This release corrects the errors of your lens from measured data, adds three ways to distort the picture directly in it, and lets you select an object, remove it, or work by how far away things are.
What's new
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Lens errors are corrected from measured data. Distortion, the coloured fringes in the corners and the darkening towards the edges. An open collection covering some 1300 lenses comes along, and lens and camera are recognised from the shot data. Where there is no data for your lens, nothing happens to the photo. On by default, adjustable per photo, and it takes a lens you pick by hand when the name in the file does not match.
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Select an object by clicking it. A new mode in the Mask tool: click something and its mask appears - the sky behind branches, a person against a wall of the same colour. Further clicks extend it, Alt takes areas away, and Part, Middle and Whole decide whether you meant the sleeve, the jacket or the person. Two sliders trim the edge.
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Remove something from the picture. Mark it and press Remove object: what was there disappears and the background is continued through the gap, so a horizon keeps running and a wall keeps its line. That is the difference to the healing brush, which copies texture from somewhere else.
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Select by distance, and blur by it. The mask tool gains a Depth mode that picks everything within a range of distance, even where the colours match. And Depth blur takes the blur strength from each point's distance instead of one radius for everything: a light in the background does not fade into a grey patch, it opens into a bright disc that can take the shape of an aperture with five, six or seven blades.
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These three need a model file that does not come with the program. The settings have a Models section that says how big each file is, fetches it when you press the button and checks afterwards that what arrived is what was meant. Nothing is fetched unless you press it, everything runs on your own machine, and where a file is missing the matching controls are simply not there.
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The rotate tool is now Rotate and distort. Perspective straightens the converging verticals of a building - four sliders, or drag the four corners in the photo. Line warp is for edges: lay a line on one and drag it where the edge should be. Grid warp lays a grid of points over the photo for everything a tilt cannot do. The picture follows while you drag, and inserted objects go along without being baked in, so a distorted text can still be typed in. With an object selected, all three distort that object instead of the picture, and the result is there the moment you let go.
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A third way of dealing with noise, in a group of its own. The two existing sliders work at one size, so the large colour blotches of a pushed exposure were out of their reach. The new one takes the picture apart into several sizes and removes what is noise at each of them, touching only the colour and never the brightness.
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Details and effects are two tools now. Details holds what brings more out of the picture - clarity, structure, noise, sharpening, softening and the depth blur - and Effects what is added to it: vignette, grain and frame.
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A background colour for the document. It fills everything that used to stay transparent: the extended canvas, the empty corners left by straightening or distorting, erased areas. Transparent to begin with.
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The comparison is a working tool now. Each half carries its own stars, favourite, Adjust and Delete, and the footer follows the photo you are looking at. Deleting the right photo brings the next one in, deleting the left one moves the right photo over, so a series can be culled in one pass. The round button between the halves - or the space bar - swaps them, the two sides can be unlinked for shots that are not framed alike, and RAW files are developed here rather than shown as the camera's small preview.
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You decide which adjustment groups you see. Twenty-four of them can be switched off, and a tool whose groups are all switched off disappears from the toolbar rather than opening an empty panel. Hiding one only changes the display: your values are kept.
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When something takes a while, you can see it - and you cannot ruin it. A quiet layer over the picture names what is being computed and the sliders are locked while it runs. Before, a slider you moved during a bake took the input and the arriving result overwrote it, which looked exactly like a slider that does nothing.
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The interface speaks Chinese. Simplified Chinese joins German, English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, contributed by amaztony. It can be picked in the settings or comes from a Chinese system language.
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The language is picked from a list, and each language carries its own name - someone looking at an interface they cannot read still finds Deutsch.
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Every package carries its licences. The GPL text and a full third-party notice travel with every build, and for the bundled GPL and LGPL libraries the packages also name the matching source.
Smaller things
- The mask tool has a move mode, masks can be dragged where they lie, and one button converts between a selection and a mask in either direction - the same shape, but a selection limits while a mask grades.
- Masks no longer flicker into marching ants, and clicking a mask layer opens the mask tool with the brush ready instead of the selection tool.
- Esc lets go before it leaves: with a mask, a correction layer or an object selected, the first press deselects and only the next one leaves the editor.
Delremoves the object you have selected, from any tool - before, that key could reach through to deleting the photo itself.- Hold Shift or Ctrl while dragging a crop handle to keep the proportions.
- Guides from the rulers stay where you put them in the picture instead of being thrown away by cropping, rotating or distorting, and they can be dragged outside the picture to mark a distance to the edge.
- The radial mask can be squeezed into an ellipse with the mouse.
- Fitting into the editing area really fits now, also for a RAW file whose full-size development arrives seconds after the small preview.
- Turning the lens distortion on and off is quick now instead of making the raw file develop again from scratch.
- A double-click in the comparison opens that side's photo in the editor.
- The film base eyedropper no longer leaves the next photo un-inverted.
- The mask icon keeps its colour while you work the adjustment sliders, and a distorted object is drawn distorted and in the right place.
- Some groups moved to where they belong: grain under vignette, the lens correction under the tone curve, dust and structure swapped inside details.
- The technology list reads in two columns and no longer leaves out three components that carry their own licence.
- Compare is offered only where it works: exactly two photos selected, and not for Immich photos, which the comparison cannot load yet.
- Work that belongs to the previous photo stays there: switching photos while something was still being computed could leave its message and its result on the new one.
- Texts the program puts together itself stayed German in every other language: dialog subtitles, layer names, the entries of the dropdown lists, context menus and the hint texts on the adjustment panels. They follow the chosen language now, and so does everything that appears only after you open or unfold it.