delaboratory is a Free Software color correction utility, it allows you to modify color/contrast of your photo in a creative way - by peforming non-destructive operations in different colorspaces with floating-point precision per channel.

WARNING delaboratory uses lots of memory. This is usually not a problem, but when I tried 36 megapixel photo I hit 2GB memory limit during final image generation. If you need to process huge files - use 64-bit build.

2012.02.23 - colorspaces

If you want to explore full potential of delaboratory - please try different ColorSpaces

2012.02.20 - Kodak ProPhoto

ProPhoto colorspace is now supported (display and output is still sRGB only), direct conversion to/from LAB is available

2012.02.18 - basic RAW support

Basic RAW support has been checked in into SVN.

It works by calling dcraw executable, so no additional library is used. It means that delaboratory is still camera independent, for new camera support you will need to update only dcraw.

There are 5 colorspaces available in dcraw: sRGB, Adobe, Wide, ProPhoto and XYZ.

delaboratory now calls dcraw with ProPhoto output, then it loads it and converts into LAB.

It means that before you convert your photo into RGB you can take care about all the details in highlights and shadows inside LAB colorspace, which is wider than sRGB.

Name of the RGB colorspace has been changed into sRGB to make everything clear.

We were able to make it work also on Windows, after few hours of testing new code with Partha we found the problem and now it's solved :)

Of course this is just a start. Expect dcraw settings (like VNG/PPG/AHD), some brightness/contrast/saturation sliders and support for crop.

2012.02.12 - delaboratory 0.6 has been released

This is another major project milestone.

Multithreading support was biggest task this time. We released 4 beta versions to fix all problems with it - let's hope it's also stable on your system.

There are new action layer types:

• dodge / burn - the way to "add depth" on your photo, I am very happy with this tool, please experiment in RGB but also in other color spaces with it
• shadows / highlights - this is a tool to bring back some details in shadow and highlight areas of your photo
• high pass - you can use it for sharpen (blend mode overlay) but there are also more interesting uses - you can find them with google
• vignette - you can define its center, its radius and its darkness and light levels, primary usage is of course in the RGB but if you use it on separate channel you can produce interesting color effects (try A or B in LAB)

There is now also easy way to produce sepia or similar images. Just convert to BW and then convert to LCH or HSV or HSL. With sliders (and presets) you can choose color.

As you can see there are also two options to set.

• real time - enabled by default, means that each change is visible on image immediately, so when you move slider the image will be constantly updated, which may be slow on some systems, so you can disable it in this case
• auto UI - disabled by default, means that the layer setup will open automagically when you add new layer, so for instance if you click curves you will see a curves editor

GUI has been improved again. For instance samplers are moved back to main window - to notebook.

And of course lots of bugs have been fixed.

Windows builds are provided by Partha (http://partha.com/), who also helped a lot with debugging Windows version. Also big thanks to all beta testers!

Have fun!

delaboratory 0.6 features:

• floating point precision (32 bits per channel)
• native support for 8 color spaces (RGB, BW, CMYK, CMY, LAB, LCH, HSL, HSV)
• fully non-destructive editing (adjustement layers)
• input/output - 16-bit TIFF (or 8-bit JPEG)
• curves
• channel mixer
• advanced blending (normal, multiply, screen, overlay, overlay inv, add, grain extract, grain merge, sub, difference, darken, lighten, dodge, burn) with masks
• apply luminance / apply color in RGB colorspace
• gaussian, surface and box blur
• unsharp mask
• high pass
• dodge / burn (with sliders, no painting)
• shadows / highlights
• vignette
• color samplers, histograms
• Free Software (GPLv3)
• KISS (keep it simple) design
• small (120KB source code archive)

Roadmap for near future:

• basic RAW support via dcraw executable (this is not the way you know from raw decoders, it's less interactive, but I think it will be enough), the reason I want to add basic RAW support is to make editing simpler and faster, this is a blocking issue for many people, of course for serious RAW conversion you should still use full feature RAW processor like rawtherapee
• zoom support (it was already implemented but I removed it because it needs better user interface)
• user configuration (background colors, grid resolution, etc) stored in a file
• integration with G'MIC (this is a big task)
• more action layer types (equalizer, shift, etc)
• multiple source images and generated textures (eg. film grain)

Delaboratory does not support color profiles. If you feel your style of photography is limited when using 16-bit sRGB output - delaboratory is not application for you. (It may change in the distant future but this is totally low priority feature) Please note that photos you watch in your browser on websites like 1x.com or deviantart.com are just 8-bit JPEGs.

delaboratory 0.5 GUI presentation:

(this is first video I have ever made, I used xvidcap and openshot, I am not really happy with the result, but it's a good start)

much better presentation video made by Alexandre Prokoudine from libregraphicsworld.org: http://vimeo.com/31072366

article: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/photo-editor-delaboratory-0-5-gets-an-updated-ui

for new users:

Installation - how to install it (Windows, Debian/Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, source)

Workflow -

Keyboard - keys used in delaboratory

Layers - description of layer types

FAQ - RAW support, painting, color profiles, plugins, 32-bit, multithreading, etc

Benchmarks - test your speed

Philosophy - design philosophy

Background - state of Free Software photography support, why I started delaboratory

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