RAWTHERAPEE 5.5 RELEASE NOTES

This is RawTherapee 5.5, released on 2018-12-17.

Start by reading the "Getting Started" article on RawPedia:
http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/



NEWS RELEVANT TO PHOTOGRAPHERS

RawTherapee supports most raw formats, including Pentax and Sony Pixel Shift, Canon Dual-Pixel, and those from Foveon and X-Trans sensors.
If you're wondering whether it supports your camera's raw format, first download RawTherapee and try for yourself. If a raw format is not supported it will either not open, or the preview in the Editor tab will appear black, white, or have a strong color cast - usually magenta. In that case, read the "Adding Support for New Raw Formats" RawPedia article.

In order to use RawTherapee efficiently you should know that:
- You can scroll all panels using the mouse scroll-wheel.
- You can right-click on a tool's name to automatically expand it while collapsing all others.
- To change slider values or drop-down list items with the mouse scroll-wheel, hold the Shift key. This is so that you can safely scroll the panels without accidentally changing a slider or other tool setting.
- All curves support the Shift and Ctrl keys while dragging a point. Shift+drag makes the point snap to a meaningful axis (top, bottom, diagonal, other), while Ctrl+drag makes your mouse movement super-fine for precise point positioning.
- There are many keyboard shortcuts which make working with RawTherapee much faster and give you greater control. Make sure you familiarize yourself with them on RawPedia's "Keyboard Shortcuts" page!

New features since 5.4:
- Filter to remove striping artifacts caused by Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF) as seen in Sony cameras, and to remove banding artifacts apparently caused by Nikon's too-aggressive in-camera PDAF correction. These are available for any camera which has a PDAF entry in camconst.json, currently:
    - Nikon Z 6
    - Nikon Z 7
    - Sony DSC-RX1RM2
    - Sony ILCE-6000
    - Sony ILCE-6300
    - Sony ILCE-6500
    - Sony ILCE-7M3
    - Sony ILCE-7RM2
    - Sony ILCE-7RM3
    - Sony ILCE-9
- Out-of-gamut warning compatible with ICC v2 and v4 profiles.
- Ability to specify custom working color spaces through workingspaces.json file.
- Unbounded processing - allows you to decide whether out-of-gamut colors should get clipped.
- Improved support for Canon mRaw format variants.
- New Shadows/Highlights tool (replaced previous one).
- Contrast threshold mask which divides an image into areas of high and low detail, allowing the effect of certain tools to be focused where it matters most and to mitigate the effect on areas where it would be undesirable, for example having the Sharpening tool affect only the in-focus subject without affecting the out-of-focus background. Available for:
    - Sharpening
    - Post-Resize Sharpening
    - Microcontrast
    - Demosaicing
- Dual-demosaic algorithms, making use of the new contrast threshold mask, allowing one to use a combination of demosaicing algorithms where one is best for details and the other best for plain areas.
- New color toning methods:
    - Grid, allowing you to separately tone the shadows and highlights using two points on a simple color grid.
    - Regions, allowing you to tone based on any number of masks. Supports functions from the American Society of Cinematographers Color Decision List (ASC CDL).
- Resizable main histogram with scaling modes:
    - Linear
    - Log
    - Log-log
- Support for Blackmagic and Canon Magic Lantern lj92 encoded files.
- Allows you to specify how many border rows/columns to discard during demosaicing - those who shoot raw video at a standard resolution such as 1920x1080 will appreciate being able to preserve the dimensions.
- New Soft Light tool which enhances contrast and saturation by emulating the effect of blending an image with a copy of itself in "soft light" blending mode in GIMP.
- New Haze Removal tool to reduce the effects of haze or fog.
- The Resize tool allows you to specify whether you want it to upscale or only downscale.
- New icon and cursor theme.
- ICC profile generator.
- The bundled profiles have been re-generated, and now include ICC v2 and v4 variants.
- If your screen's resolution is such that not all icons fit in a toolbar, you can now scroll the toolbar using the mouse scroll-wheel.
- New "Flexible" tone curve type. A characteristic of the cubic spline curve (renamed from "Custom" to "Standard") is that editing one node could have a huge impact on what happens to the curve in relation to the other nodes. The new "Flexible" centripetal Catmull–Rom spline curve allows you to make adjustments to any part of the curve with little impact on the other parts.
- Allow saving both floating-point and integer type files at both 16-bit and 32-bit precision from RawTherapee GUI and CLI.
- Improves lensfun chromatic aberration correction.
- The raw chromatic aberration correction tool can now run in several iterations, and gained a feature to avoid introducing a color shift which could result from correcting chromatic aberration before demosaicing.
- Certain sliders now operate on a logarithmic scale, allowing for a meaningful response over large ranges.
- Dedicated "Reset" button in Crop tool.
- Support for new cameras, and new input color profiles.
- Speed enhancements and bug fixes, for a total of over 1300 commits.

RawTherapee and other open-source projects require access to sample raw files from various camera makes and models in order to support those raw formats correctly.
You can help by submitting raw files to RPU:
https://raw.pixls.us/



NEWS RELEVANT TO PACKAGE MAINTAINERS

In general:
- To get the source code, either clone from git or use the tarball from http://rawtherapee.com/shared/source/ . Do not use the auto-generated GitHub release tarballs.
- Requires GTK+ version >=3.16, though >=3.22.24 is recommended.
- RawTherapee 5 requires GCC-4.9 or higher, or Clang.
- Do not use -ffast-math, it will not make RawTherapee faster but will introduce artifacts.
- Use -O3, it will make RawTherapee faster with no known side-effects.
- For stable releases use -DCACHE_NAME_SUFFIX=""
- For development builds and release-candidates use -DCACHE_NAME_SUFFIX="5-dev"

Changes since 5.4:
- Requires libtiff >= 4.0.4.
- Requires CMake >= 2.8.8.
- Optional codesigning commands have been added to the CMakeLists.txt and macosx_bundle.sh scripts. If you wish to codesign the built packages (.app and .dmg), add your details to your CMake command flags:
    -DCODESIGNID:STRING="Developer ID Application: Firstname Lastname (xxx)"



NEWS RELEVANT TO DEVELOPERS

See CONTRIBUTING.md



DOCUMENTATION

http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/
http://rawtherapee.com/blog/documentation



REPORTING BUGS

If you found a problem, don't keep it to yourself. Read the "How to write useful bug reports" article to get the problem fixed:
http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/How_to_write_useful_bug_reports



FORUM

RawTherapee shares a forum with users and developers of other Free/Libre/Open Source Software:
https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/rawtherapee



LIVE CHAT WITH USERS AND DEVELOPERS

Network: freenode
Server: chat.freenode.net
Channel: #rawtherapee

You can use freenode webchat to communicate without installing anything:
http://webchat.freenode.net/?randomnick=1&channels=rawtherapee&prompt=1
More information here: http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/IRC



SOCIAL NETWORKS

Google+
https://plus.google.com/+RawTherapee



REVISION HISTORY

The complete changelog is available at:
https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/commits/
