New PhotoFlow version 0.2.1 released

The next PhotoFlow version 0.2.1 is out!
The source code is available from the github repository, while OSX and Windows installers will be provided very soon through the same link.
For Ubuntu users, an updated package will most likely be available in the next few days as well.

PhotoFlow version 0.2.1 fixes a quite large number of issues related with the new GUI layout.
However, a new release would be rather boring without new features! So there is a bunch of cool new things and improvements that have been added in this release.




The main ones are:

1. The "Volume" tool has been renamed to "Local contrast" and acquires an additional smoothing filter, the bilateral blur. The "Local contrast" filter follows the ideas outlined by trick David in this blog post. Shortly speaking, it takes an image and subtracts from it a smoothed version, thus extracting only the high-frequency component. This is then added back to the original image to enhance the higher frequencies and therefore increase the local contrast. Optionally the effect can be restricted to a given tonal range (mid-tones by default) using a five-sliders equalizer. The final result is greatly influenced by the choice of the smoothing filter: the default gaussian shooting creates a quite strong effect with visible halos, while the bilateral smoothing produces a more subtle effect with almost invisible halos.

2. The controls widget of the Gradient tool now includes a curve adjustment, which allows to easily create arbitrary colored and/or non-linear gradients starting from a linear grayscale one. This is equivalent to adding a curves adjustment above the gradient, but more practical.

3. The scale/rotate tool now allows for a mouse-assisted adjustment of the rotation angle as well as an automatic cropping of the rotated image. Read more about this new features here.

4. A bug affecting the G'MIC filters under OSX has been solved, so that now all filters are fully functional on all platforms. G'MIC has also been updated to version 1.6.5.2.

5. A progress indicator has appeared at the bottom of the preview area, which shows the current status of the processing engine. The possible configurations are:

• "ready" + green indicator: the preview area is up-to-date and the processing engine is idle
• "processing" + red indicator: the preview area is being updated
• "caching" + orange indicator: the preview area is up-to-date but the processing engine is performing some background caching. In this case, further updates of the preview area might be slower than usual
• "exporting" + red indicator: the processing engine is busy exporting the current image

6. Two buttons have been added at the bottom of the preview area, that allow to toggle on/off the shadows/highlights clipping warning in preview area. When on, clipped highlights will be shown in red, and clipped shadows in light blue:

The complete changelog for version 0.2.1 can be found here.