The digiKam handbooks will soon receive an update

Sep 25, 2016 23:50 GMT  ·  By

The digiKam developers were proud to announce the release of the second maintenance update to the digiKam 5 latest stable series of the free and open source RAW image editor for GNU/Linux operating systems.

digiKam 5.2.0 is here more than a month since the previous point release, digiKam 5.1.0, and introduces a new and smarter red eyes tool that promises to automatize the entire red-eyes effect reduction operation by processing the face detection on the whole image using a new algorithm written by Omar Amin during Google Summer of Code 2016.

Omar Amin's algorithm is designed in such a way that it can recognize shapes automatically and then tries to find eyes on people's faces that have a direct flash reflection on the retina, which causes the red eyes effect. The new Red Eyes tool is available in both the Image Editor and Batch Queue Manager.

"The algorithm have been very optimized for speed efficiency and for small memory fingerprint," reads the announcement. "End user can adjust just a single parameter about the reducing level of retina red color to the average of blue and green channels. [...] So typically, no user interaction are need with this new version of this tool compared to older one."

Over 40 reported bugs have been fixed

While the Red Eyes tool is the biggest new feature of the digiKam 5.2.0 release, the developers also manged to fix more than 42 bugs and annoyances reported by users since last month's maintenance update. Also, it looks like the digiKam and Showfoto handbooks will soon be updated with descriptions of the new features of digiKam 5.

It appears that the digiKam documentation has not received an update in many years, and this time the team will be helped by Wolfgang Scheffner to offer users up-to-date handbooks so they can get started more easily with the powerful RAW editor. Until the new documentation is ready, you can download digiKam 5.2.0 right now via our website.

The new Red Eyes tool in action
The new Red Eyes tool in action

digiKam 5.2.0 (2 Images)

digiKam 5.2.0 released
The new Red Eyes tool in action
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