delaboratory is an unique image postprocessing application

long Summary - Introduction and clarification of a few myths.

delaboratory 0.7 is the latest stable version

next version 0.8 will be much more friendly for casual user, there will be buttons like "exposure", "white balance", "CMYK levels", "RGB levels", "local contrast", different version of "sharpen", and you won't need to click any conversions at all, stuff like "saturation curve" or "luminance curve" will be in "advanced tab" and an old user interface (curves, mixer, apply image, conversion) will be still available in "expert tab", I am working hard on making "basic inteface" powerful enough so there will be no need to touch "expert tab" at all during normal postprocessing, only when experimenting

more details about new interface design here: operations

features to implement after 0.8:

• integration with G'MIC
• local changes (painting on mask)
• GTK+ (and maybe QT) version
• command line version (for batch processing)

Features of delaboratory 0.7 Features

in short:

• floating point precision
• native support for multiple colorspaces
• adjustment layers
• realtime preview
• curves
• channel mixer
• basic settings
• equalizer
• apply image
• vignette
• dodge/burn
• shadows/highlights
• unsharp mask
• high pass
• blur
• samplers
• color matrix
• RAW files, 16-bit TIFFs, JPGs

limitations:

• delaboratory doesn't support any local modifications, like paiting, clone tool, healing tool or true dodge/burn, it can change in the future (that's why there is a button "send to Gimp", just make sure you will set all your color/contrasts in the delaboratory so in Gimp you will only perform simple final operations because it's 8-bit color depth)

• delaboratory doesn't support color profiles at all, RAWs are loaded in ProPhoto RGB, but display works in sRGB and output will be sRGB, so if your style of photography requires wider colorspace than sRGB then delaboratory is not a tool for you

why use delaboratory?

• you don't have to worry about quality loss during your postprocessing, it's perfectly fine to use for instance 10 different curves in different colorspaces, move between RGB, LAB and CMYK - in Gimp even one curve destroys the quality, because it's 8-bit color depth, in most RAW editors I've seen you can use 16-bit or 32-bit curve but only once, users of commercial software are afraid of converting between RGB/CMYK/LAB because they believe it means quality loss, that's why delaboratory uses 32-bit and adjustement layers

• it's an utility made for experiments, to play with colors, to learn new techniques, if you multiply some simple actions (curves, mixer, vignette, etc) by number of colorspaces by number of blend modes, you will realize how many ways you can go, this is totally different approach than in RAW editors, when you can only set this and that

• it's free and it will be free forever, it compiles and works on multiple operating systems, I use it on Linux, many people uses it on Windows, and now we have also Mac build

code on SVN is unstable development version, you should use it only for test purposes

Development - development news

Please report all your problems here: http://code.google.com/p/delaboratory/issues/list