digiKam 5.2.0 is published…

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After a second release 5.1.0 published one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.2.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces a new bugs triage and some fixes following new feedback from end-users.

This release introduce also a new red eyes tool which automate the red-eyes effect reduction process. Faces detection is processed on whole image and a new algorithm written by a Google Summer of Code 2016 student named Omar Amin is dedicated to recognize shapes and try to found eyes with direct flash reflection on retina.

This new tool is available in Image Editor and also in Batch Queue Manager to be able to process a set of photos at the same time. The algorithm have been very optimized for speed efficiency and for small memory fingerprint. End user can adjust just a single parameter about the reducing level of retina red color to the average of blue and green channels. The default threshold have been tested successfully with a trial and error basis from a large data-set of images. So typically, no user interaction are need with this new version of this tool compared to older one, where no red eyes detection was performed, and a lots of manual settings was required to process this kind of correction.

With the help of Wolfgang Scheffner, we also start to update the digiKam and Showfoto handbooks. Documents have not been updated since many years. We start to introduce description of 5.x features, but not all the documentation is yet done and re-writing still under progress. This take a while as documentation is huge. All help is welcome to contribute to this project, by writing sections, proof-reading, translating, etc...

For further information, take a look into the list of more than 42 files currently closed in Bugzilla.

digiKam software collection source code tarball, OSX (>= 10.8) package, and Windows 32/64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository

Happy digiKaming!