Getting ready for version 0.2.8

The past few months have been mostly devoted bug-hunting and general stability improvements, as well as some nice improvements here and there. The code is now basically ready for a new official release, so it is a good time to summarise the recent developments.

Pre-compiled packages are provided for Linux, OSX and Windows. In the Linux case, the package is distributed in the form of an AppImage that can be run on virtually any recent Linux distribution, without the need of installing extra dependencies.
The links will be updated in case new the packages get published.

Please help testing the code and give your feedback! If no major problem with the current code is reported, it will be used as the basis for the next v0.2.8 release.


Here is a short look at the major improvements implemented in the current development code:

* New user interface

The user interface has been significantly modified and (hopefully) improved since version 0.2.7. Here is a screenshot of the new UI layout:

* Improved Crop Tool

The crop tool has also been improved, and it is now possible to move any side or corner of the crop area, as well as to click-and-drag inside the crop are in order to move it around:

* Optical Corrections

Lens corrections based on LensFun have also been greatly improved. The lens corrections are now directly included in the RAW processing module, in addition of being available in a separate module.
The application of lens corrections directly as part of the RAW processing step has some important advantages, in particular the fact that the vignetting correction gets applied to the linear RGB values in the camera colorspace, exactly like a global exposure correction.

* Layers Copy/Cut/Paste/Delete/Duplicate Commands

The operations on layers have been simplified by adding common commands to copy/cut/paste/delete/duplicate layers, accessible from a contextual menu in the layers tree as well as from keyboard shortcuts.

* The New GIMP Plug-in

The GIMP plug-in has been also completely re-written. The plug-in itself is now just a mere wrapper that calls the standard photoflow executable with special parameters. You can read more about the new GIMP plug-in here and here.