The digiKam team has just released a new version of digiKam, digiKam 1.2.0. digiKam is an excellent image editor and organizor for KDE SC with a lot of features.

digiKam 1.2.0 comes with a lot of bugfixes and some new features. The new features includes:

• AlbumGUI :
  • All Album tree views are ported to pure Qt4 model/view implementation.

• ImageEditor :
  • Brightness/Contrast/gamma tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Color Balance tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Hue/Saturation/Lightness tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Auto Color Correction tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Channel Mixer tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Black and White tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • White Balance tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Adjust Curves tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Adjust Levels tool is multithreaded and use a zoomable preview widget.
  • Complete rewrite of the FilmGrain tool. FilmGrain tool use now YCrCb color space to add noise. Graininess size can be adjusted with an option to set-up photographic distribution of noise. Different amounts of noise can be added to highlights, shadows and midtones.

• BatchQueueManager :
  • New tool to
    • fix Brightness/Contrast/gamma.
    • adjust Color Balance.
    • Hue/Saturation/Lightness.
    • convert images color space.
    • mix color channel.
    • convert to Black and White.
    • adjust White Balance.
    • adjust Curves.
    • blur images.
    • add Film Grain to images.
    • apply Local Contrast (LDR tone mapping).
    • add/remove vignetting.
    • invert image colors.
    • convert color bits depth.
    • add border around images.
  • Rotate tool support Free Rotation adjustments.
  • It's now possible to Stop and restart a processed queue.

digiKam 1.2.0 is not yet available for any linux distribution. However, if you are upto it, you can download and compile from the source.