The first Release Candidate of Darktable 3.0 has already been released

After almost a year of active development, the Darktable developer community announced the launch of the first Release Candidate to be (possibly) part of the new stable branch from Darktable 3.0.

For those who are unaware of Darktable should know that this is a program to organize and process digital photos and that acts as a free alternative to Adobe Lightroom and specializes in non-destructive work with raw images. It has the distinction of being non-destructiveIn other words, it never modifies the files in which it works since it manages a set of transformations to apply to the raw file and Darktable allows the result to be exported, in conventional image formats.

Darktable supports working with RAW images and provides a large module selections to perform various operations in photo processing.

Main new features of this Release Candidate of Darktable 3.0

In this RC we can find whatThe interface and portability to GTK / CSS were completely redesigned. With it now all interface elements can be controlled using CSS themes, In addition, a series of themes optimized for use on low and high resolution monitors have been prepared.

You can also find support to reorder modules in the order in which they are applied to the image (Ctrl + Shift + Drag), support for undo / redo operations in lighttable mode for labels, color labels, classifications, metadata, edit history and applied styles as well as support for masks plot.

In addition to it new modules were added "RGB levels" and "RGB tone curve", that support working with individual channels in RGB space, in addition to existing modules that work in Lab space.

Also the new module "3D Color Lookup Tables" with support for Hald-CLUT and Cube PNG formats. As well as the "basic settings" module, which allows you to quickly adjust the black, white and gray points, change the saturation and automatically calculate the exposure of the image.

The color eyedropper tool in the Blending, Tone Curve, Color Zones and Brightness modules supports selection of the average value for the selected area (Ctrl + click the eyedropper icon).

Of the other changes that are highlighted in the ad:

• Redesigned tape images and histogram modes.
• New versions of the "film tone curve" and "equalizer tones" modules.
• Modified the profile noise suppression module.
• Support for quick search of modules by name.
• A dialog has been added to configure the exported metadata, allowing you to control the export of Exif data, tags, their hierarchy, and geotagging data.
• Migrated from POSIX threads to OpenMP.
• Multiple optimizations have been made for SSE and OpenCL.
• Added support for more than 30 new cameras.
• Support for the new Google Photo API with the ability to create albums directly from darktable.

If you want to know more about the news, you can consult the publication In the following link.

How to install the Darktable 3.0 Release Candidate on Linux?

Finally for those who are interested in being able to test the new features of what will be integrated into the next stable branch of Darktable 3.0. They can do it by following the instructions we share below.

Debian users or any other based on it. They are going to open a terminal and in it type the following commands:

sudo echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable:/master/Debian_10/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/graphics:darktable:master.list
wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:darktable:master/Debian_10/Release.key -O Release.key
sudo apt-key add - < Release.key
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install darktable

While for the case of those who are Ubuntu users or derived from it, they must type the following.

Ubuntu 19.10:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable:/master/xUbuntu_19.10/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/graphics:darktable:master.list"
wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:darktable:master/xUbuntu_19.10/Release.key -O Release.key

Ubuntu 19.04:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable:/master/xUbuntu_19.04/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/graphics:darktable:master.list"
wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:darktable:master/xUbuntu_19.04/Release.key -O Release.key

Ubuntu 18.04:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable:/master/xUbuntu_18.04/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/graphics:darktable:master.list"
wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:darktable:master/xUbuntu_18.04/Release.key -O Release.key

And they install with:

sudo apt-key add - < Release.key
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install darktable

For the case of those who are Fedora 31 users:

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:darktable:master/Fedora_31/graphics:darktable:master.repo
sudo dnf install darktable

Or for those who use openSUSE Leap 15:

sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:darktable:master/openSUSE_Leap_15.1/graphics:darktable:master.repo

openSUSE Tumbleweed

sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:darktable:master/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/graphics:darktable:master.repo

And install with

sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install darktable