Your digital darkroom

Ansel is an open-source photo-editing software for digital artists, designed to help you achieve your own interpretation of raw digital photographs.

Ansel screenshot

It is grounded in the legacy of Ansel Adams, pianist and photographer, who pushed darkroom craftsmanship like never before to serve his photographic vision.

The negative is the score, and the print is the performance.

Ansel Adams

Install

Linux

Distribution-agnostic executable

Download ansel.appimage
Windows

Windows 10 & 11 installer

Download ansel.exe
Build from source

Best performance for your hardware

Building instructions

Minimal recommended configuration :
CPU Intel i5 (4 cores) / 8 GB RAM / GPU Nvidia GTX 850.

The links above always point to the latest nightly build of the “fairly stable” branch. If you want a particular version or need to roll back, you can find all intermediate versions on Github.

Why Ansel ?

Many solutions already exist to produce ready-to-consume photographs for masses, from smartphones filters to out-of-cameras JPEGs, followed recently by AI-driven automagic applying caricatural dramatic toy filters. These make photography easier than ever, but are the produced images really your images and, in any case, the images you expected ?

Pressing the camera shutter merely started a process ending when the on-screen picture looks like the one you had in mind. Ansel proposes to put the artists back at the center of the creative process and enables them with an interface to manipulate images with precision and nuance, using state-of-the-art color science and independent color controls.

Ansel lets you interpret your raw photographs much like a music instrument, when most software tries to automatically play the score for you, but mechanically and soullessly.

What can Ansel for you ?

Ansel allows you to manage your collections of pictures, to edit your raw digital photographs and film scans non-destructively and to export the result to common file formats. It stores your editing histories as text and lets you go back in time at any editing step you like, anytime.

Color work

Ansel ships a recent color science, compatible with HDR : the chromatic adaptation CIE CAT 2016, the HDR color space JzAzBz (2017) and the perceptual color space darktable UCS 2021, developed specifically to manipulate color saturation without the fluorescent effect.

Color calibration
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Before Before

Fix white balance and get high-fidelity colors in just a few clicks, by calibrating colors with a Color Checker directly in the darkroom.

Color-grading
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Give ambiance and character to your pictures by polishing their color palette with nuanced and fine-grained controls, in RGB, Ych or HSB color spaces, for creative and corrective purposes.

Color matching
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Force the chromatic adaptation such that any selected object matches a predetermined color, input from CIE Lab coordinates (for logos and brand colors), or by sampling the color of the same object in another shot, as to even the color rendition over the series.

Hue qualifying and keying
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Use the hue, chroma and lightness qualifiers to quickly define masks and apply selective effects. Combine parametric masks with drawn masks and boolean operations. Refine and feather the edges of masks by blurring or using clever edges detection.

Tonal work

The tonal working methods are designed to manipulate luminance without affecting hue nor saturation, in order to respect the color work, done apart.

HDR tone mapping
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Recover deep shadows and compress the dynamic range while retaining original saturation and hue, with gamut mapping to ensure the colors fit in the output color space. (Photo : Andreas Schneider)

Zone-system editing
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Balance densities based on exposure zones, by preserving local contrast thanks to an edge detection algorithm, and select the exposure zones to affect directly from the picture, through the interactive cursor. (Photo : Andreas Schneider)

Image reconstruction

Lens deblurring
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Unleash the power of multiscale, gradient-based machine learning to rejuvenate old lenses, recover focusing mistakes or add emphasis on your subject, but without the typical edge artifacts, over-sharpening oddities or added noise.

Dehazing
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Restore some depth in foggy and hazy shots by bringing back textures and saturation in colors, without overaccentuating already sharp details.

Denoising
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Remove chromatic noise, soften and blend lumaninance noise.

Highlights reconstruction
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Salvage both color and texture in highlights, recover blown areas by propagating gradients while the gamut-mapping watches your back to ensure colorful highlights can still be printed at their proper hue. You don’t have to bleach highlights to hide problems anymore.

Specialized features

Automatic perspective correction
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Let the machine learning detect automatically vertical and horizontal lines and compute the best geometric correction to rotate, straighten and crop the picture, optionnaly taking into account the kind of lens used.

Censoring
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Anonymize people, license plates, etc. and play with use conditions of socially prude network without defiling your pictures too much.

Compatibility

Edits

Ansel is based on darktable 4.0 and is fully compatible with darktable 2.x up to 4.0 database and XMP files. Coming from darktable ?

Find out what is changed
Cameras

Ansel uses Rawspeed and Libraw to decode raw photographs. New cameras may need up to 24 months to be fully supported after their commercial release.

Supported cameras
Languages

The software is integrally translated in English, French and simplified Chinese. Partial translations are available in German, Spanish, Portugese, Ukranian, etc.

Improve translations

Darktable, but better

Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if its developers were not so busy turning it into an usability nightmare. Ansel is a Darktable 4.0 variant where 30.000 lines of poorly-written code and half-broken features have been removed, and 11.000 lines rewritten : it runs faster, smoother, uses less power and requires less configuration. Enjoy an app focusing on getting work done and stability.

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Ansel