The developers of darktable They have decided to take advantage of Christmas to publish version 3.8 of this popular RAW image editor. As is usual with each new launch of this application, we find a large number of news that we will try to summarize in this post.
The first thing that has been highlighted from darktable 3.8 is that “the keyboard shortcut system has been redesigned and expanded completely to allow darktable to be controlled with other devices, such as MIDI devices and video game controllers. Standard keyboard or mouse shortcuts can now make use of mouse movements (horizontal, vertical, diagonal), as well as multiple button or key presses and short or long presses or clicks ”.
The new diffusion or sharpened module simulates or reverses the diffusion process to reconstruct images from a blurry lens or noise, among other things. This can also be used to simulate watercolor stains, increase local contrast, or apply a surface blur.
The new module for blurring related to the scene opens the door to synthesizing movements and blurring of the lens in a parametric and physically precise way, allowing to define the trajectory of the movement or the diaphragm of the lens and then generate the corresponding blur.
The perspective correction module has been renamed to “rotate and perspective” and as of darktable 3.8 it is possible to manually define the configuration when drawing lines or rectangles in the image. On the other hand, support for multiple images has been added in the print view, making the page can be filled with several areas, each of which can be moved and positioned on the page with the ability to snap to a grid to greater precision.
darktable 3.8
Cut Module Layout Guides are now generally available and no longer require the Cut Module itself to be activated. The support for Canon’s raw CR3 format has been added, this being something provided by LibRaw and requiring at least version 0.27.4 of exiv2 with BMFF support enabled.
To finish with the most important new features of darktable 3.8, the color corrector profiling tool, which was introduced in version 3.4 of the application as part of the color calibration module, has been standardized as a patch to rule out the uneven lighting effect and the drop when shooting the color correctors that are on hand and in place.
Full details on darktable 3.8 are available by checking the release announcements posted on the official blog and in GitHub, in addition to the release notes. The application can be obtained for Windows and macOS from the corresponding download section on the official website, while for Linux you have to resort to the openSUSE website (because the compilations have been made with openSUSE Build Service) or by Flatpak installer, which is also official.
