New version of darktable, next closest thing to Lightroom on Linux, is out with new major features.

The list of changes looks like this:

• XMP is now used for storing metadata;
• darkroom plug-ins are now grouped into basic, color, correct and effect plug-ins;
• four new darkroom plug-ins: zone system, relight, graduated neutral density filter, watermark;
• you can now press Backspace to see the whole cropped image and cropping frame on top of it, if you think you cropped out too much;
• first rough version of Preferences dialog is available now;
• if you missed some specific camera settings in tethering mode, you can now add custom ones;
• first version of user manual is available now;
• directories can be recursively imported as separate film rolls.

Note that only English user manual is automatically built by default (some translations are available), and you have to feed --enable-docs to ./configure. You will also need xsltproc (usually available by default on Linux) and FOP (needs installing) to have the manual built.

There are several ways to get darktable installed on your system:

• build from source code;
• get from Ubuntu PPA with a stable version;
• get from Ubuntu PPA with nightly builds;
• get from Fedora 13 or 14 repository (not updated yet).

More on this topic:

• Few notes on RawTherapee 3.0
• Split toning with GIMP and darktable
• Luminance HDR 2.0.0 review
• Photo editor delaboratory 0.4 released
• First darktable e-book released