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.
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.
Install
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.
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.
Image reconstruction
Highlights reconstruction
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
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 ?
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.
Languages
The software is integrally translated in English, French and simplified Chinese. Partial translations are available in German, Spanish, Portugese, Ukranian, etc.
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.
A software by Aurélien Pierre
On the following picture, I made the styling, the make-up, the lighting, the shot, the editing, the retouching, the software color filters, the documentation to use them, the website to talk about them in 2 languages, and even the colorspace used for saturation adjustment. You will find very few people with this kind of full-stack understanding of light and color able to also write efficient computer programs and read academic research papers on applied mathematics. Yet, you will find a lot of image editing applications and a lot of guys trying…
I have given 4 years of my life to the Darktable project, only to see it destroyed by clueless geeks playing code stashing on their spare time, everyone pushing his own agenda with no sense of design, in a project where nobody is responsible for anything and where we work too fast on everything at the same time. Ansel development is driven by results and achieved by proper color science throughout the pixel pipeline. Things are done at a pace that ensures the quality of the code. The design is based on the user feedback I gathered from giving individual editing/retouching lessons with Darktable over the past 3 years, and on the 2 user surveys I ran in 2020 and 2022. The software is only a mean to an end and it infuriates me when it gets in the way of creativity and productivity. Having one designer leading the project and managing priorities should hopefully prevent that.
Developing it still takes an average of 45 h/week for not even minimal wage, and if you think open-source imaging options need to be made better, well it will not happen by itself (and don’t expect the guys who created the problems to be the ones fixing them).
Source code
Ansel software and documentation are released under the GNU/GPL v3 license and versionned with Git. The website is copyrighted but still publicly visible. The work repositories are hosted on Github and are mirrored on Gitlab for backup.