A new release of virtual light-table and darkroom application Darktable is available for download.

The tool, aimed at photographers, allows you to manage “your digital negatives in a database and lets you view them through a zoomable light-table.”

It is also to develop and enhance raw images, uses non-destructive editing and only converts the full image during export.

New features present in version 0.6.0 include: –

  • tethered shooting mode
  • import from camera via gphoto2
  • new, improved plugins: vignetting, velvia, grain, denoise (via bilateral filter), color transfer, channel mixer ..
  • crop/rotate: straighten tool, perspective correction, guide lines (ported from digikam)
  • lots of new input color matrices and base curves
  • openexr export
  • database format changed, which greatly improves speed (and cuts down used disk memory)
  • film strip view in darkroom mode for quick image switching
  • cool alternative demosaicing algorithms (ported from rawtherapee): dcb, amaze, vcd, c/a autocorrection
  • customizable preset system for all darkroom modules with auto application to matching images, selected by exif
  • reworked export system to modularly support export to picasa webalbum, email, or disk in jpg, png, 8/16-tiff, pfm, exr, or 16-ppm.
  • lots of performance enhancements (plugins denoise and local contrast are still slow)
  • New translations
The application reminds me – although it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison – of Commercial (and Linux supported) application LightZone. The UI is neat and orderly, the effects/editing application is logical, fast and fully tweakable and the application as a whole runs fairly light. 

Download
The latest release can be installed on Lucid from the Darktable PPA. Open a terminal and enter the following lines carefully: –

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmjdebruijn/darktable-release
  • sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install darktable
Thanks to Rich
Apps darktable Image Editors