As published by @Pascal_Obry on the mailing list, we are pleased to inform you that darktable 3.2 will be released during this summer, targeting 10th August as the release date (this might be subject to change).
The main reason is we are already more than 1800 commits ahead of 3.0 – COVID-19 confinement had an unexpected effect on opensource contributions – and the master branch is not in a state where we can simply push changes to 3.0.x releases anymore, so we are unable to backport most bugfixes as minor releases.
Among the big changes:
a full rewrite of the pipeline reordering, that will fix all the history inconsistencies and allow pipeline order presets (so you can create custom presets, or revert to 2.6 and 3.0 default pipe order),
a full rewrite of the lighttable as native GTK widgets, much faster and better polished, along with many CSS theming and icons improvements,
many fixes in 3D LUT, cropping, liquify modules,
negadoctor : a new film inversion module for digitalized negatives, that also simulates printing based on Kodak Cineon,
possibly filmic v4, with improved color science and highlights blending/reconstruction,
many more I simply didn’t follow because these guys have commited like animals,
integration and unit tests built-in, to track inconsistencies between C and OpenCL code and ensure compatibility on image processing changes (regular users won’t see them and won’t notice the difference, but it is a big milestone in software quality management).
darktable 3.4 is still planned for next Christmas as usual.
Many thanks to all the 61 (!) involved devs and all the testers who have achieved all that in 5 months !
As @anon41087856 says there have been a ton of changes in darktable since 3.0, and probably in the process some more bugs have been introduced too. The next couple of months will be devoted to trying to make this release as stable as possible. If you are able to compile darktable from source you can help with this effort by testing the latest code and raising any issues you find (and in the process you’ll get a sneak preview of some of the great new features that have been added).
Amazing stuff the ui now is so much more polish. I have started to use it. Great stuff and thanks to all the devs.
One thing that I notice is when you double click an image in light table it takes around 2-3 seconds for the image to appear in darkroom. If the time can be reduce it would make the process seamless and feel even more polish.
That is awesome! I have built some PRs to try them out, but I don’t want to switch my main library over to a dev version.
I am very impressed with FilmicV4, the new channel mixer and the UI changes and can’t wait to incorporate those in my workflow. Hearing that Christmas is in August this year has just made my day!
And the UI polish is not over. 2 PR are waiting (that I test them and check what’s needed to tweak on CSS). Added on that, that I also have (already) little things polished on my side and will be proposed after testing and confirm 2 cited PR. Thanks to @AlicVB and @Mark-64 works.
I don’t blame you - my main library is still on a version somewhere between 3.0 and 3.2 (before some of the more major rewrites in 3.2). But you can run multiple versions at the same time (I’m running three at the moment). So run a few edits through the new version if you are able.
That’s what I do. I have a set of ‘difficult’ pictures that I use for testing different software. They are mostly mixed lighting pictures where half is natural/flash and a part is blue led light. So far my best results were with cough Lightroom cough, and I absolutely hate that I can’t explain why, nor reproduce it in darktable. The new filmic and channel mixer are amazing though. I might start a PlayRaw for new ideas soon.
I am using current git master. I experienced regular crashes some time ago but not during the last two weeks or so. Not sure what the reason for the carshes was. Anyway, I have the impression that git master is already surprisingly stable. I’d say git master is even more stable and less buggy than 3.0 in December.
Looking forward to the next version. Is there a way to set up a test environment without disturbing a production system? Can anyone post a link to directions?
If you launch darktable with --configdir <somewhere else than your normal config> It makes a new library and data db without disturbing your production library. Then disable writing xmp sidecars in settings or darktablerc and you should be good to go.
You can also have two versions of the darktable application running side-by-side if you’re building from source, by telling the build script where to install it:
My three versions all currently run from subdirectories within my home directory so that they don’t conflict with the stable version installed by my distro.
