When updating from the stable 5.2 series, please bear in mind that your edits will be preserved during this process, but the new library and configuration will no longer be usable with 5.2.

You are strongly advised to take a backup first.

Important note: to make sure that darktable can keep on supporting the raw file format for your camera, please read this post on how/what raw samples you can contribute to ensure that we have the full raw sample set for your camera under CC0 license!

Since darktable 5.2:

• 996 commits to darktable+rawspeed
• 386 pull requests handled
• 56 issues closed

Please note that the darktable documentation is not currently complete for release 5.4 and contributions are greatly appreciated. Please see the project documentation for more information on how to contribute.

The Big Ones

The following is a summary of the main features added to darktable 5.4. Please see the user manual for more details of the individual changes (where available).

• A new section Capture Sharpening is added into the demosaic module. The capture sharpening tries to recover details lost due to in-camera blurring, which can be caused by diffraction, the anti-aliasing filter or other sources of Gaussian-type blur.

• Added a new tone mapper implementation based on Blender's AgX display transform. The new module's color output is similar to that of Sigmoid, but the provided set of controls is more extensive. It allows for setting exposure white and black points explicitly, similar to Filmic RGB. The implementation includes a user-adjustable pivot point for the tone curve, with the default set at 18% mid-gray. Contrast around this pivot is adjustable. Controls are provided to create a section of constant contrast, and independent sliders are available to control the contrast in shadows and highlights (the "toe" and "shoulder" of the curve). The resulting output is characterized by a gradual color desaturation in highlights, similar to film, and a natural-looking color representation in mid-tones and highlights.

• Added support for multiple workspace. When the corresponding option is activated on the preferences, Darktable opens a dialog when starting. From this dialog one can select the default workspace (the one created the first time and currently used by everyone by default) or to create a new one. Each workspace has it's own database and configuration file (collection, last UI defaults...).

  An in memory workspace can also be selected in the dialog. In this case there is no database created in disk, a configuration file is created though.

UI/UX Improvements

• Many GNU/Linux distributions have dropped support for X11 leaving only Wayland. Darktable has received many fixes to work properly on Wayland including display ICC profiles. This version 5.4 should work on Wayland as good as it was on X11.

• Show a busy cursor when changing views. This provides immediate feedback when, for example, double-clicking an image in the lighttable instead of simply freezing the UI until the darkroom has finished opening.

• Added the standard "Window" menu to the application menu bar on macOS.

• In Tone Equalizer module move controls for mask exposure and contrast compensation to the advanced tab.

• In the navigation windows, the zoom dropdown is now better behaving. After a free zoom over the darkroom, using the scroll over the zoom level indicator of the navigation window, the selected zoom will be the closest match (above or below depending on the scroll direction). This is better than previous behavior where the zoom level was always set to "small".

• When moving around in a (zoomed) center view in the darkroom, we now pre-calculate a slightly larger area so that it might not always be necessary to immediately recalculate after further moves. The initial 1px mouse move is generally not final, after all. This does mean longer calculation times, so you can switch this off by setting darkroom/ui/anticipate_move in darktablerc to 1.0. If you use cursor keys to move around, you might want to increase it to >1.4 to anticipate at least one further 20% move on either side. When the recalculation is triggered by a module parameter change, say exposure increase, only the exact area shown is calculated as before, for optimal responsiveness.

• When applying a rotation or flip, the transformation will be immediately applied to the part of the image currently shown in the center view while waiting for a full recalc. It used to be only repositioned but not rotated which would lead to weird overlays for a brief period.

• The popup (that you get when right-clicking) for sliders with a 360° range now shows a color wheel or compass. If the slider is soft-limited to a smaller range (for example in rotate&perspective) you can toggle zooming out to the full range by middle-clicking. Another middle click will restore the soft range (and the normal fine-tuning mechanism).

• When the slider range has been zoomed out beyond soft limits, the now visible "extreme" areas have a slightly different color.

• To make the rotation in the wheel match the rotation effect in the image, most slider directions for angles have been reversed. You may want to add a "-1" speed to any shortcuts you have gotten used to.

• Added new default shortcut keys. These will take effect only if the keys do not yet have user-defined assignments.

  • c - toggle crop box.

  • e - set exposure compensation (equivalent to right-clicking on the exposure slider).

  • alt-r - set image rotation (equivalent to right-clicking on the rotation slider).

  • alt-[ and alt- ] - fine rotation adjustment.

• Different shapes for the indicator on sliders can now be selected in preferences/misc/interface (triangle, circle, diamond, bar).

• All toolbar buttons on the lighttable and darkroom have their enabled state recovered across sessions. The visibility of the enabled buttons has been improved to avoid confusions when restarting Darktable and seeing artifacts due to some tools being activate like Gamut check.

