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.