Ansel is unclaimed —

Ansel

Your digital darkroom·ansel.photos

Ansel is an open-source raw photo editor for digital artists, forked from darktable, designed for non-destructive editing of raw photographs and film scans. It offers advanced color science (CIE CAT 2016, JzAzBz, darktable UCS 2022), tonal and color-grading tools, image reconstruction features like dehazing, denoising and lens deblurring, and stores editing histories as text so users can revert to any prior step. It is distributed as installers/AppImages for Linux, Windows and macOS.

What it's for

Non-destructive raw photo editingManaging collections of picturesColor calibration with a Color CheckerColor-grading for creative and corrective purposesColor matching across a series of shotsHue/chroma/lightness based masking and selective effectsHDR tone mapping and dynamic range compressionZone-system exposure editingLens deblurring and focus recoveryDehazing foggy or hazy shotsDenoising chromatic and luminance noiseHighlights reconstruction in blown areasAutomatic perspective correctionCensoring/anonymizing faces and license platesExporting to common file formats

Features 20

Automatic perspective correction via detected vertical/horizontal lines
Censoring/anonymizing tool
Chantal AI-powered documentation search engine
Chromatic and luminance denoising
Color calibration via Color Checker
Color matching using CIE Lab coordinates or sampled colors
Color-grading in RGB, Ych or HSB color spaces
Command Line Interface
Compatible with darktable 2.x–4.0 database and XMP files
Dehazing
Editing history stored as text, revertible at any step
HDR tone mapping with gamut mapping
Highlights reconstruction
Hue/chroma/lightness qualifying and keying masks
Machine-learning based lens deblurring
Nightly/portable builds (AppImage, Windows installer, macOS packages)
Non-destructive raw and film scan editing
Parametric and drawn mask combination with boolean operations
Raw decoding via Rawspeed and Libraw
Zone-system exposure editing with edge-preserving contrast

At a glance

free tieropen source

TypeDesktop app

DeploymentInstalled (local)

PlatformsWindows, macOS, Linux

LanguagesEnglish, French, Italian, Chinese, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch

Fordigital artists, photographers

Integrations

GithubGitlabSentry.ioPostHog

Resources

Docs

Pricing

Ansel is free, open-source software (GNU/GPL v3); no pricing plans or paid tiers are stated on the pages.