• Make the cursor indicating the selected thumbs more visible. It is now bigger and has a border to ensure better visibility on dark thumbs.

Performance Improvements

• Tune performance for the Lut3D module (5% to 20% speed-up).

• Dramatically speed up first startup of a new installation when the library is stored on a hard drive or NAS rather than SSD.

• When zooming or panning the center view, transformations in the liquify module are ignored. This leads to much improved responsiveness when that module is active.

Other Changes

• Allow using Shift modifier to select only the feather points on blend masks. This is sometime needed when the path point and the feather point are too close to each others.

• Hierarchical presets are now supported for utility modules as well as processing modules.

• Dual demosaicing now works also in tiling mode for possibly better OpenCL performance and smaller CPU memory pressure.

• Added automatic compensation of camera's hidden underexposure for Canon Lighting Optimizer mode, Nikon Active D-Lighting and HLG tone modes, Olympus Gradation mode, Pentax Dynamic Range Expansion mode, and Fujifilm DR200/DR400 modes. This affects both the "exposure" and "denoise (profiled)" modules.

• Add a RGB percent display in the color picker module.

• Allow far smaller crop area to be created (crop up to 99% of the image size).

• Allow the variable $(ROLL.NAME) to have optional levels, $(ROLL.NAME[n]), where 1 <= n <= 5, the levels follow the same rules as film roll, the default value n=1, this keep the previous behavior of $(ROLL.NAME).

• Added optional collection of shortcut assignments using keyboard+mouse combinations to control image processing modules. Install these by clicking on the new "import extras" button on the Shortcuts tab under Preferences.

• Remove the "overwrite" option from the lighttable history stack module. This option is used when pasting history to delete the current history stack before pasting the new one. It is rarely used and was confusing people when working copying/pasting on darkroom from the filmstrip as this option was only visible on lighttable. The option has been moved into the paste parts dialog.

• Added manual chroma subsampling control for AVIF export. Users can now choose between auto, 4:4:4, 4:2:2, and 4:2:0 chroma subsampling modes independently of the quality setting, allowing better optimization of the quality-vs-size tradeoff for AVIF files.

• The processing modules/<focused> shortcuts also work if the quick access panel is "focused", addressing the first 20 sliders or dropdowns.

• If only the first rotor on a midi controller is assigned, the higher numbered ones automatically address increasing elements of the same action or subsequent actions. This allows quick (re) assignment to the <focused> action or to the mimics set up with for example the x-touch Lua script.

• Added the ability to calculate crop factor for Olympus cameras.

• When creating styles with multiple images selected, clicking Cancel button or typing ESC on the style dialog now ends the whole process instead of continuing with the next image.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some issues with the hierarchical styles handling in the styles module.

• Fixed moving additional extra audio or text sidecar files when an image is moved.

• Fixed module based collection restoring. After quitting darktable with a module based collection, the lighttable was empty after restarting it.

• Fixed some reset issues of the export module. The format and storage sections were not reset properly.

• Fixed corruption of sidecars during large imports of images with XMP sidecars.

• Fixed a bug where changing the image scaling in the export module influences the result of a running export job.

• Make sure we always fill the complete main darkroom canvas while zooming at large scales.

• When zoomed to 1600% don't ignore sub-pixel panning/dragging, which made it almost impossible to move around at all.

• Make sure image changed_timestamp is updated when a sidecar file is applied.

• Fixed drag and drop of images on the map gives wrong location assignment on macOS.

• Fixed auto applied presets for sraws and true monochromes.

• Fixed a bug in details threshold mask for monochrome raw files leading to crashes.

• Fixed an issue when positioning the main darkroom windows due to precision in computation. The precision is now to the pixel and avoid a displacement in some cases.

• Fixed issue in darktable-cli that prevented input files from being detected.

• Fixed out of memory issue which could kill Darktable on small systems when processing large images.

• Fixed toast message translation displayed when scrolling over the module's preset buttons.

• Fixed issue in darktable-cli that prevented input files from being detected.

• Fixed an issue with reading TIFF files that (incorrectly) contain metadata specific to the raw files they were made from.

• Fixed an issue where imported styles that didn't have a name could cause darktable to crash when starting.

• Fixed a bug leading to wrong colors in main darkroom window (mostly after using a module picker) due to bad color coeffs in colorin module.

• Fix support for Wayland. The UI is now working as expected and Darktable will handle ICC profile from colord.

• Fixed processing module naming based on the presets when the used preset is renamed or deleted.

• Fixed a bug in darktable-cli where exporting a duplicate version of an image would use the tags attached to the base version instead of the tags attached to it.

• Fixed a bug in darktable-cli where synonyms for tags attached to an image were ignored when exporting it.

• Fixed auto-applied user's presets when Ctrl+click on a processing module after restarting Dartkable.

• Fixed a bug where adding an image to a group in lighttable could merge multiple group together.

