. This allows for fast rotation correction without having to open the Rotation and Perspective module.

• Add OpenCL support to the Sigmoid module.

• Do not invalidate snapshot anymore when the history is changed (compressed or reset). All snapshot are now stored with their full history and can be reconstruct properly.

• Module "Levels" has been deprecated, use "Levels RGB" instead.

• Module "Contrast Brightness Saturation" has been deprecated, use "Color Balance RGB" instead.

• Convert the zoom widget on the navigation window to a standard drop-down for better fitting the darktable style.

• Lower the ISO 12646 border size still staying in the recommended size.

• Rework the preset dialog filter to better show the relation between the raw, non-raw and the three formats HDR, monochrome and color. This avoids confusions and creating presets that are actually not applied.

• The default module group has been removed. It is better to use one of the scene-referred group.

• Add support for loading QOI images.

• Redesign the export and thumbnails generation.

  Some hacks have been accumulated to try to have exact size of the exported pictures. All this has been redesigned and simplified to have a better export size.

• Various code cleanups and improved performances. All module's SSE2 code path have been removed (as the optimized parallel code generated by the compiler is faster) or code optimized in the following modules. This leads to a speed gain of 5% to 25%:

  • Dithering

  • Graduated Density

  • Input Color Profile

  • Color Look up Table

  • Borders

  • Surface Blur

  • Vignette

  • Retouch

  • Denoise Profile

  • Invert

  • Local Contrast with Local Laplacian

  • Lowpass

  • RGB Levels

  • Input Color Profile

  • Lowlight vision

  • Velvia

  • Split-toning

  • Nega Doctor

  • Filmic (legacy)

  • Color Balance (legacy)

  • Levels (legacy)

  • The interpolation algorithms (Bicubic, Bilinear, Lanczos2, Lanczos3) used by modules doing warp or scaling of pixels. The old Crop and Rotate and the new Perspective Correction modules are now running faster.

  • The gaussian generator used by many modules: Censorize, Denoise Profile, Lowpass, Diffuse & Sharpen, Defringe, RAW Chromatic Aberrations, Base Curve, Perspective Correction, Filmic RGB, Retouch, Tone Equalizer and Zone System (deprecated). Meaning all those modules have parts now running faster.

  • The box blur filter used by the focus peaking, the guided filter for blending, the new highlight recovery algorithms, and the Bloom, Highpass, and Soften modules. Meaning all those modules and features have parts now running faster.

  • The Edge-Avoiding a-trous Wavelet used by those modules Contrast Equalizer and Denoise (Profiled). Meaning those modules have parts now running faster.

  • Some part of the bilateral filter have been improved for better performances. This is used in multiple modules like Monochrome, Lowpass Filter, Shadow and Highlights, Censorize, Retouch, Color Mapping, Rotation and Perspective and Local Contrast. Meaning all those modules have parts now running faster.

  • All the blending modes in Lab & RGB for the Display & Scene referred workflows have been optimized.

  • The luminance mask calculation for the Tone Equalizer.

  • Loader for JPEG2000 file format

• Improve Highlights reconstruction "inpaint opposed" performance by providing an OpenCL implementation and using internal caching in darkroom.

• Various improvements of the debug interface:

  • -d common outputs most valuable information and should be used for bug reports instead of -d all.

  • --bench-module <modulea,moduleb> does runtime benchmarking of the specified modules.

  • --dump-pipe <modulea,moduleb> writes in & output data of the specified modules as pfm files for inspection.

• Improve support for Lens correction based on embedded data.

  • Add supports for dng files,
  • Allows finetuning of scale,
  • Add an auto-scale button.
  • Improve overall module performance of about 8%.

• Add OpenMP support to XCF export for better performances.

• Add support for writing metadata to XCF format (see notes below).

• Add OpenMP support to the RGBE loader for better performances.

• Added section headers to the sort by drop-down (files, times, etc).

• Shortcuts assigned to presets or styles will be shown when hovering over them in their menu.

• Long left clicking a preset will keep the menu open so you can quickly switch between several to see the effect without having to repeatedly click the preset button to reopen the menu. You can also scroll over the preset button to switch to previous/next presets (like you already could via shortcuts).

• When the crop module receives focus and switches to an uncropped view of the image, the crop areas around the edges of the image briefly light up to indicate that they are now draggable.

• The crop module, which shows the full image to facilitate making adjustments, will not trigger an unnecessary recalculation until the module loses focus (for example by switching to another module or by collapsing the crop module itself) at which point the new crop will be used to resize. If shortcuts are used to make changes to the crop without focusing the module, they will still be implemented immediately.

• The height of resizeable widgets and lists can now be changed by dragging their bottom. The previous method to achieve this, by scrolling while holding the control key, has been changed to shift+alt+scroll (and a note has been added to all tooltips consistently). This frees up ctrl+scroll to fine-tune changes in RGB Levels or the histogram (to change exposure or black level). In the navigator ctrl+scroll will adjust zoom level without bounds, like it would do over the central area.

