vkdt: darktable which sucks less

this is an experimental complete rewrite of darktable, at this point with a reduced feature set. vkdt is designed with high performance in mind. there are already some new features, too: support for animations, raw video, and heavy lifting algorithms like image alignment and better highlight inpainting. this is made possible by faster processing, allowing more complex operations.

the processing pipeline has been rewritten as a generic node graph (DAG) which supports multiple inputs and multiple outputs. all processing is done in glsl shaders/vulkan. this facilitates potentially heavy duty computational photography tasks, for instance aligning multiple raw files and merging them before further processing, as well as outputting intermediate results for debugging. the gui profits from this scheme as well and can display textures while they are still on GPU and output the data to multiple targets, such as the main view and histograms.

features

• set of essential image operation modules
• very fast GPU only processing
• general DAG of processing operations, featuring multiple inputs and outputs and feedback connectors for animation/iteration
• full window colour management
• noise profiling
• minimally invasive image database
• command line utility
• real time magic lantern raw video (mlv) processing
• 10-bit display output
• gamepad input inherited from imgui
• automatic parameter optimisation, for instance to fit vignetting
• heavy handed processing at almost realistic speeds

packages

there are up-to-date packages (deb/rpm/pkgbuild) in the

opensuse build system

build instructions

you should have checked out this repo recursively. if not, do

  git submodule init
  git submodule update

to grab the dependencies in the ext/ folder. you should then be able to simply run 'make' from the bin/ folder. for debug builds (which enable the vulkan validation layers, so you need to have them installed), try

  cd bin/
  make debug -j12

simply run make without the debug for a release build. make sanitize is supported to switch on the address sanitizer. changes to the compile time configuration as well as the compiler toolchain can be set in config.mk. if you don't have that file yet, you can copy it from config.mk.defaults.

running

the binaries are put into the bin/ directory. if you want to run vkdt from anywhere, create a symlink such as /usr/local/bin/vkdt -> ~/vc/vkdt/bin/vkdt.

  cd bin/
  ./vkdt -d all /path/to/your/rawfile.raw

raw files will be assigned the bin/default-darkroom.i-raw processing graph. if you run the command line interface vkdt-cli, it will replace all display nodes by export nodes. there are also a few example config files in bin/examples/. note that you have to edit the filename in the example cfg to point to a file that actually exists on your system.

licence

our code is licenced under the 2-clause bsd licence (if not clearly marked otherwise in the respective source files). there are parts from other libraries that are licenced differently. in particular:

rawspeed: LGPLv2 imgui: MIT

and we may link to some others, too.

dependencies

• vulkan, glslangValidator (libvulkan-dev, glslang-tools, or use the sdk)
• glfw (libglfw3-dev and libglfw3, only use libglfw3-wayland if you're on wayland)
• submodule imgui
• submodule rawspeed (depends on pugixml, stdc++, zlib, jpeg, libomp)
• libjpeg
• build: make, pkg-config, clang, rsync, sed
• build rawspeed: cmake, libomp-dev

optional (configure in bin/config.mk):

• freetype (libfreetype-dev libpng16-16) for nicer font rendering
• exiv2 (libexiv2-dev) for raw metadata loading to assign noise profiles
• asound (libasound2) for audio support in mlv raw video
• ffmpeg (libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev) for the video input module i-vid

you can also build without rawspeed if that is useful for you.

faq

• does it work with wayland vkdt has been confirmed to run on wayland, using amd hardware. there are a few known quirks, such as fullscreen mode (f11) does not work and there were refresh issues when window focus is lost.

• can i run my super long running kernel without timeout?
  if you're using your only gpu in the system, you'll need to run without xorg, straight from a tty console. this means you'll only be able to use the command line interface vkdt-cli. we force a timeout, too, but it's something like 16 minutes. let us know if you run into this..

• how do i build a binary package?
  you mostly need the bin/ directory for this. after running make inside bin/, a straight copy of bin/ to say /opt/vkdt/ would work (you can put a symlink to the binaries vkdt and vkdt-cli in /usr/bin). the shader sources (*.{glsl,comp,vert,geom,frag,tese,tesc}) as well as the examples/ and various test/ directories are optional and do not have to be copied. to build for generic instruction sets, be sure to edit config.mk, especially set OPT_CFLAGS= to -march=generic and whatever you require. to convince rawspeed to do the same, set RAWSPEED_PACKAGE_BUILD=1.