• Fixed a print issue which is probably happening only on macOS. When printing in landscape mode, the rotation of the picture is not done on the printer. So only a part of the image is printed at the bottom of the page. This issue is not fully understood at this stage and has only been reported twice. If you encounter this issue then you can set the following variable in your darktablerc to force the landscape CUPS option to be generated:

  plugins/print/cups/force_landscape=TRUE

• Fixed possible display of double thumbs cursor on filmstrip when in darkroom. Also the thumbs background could look as selected on multiple pictures.

• Fixed darkroom processing after changing any of the colour profiles.

• For module toggle shortcuts (like enable, show and focus) the "on" and "off" effects are now respected (they dont simply always toggle anymore, like they did before).

• Fix too strict restriction for filename length in watermark module.

Lua

API Version

• API version is now 9.6.0

New Features

• Added darktable.query_event() to check if an event is registered.

• Added collection-changed event that fires when the collection changes.

• Added darktable.configuration.share_dir and darktable.configuration.data_dir to expose the darktable data and share directories.

Bug Fixes

• Check added to ensure view has changed before processing GUI events preventing hang on start.

• return a nil value instead of throwing a Lua error if the indexed element of the following Lua tables does not exist or if the table is empty:

  • dt_lua_tag_t.#

  • dt_lua_film_t.#

  • dt_style_t.#

  • darktable.films.#

  • darktable.styles.#

  • darktable.database.#

  • darktable.collection.#

• Ensure darktable.database.get_image() returns a nil, in all conditions, for an image that doesn't exist.

• Ensure translations are displayed in UTF-8 under Windows

Add action support for Lua

Other Lua changes

• N/A

Notes

• When exporting to AVIF, EXR, JPEG XL, or XCF, selecting specific metadata (e.g. geo-tag or creator) is not currently possible. For AVIF, EXR, JPEG XL, and XCF formats, darktable will not include any metadata fields unless the user selects all of the checkboxes in the export module's preference options.

• Starting with release 5.4, Intel Macs and macOS versions older than 14.0 are no longer supported.

Changed Dependencies

Mandatory

• N/A

Optional

• N/A

RawSpeed changes

• Canon EOS 2000D/1500D/Rebel T7/Kiss X90 color matrix was updated.
• Nikon Z 7 color matrix was updated.
• Nikon Z5_2 color matrix was updated.
• Sony ILCE-1M2 color matrix was updated.

Camera support, compared to 5.2

Base Support

• Canon EOS R1 (requires LibRaw 0.22-PreRC1 and later)
• Canon EOS R5 Mark II (requires LibRaw 0.22-PreRC1 and later)
• Canon PowerShot D10 (DNG)
• Canon PowerShot S100V
• Canon PowerShot S2 IS (DNG)
• Fujifilm FinePix HS33EXR
• Fujifilm X-E5 (compressed)
• Kodak DCS Pro SLR/c
• Kodak P712
• Leica D-Lux 8
• Leica M EV1 (DNG)
• Leica Q3 Monochrom (DNG)
• Leica X-E (Typ 102) (DNG)
• Nikon Z fc (14bit-uncompressed, 12bit-uncompressed)
• OM System OM-5 Mark II
• Olympus SP550UZ
• Olympus SP565UZ
• Panasonic DC-S1M2 (3:2)
• Panasonic DC-S1M2ES (3:2)
• Ricoh GR IV (DNG)
• Ricoh GX200 (DNG)
• Sony DSC-RX1RM3
• Sony ZV-1M2

White Balance Presets

• Canon EOS R5 Mark II
• Nikon D2H
• Nikon Z5_2

Noise Profiles

• Canon EOS R1
• Canon EOS R5 Mark II
• Fujifilm X-E5
• Fujifilm X-M5
• Nikon Z fc
• Sony ILCA-99M2

Missing Compression Mode Support

• Apple ProRAW DNGs
• CinemaDNG lossless (Blackmagic, some DJI, etc.) and lossy (Blackmagic)
• DNG 1.7 using JPEG XL (Adobe enhanced, Samsung Expert RAW)
• Fujifilm lossy RAFs
• Nikon high efficiency NEFs
• Phase One other than IIQ L
• Sony ARW 4.0/5.0 downsized lossless ("M" for full-frame, "S" for full-frame & APS-C) and ARW 6.0 lossy

Suspended Support

Support for the following cameras is suspended because no samples are available on https://raw.pixls.us:

• Creo/Leaf Aptus 22(LF3779)/Hasselblad H1
• Fujifilm IS-1
• Kodak EasyShare Z980
• Leaf Aptus-II 5(LI300059)/Mamiya 645 AFD
• Leaf Credo 60
• Leaf Credo 80
• Olympus SP320
• Phase One IQ250
• ST Micro STV680

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