Alexey Tutubalin released new version of LibRaw — a library that is used by various open source and proprietary photography tools for unpacking Raw images.

The new version features two addtional demosaic packs:

• GPL2-licensed: AFD, LMMSE, VCD, Modified AHD and AHD+VCD interpolations. Additional median filters from 'Modified DCRAW' package. Foveon support also included in this pack.
• GPL3-licensed: AMaZE interpolation and chromatic aberrations correction from RawTherapee.

DCB interpolation and FBDD denoising have been integrated into main LibRaw. The library now also supports LCMS 2.x and uses ./configure (GNU autotools) for configuring build. Apart from that the following bugs have been fixed:

• Fix in green_matching code to support nonstandard Bayer pattern.
• Fixed bug in add_masked_borders_to_bitmap() call for cameras with masked border composed of odd number of pixels.

One thing worth noting is that while e.g. digiKam keeps using LibRaw, darktable is moving away from it: the code in Git master now relies on Rawspeed, a library developed by Rawstudio team, which brings significant speed-ups (<100ms for opening an image on CPU and <10ms on GPU). LibRaw is still used as fallback for cases when Rawspeed isn't able to handle images. Demoisaicing is now implemented as darktable's native plug-in, so is chromatic aberrations fix for which code was borrowed from AMaZe demosaicing method.

You can download source code and builds.

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
• digiKam 2.1.0 released with panorama stitcher