Available now for GNU/Linux and macOS operating systems

Dec 27, 2016 21:17 GMT  ·  By

The developers of the open-source and cross-platform darktable RAW image editor proudly announced the release and general availability of the 2.2 stable series, a major release that brings countless new features and improvements.

We discussed here the development cycle of darktable 2.2.0 on several occasions, so you should have a notion of the new features implemented. It appears to be the biggest milestone of the open-source project that lets amateur and professional photographers edit their RAW images from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, or Pentax digital cameras.

We recommend studying the full changelog attached at the end of the story if you're curious to know what exactly was added or improved in this version, as it would be impractical for us to list all of them here. You should also carefully study the list of new dependencies, base camera support, noise profiles, and white balance presets.

Highlights of darktable 2.2

The biggest new features of darktable 2.2 are an automatic perspective correction module, darktable-chart, a new tool that lets users create styles for the CLUT (Color Look Up Table) module used for changing colors in an image, a brand-new Liquify tool, as well as the total revamp of LCh reconstruction mode in the Highlight reconstruction module.

darktable 2.2 also comes with an exposure fusion functionality that was implemented in the Basecurve module for lowering the dynamic range of images, a new RAW overexposure indication, support for importing and exporting tags from Lightroom keyword files, and various enhancements to Darkroom's preview component.

"Darkroom: the preview (in top-left corner) is now no longer pre-demosaiced (but just downscaled without demosaicing it at the same time), thus the preview, color picker, histogram show the proper results, especially when there is highlight clipping," explained the developers in the release announcement.

With well over 2,000 commits since the 2.0.0 branch, darktable 2.2 fixes more than 360 issues and is without any doubt the biggest release of the application so far. You can download darktable 2.2.0 for GNU/Linux and macOS right now from our website, but please keep in mind when upgrading from the 2.0.x series that, while your edits will be preserved, you won't be able to downgrade from 2.2 to 2.0.x any more.

Darktable 2.2.0 Changelog