• The histogram gui has been reworked. Control buttons have been splitted in two groups: on the left side, a series of buttons to switch among histogram modes (histogram, waveform, rbg parade, vectorscope). On the right side, the buttons that control the aspect of each mode (RGB Channels, Orientation, Vectorscope type). For the RYB vectorscope, a series of buttons have been added to visualize guide lines for the most common color harmonies.

• The central image internal scroll zoom logic in the darkroom has been reworked in order to make the zoom steps more perceptually uniform for all the image sizes.

• Better display of the module's instance name in darkroom to have a clear visual separation between the module name and the instance name. The label name in the history is also updated accordingly.

• Improve display of the range rating widget. It should be more readable with a better contrast and a rework of some icons.

• In lighttable, link "hold" and "sticky" preview shortcuts to the same action (previously there were two "toggle sticky preview mode" actions, one with and one without focus detection). Focus detection is selected via an element, hold or toggle via an effect. All mapped shortcuts are shown in the tooltip of the preview layout button.

• Read Exif metadata from AVIF, HEIC and JPEG XL images using native libraries if Exiv2 does not support it.

• Write Exif data to the eXIf PNG chunk if using Exiv2 version newer than 0.27.x. This is the new standard way to store Exif data in PNGs.

• Makes laplacian highlights recovery mode less memory hangry (save around 40%) and allow for a large speed up. This makes this recovery mode lot more usable and allows for more recovery iterations.

• Add support for embedded DNG lens corrections metadata. By reading the rectilinear and vignette_radial metadata it is now possible to make lens correction.

• Add support for MaxApertureValue metadata to complement the already supported ApertureValue. This is the only metadata tag available in Leica M Monochrom, M8, M9 & M10 DNGs.

• Export masks for EXRs as extra channels.

• The search filter has been improved to also search the camera's brand and model.

• A full copy and paste is always done in overwrite mode now. Using the append mode was in the vast majority of time wrong in this case. When the full history is copied and pasted into another image we do want to just use the new history as a replacement of the previous one. It makes no sense adding some multi-instance for some modules for example. So this new default should fit better in the workflow.

• Re-enable loading of BigTIFF images by attempting the native libtiff-based reader first.

• The brush path is now a bit more transparent to better see what is actually painted.

• Style tooltip immediately shows module details while waiting for preview image to be calculated.

• In the style and copy/paste dialog a new column display the module masking status. If any mask (draw, parametric or raster) is used the column contains a mask icon.

• Makes the drawn mask tools' tooltip of Liquify module consistent with the other mask tools as found in the blending drawn masks.

Bug Fixes

• Fix the reset of the sort order to 'filename' on every collection change.

• Remove the commit button from the crop module has it was not used anymore.

• Fix the reset of modules with specific default parameters to ensure that the modules will be set back in the same state as it was when first importing the image. This fix is related with the rework of auto apply module default parameters in the section above.

• Properly transform XMP regions from metadata to ensure they match the image. The XMP regions may come from the camera face recognition for example.

• Fix some rounding issues in the calculation of the borders in the border module. This creates borders on opposite sides with the same size.

• Code maintenance and bugfixes for writing dng files as used in "Create HDR"

• Pixelpipe cache safety and performance improvements. This makes better hit when looking in the cache and so allow for better performances.

• Fix "--threads n" restricts OMP threads to specified number (does not allow for more threads than available on the host.

• Raw chromatic aberration module always works on full image data so quality is immune to scaling in darkroom mode.

• A bug with shortcuts (and dt.gui.action) to set the active item in a combobox with varying content has been fixed and now it is also possible to directly set the values of the combos for the focused module's blending mode etc. (by setting the shortcuts effect).

• Fix the update preset entry in the presets menu to allow for it to be activated in more situations. For example after entering in the darkroom and modifying the some parameters in the module the update preset entry was not selectable. It was necessary to first select the preset and then changing the parameters.

• Fix the color picker sample area calculation to ensure at least one pixel is selected. At large zoom level and with a very small area some rounding were sometimes returning an empty area. This leads to returning a wrong color sample.

• Fix the ignore EXIF rating on initial import for images containing the XMP.xmp.Rating tag. This does not change the rating if an XMP with some specific rating has been already made.

• Fix some minor memory leaks in some modules.

• Fix a possible crash when selecting the original module history state and compression the history.

• Fix a possible crash in gradient mask creation due to an issue in the implemented parallelism.

• Fix crawler when updating the XMP. The XMP file must be set with the timestamp of the database entry to ensure we don't have continuous mismatches reported.

• Fix different issues on the mask manager. It is now possible for all masks kind to be added continuously. Also the brush was not properly displayed after being created from the mask manager. A crash when creating gradient from the mask manager has been fixed. For all shapes the editable state is properly set after being created making it possible to move and resize the different parts.

• Fix brush correction tool placement as used in Retouch module, the issue was more visible when the image is distorted.

• Fixed CPU vs OpenCL output differences in PPG and VNG/VNG4 demosaicers, match greens and color smoothing.

• Finalscale now properly uses same user defined scaling mode for image and masks.

