14 DAY TRIAL // By the looks of it, this year, KDE users will have a bunch of awesome and powerful tools, all of them ported to the next-generation Qt 5 UI toolkit, and this is also the case of the famous digiKam image editor.
digiKam is an open-source, cross-platform and free image editor software piece, as well as a versatile image viewer and browser tool that is usually shipped by default with most KDE desktop environments setups on several important Linux kernel-based operating systems.
The project's developers are currently in the process of adding as many new features as possible, as well as fixing bugs and annoyances in the next major version of the software, digiKam 5.0, which is scheduled for an official release sometime in the first week of May 2016.
As for the release schedule, it also seems to us that they are falling behind as the team announced a few hours ago the release and immediate availability for download of the third Beta build for digiKam 5.0, which should have been released two weeks ago.
"digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 5.0.0 beta3. This version is new stage to the long way to stabilize code of Qt5 port of next main digiKam release," reads the announcement. "As usual, with this new release, we have introduced a lots of bug fixes compared to previous one, but not only."
New 3D LUT tool and possible support for Photoshop LUTs
Besides bugfixes, digiKam 5.0 Beta 3 ships with a new tool called 3D LUT (also known as 3D lookup table), which promises to let users apply some very nice color effects to their beautiful photos, such as vintage, high contrast, or over saturated. The tool is implemented in the Image Editor and Batch Queue Manager.
The development cycle of digiKam 5.0 will continue with three more Beta builds, and the next one, digiKam 5.0 Beta 4, is scheduled for Valentine's Day, but considering the fact that Beta 3 was delayed for two weeks, it might be released at the end of the month. The fifth and sixth Betas are coming in March and April.