14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the powerful, open-source, free and cross-platform darktable RAW image editor is about to get to the next level and enhance your photography experience on GNU/Linux and Mac platforms.
darktable 2.2.0 is currently under heavy development, with an initial Release Candidate version out the door, and it looks like it will be a major release sporting exciting new features and tools, including a brand new automatic perspective correction module, new raw overexposure indication, as well as Undo and Redo support.
The upcoming darktable 2.2 release also promises a new tool called darktable-chart, which allows for the creation of styles for the CLUT (Color Look Up Table) module used for changing colors in an image, a new Liquify tool, and a revamped LCh reconstruction mode in the Highlight reconstruction module.
To lower the dynamic range of your photos, darktable 2.2 also comes with an exposure fusion functionality in the Basecurve module, and it looks like Darkroom's preview component will no longer be pre-demosaiced, allowing Histogram, Color Picker, and Preview components to display proper results for highlight clipping.
darktable to allow import and export of tags from Lightroom keyword files
There will be numerous other interesting features in darktable 2.2, such as support for 64-bit and ARM-based platforms, the ability to import and export tags from Adobe Lightroom keyword files, support for directories in the darktable-cli command, and OpenCL implementation for VNG, VNG4, and Markesteijn demosaicing methods.
Of course, the dependencies will also be changed for this upcoming major release of darktable. For example, CMake 3.0 is now required and you'll need at least GCC 4.7 or Cland 3.3 to compile the software. Libraries like libexiv2 0.24, GTK+ 3.14, and Glib 2.40 or later versions are also required, and there's no need for the SDL library anymore.
Ultimately, the OpenJPEG2 library should now be supported, and there's a special note for Fedora users (see below). You can download the darktable 2.2.0 RC0 development release right now for GNU/Linux distros if you want to get a taste of what's coming to the final version, but please be aware that some of these features are not yet complete.
"Fedora-provided darktable packages are intentionally built with Lua disabled. Thus, Lua scripting will not work," reads the release notes. "In the mean time you could fix that by self-compiling darktable (pass -DDONT_USE_INTERNAL_LUA=OFF to CMake in order to enable use of bundled Lua5.2.4)."