If you’re sick of paying for photo editing software and are looking for an alternative to Adobe Lightroom, then the new Darktable 3.8 may be for you. It’s a free, open-source RAW photo file editor software for photo editing and file management.
Darktable has unique features such as virtual lighttable and darkroom clubbed with complete RAW image editing workflow for complex photography projects.
The Darktable team has announced its winter feature release just in time for dealing with any holiday photos, bringing Darktable to version 3.8. Here’s a quick update.
What’s New in Darktable 3.8
We start with the fact that the keyboard shortcut has been entirely reworked and extended to allow you to control Darktable with other device, for example, game controllers or MIDI devices. The new shortcut system is much more extensible than the prior implementation. Please note that any shortcuts you have previously created are not transferred to the new functionality and will need to be redefined in Darktable 3.8.
New diffuse or sharpen module, allowing you to simulate or to revert diffusion processes to reconstruct images from lens blur, hazing, sensor low-pass filter, or noise. It can also be used to simulate watercolor smudges, increase local contrast, simulate blooming or apply surface blur.
In Darktable 3.8, perspective correction module has been renamed to rotate and perspective and now allows you to manually define correction settings by drawing lines or rectangles on the image.
On top of that there is a new scene-referred blurs module, which allows you to define the motion path or the lens diaphragm and then generates the corresponding blur. Moreover a new LMMSE demosaic algorithm has been introduced. This algorithm is particularly suited to high ISO and/or noisy images.
Among other noteworthy changes, this release comes with the added support for multiple images in the print view. We can’t fail to mention that the color checker profiling tool is now normalized patch-wise in exposure to discard the effect of uneven lighting and fall-off when shooting color checkers hand-held and on-location.
Among other things, Darktable 3.8 brings a lot of other smaller changes and under the hood improvements, making up this big release. For example, flip buttons have been added to the orientation module, background jobs handling has been removed from preferences, faster mask handling, new sorting options, and many more.
If you’re interested in everything that’s new be sure to read through the release notes.
You can get the latest Darktable 3.8 release right now as a Flatpak package directly from the Flathub.