• Fix display when editing a shapes' name in masks manager. Avoid overlay of the old and new name.

• Fix for clean Nikon camera make and model Exif info on import; opening in darkroom is no longer required, and now works for non-raw files as well.

• Fix Canon CR3 metadata crop not being ignored; full visible sensor area (as determined by LibRaw) is always being used now on new imports.

• When using Wayland give priority to XWayland, because native Wayland is the cause of many issues in darktable.

• When using the spot exposure mapping mode, properly reset the mode to "correction" when changing image.

• Fix some pixel-pipe cache issues related to mask visualization. This ensure better hit in the cache leading to better performance and also avoid some refresh issues in some cases.

• Fix a bug where the "highlights reconstruction" module, which was not applicable to the current image, could be enabled. For example it is now impossible to enable the module if the image is a JPEG as the module works only with RAWs.

• Fix border issue in inpaint opposed highlights reconstruction. Some pixels on the border of the image where not handled by the algorithm. This may lead to a small difference on the border of the image and will avoids some possible redish borders.

• Avoid XMP writing if not requested and image was not altered. This is rule is properly followed now also when importing RAW + JPEG.

• Make sure the database timestamp is always set when possibly writing a sidecar xmp file.

• A workaround was implemented for the mouse hover effect over sliders and dropdowns, that used to cause the whole side panel, including histogram, to be redrawn on each move between widgets, reducing cpu consumption.

Lua

API Version

• API version is now 9.1.0

Add action support for Lua

• The lua call to dt.gui.action has become more flexible, with most parameters optional, so you can read the focused status of a module doing just dt.gui.action("iop/filmicrgb", "focus").

• tooltips show the compact lua commands in mapping mode (only adding the last parameter, instance, if the module supports multi-instance) and have been added to presets and styles menus as well.

• Lua commands can be copied to the clipboard, using ctrl+v in the shortcuts dialog, both from a selected action or shortcut, or long right click when in mapping mode (over a widget) or in the presets/styles menus.

• The shown/copied lua command for a slider or combobox will set the value it currently has.

• A shortcut can now be directed to a lua script that mimics a standard slider, dropdown or button, but dynamically selects the real widget(s) that receive(s) it, based on for example which module is focused or enabled. The advantage is that all fallbacks work as normal, so you can assign a midi knob to it and turning it (holding shift/ctrl to speed up/down) or pressing it to reset work regardless of which widget receives it. Basically this is a much more flexible alternative to the fake widgets under processing modules/. This allows owners of for example an x-touch mini to use their scarce rotors in different, fully configurable, ways while working in different modules (which can also be focused using midi buttons which will then light up). Such configurations could be shared using https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts.

• Support shortcuts to sliders/combos created in lua, either via visual mapping mode or in the shortcuts dialog under the lua category. Elements and effects are not supported.

Other Lua changes

• Added aspect_ratio field to dt_lua_image_t for image orientation retrieval support.

• Two new properties have been added to get the flags (category, private) and the synonyms from a tag.

• Moved pixelpipe-processing-complete event from the end of the image pixelpipe to the end of the preview pixelpipe to catch completion of events that only update the preview such as spot exposure measurement in the exposure module.

Notes

• When exporting to AVIF, EXR, JPEG XL, or XCF, selecting specific metadata (e.g. geo tag or creator) is not currently possible. For AVIF, EXR, JPEG XL, and XCF formats, darktable will not include any metadata fields unless the user selects all of the checkboxes in the export preference options.

• In order to support the correct display of numbers in darktable, the minimum supported Gtk version has had to be increased to 3.24.15. For people who need to build darktable with an older version, this can be supported by reverting the following change: remove line 241 of darktable.css file on your system. See: darktable-org#13166

• Beginning with this release a new support policy regarding macOS versions will be in place. darktable releases will just support macOS versions that are also supported by Apple. So release 4.4 drops support for macOS versions older than 11.3.

Changed Dependencies

Mandatory

• ???

Optional

• ???

RawSpeed changes

Camera support, compared to 4.2

Base Support

Missing Compression Mode Support

• Fujifilm lossy
• Nikon high efficiency
• Sony lossless

White Balance Presets

• Canon EOS R7
• Canon EOS R10

Noise Profiles

No data for this release.

Suspended Support

No samples on raw.pixls.us

• Creo/Leaf Aptus 22(LF3779)/Hasselblad H1
• Fujifilm FinePix S9600fd
• Fujifilm IS-1
• GoPro FUSION
• Kodak EasyShare Z980
• Leaf Aptus-II 5(LI300059)/Mamiya 645 AFD
• Leaf Credo 60
• Leaf Credo 80
• Minolta DiMAGE 5
• Olympus SP320
• Panasonic DMC-FX150
• Pentax Q10
• Phase One IQ250
• Samsung GX10
• Samsung GX20
• Samsung EK-GN120
• Samsung SM-G920F
• Samsung SM-G935F
• Sinar Hy6/ Sinarback eXact
• ST Micro STV680

Translations

• ???