Dawn
Dawn is a cross-platform colour-managed image browser, focusing on image fidelity.
See Why you need a better image viewer if you feel lost.
Design-wise, the project is an amalgamation of older efforts and desires. We’re at our first milestone. Also see Plan, and a detailed Rationale. There is more to come.
The project comes with a maintenance guarantee—it is actively used.
Features
We care about
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Wide-gamut, high-bit-depth output: 10-bit displays in Adobe RGB or Display P3.
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16-bit internal precision in order to minimise quantisation errors.
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Gamma-correct scaling if appropriate.
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Good scaling: GIMP’s NoHalo is an awesome compromise for upscaling both photos and man-made images.
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Loading as much as we can from any file format at the best possible quality: multi-page TIFF, 16-bit PNG, 12-bit JPEG, HDR, SVG/PDF, etc.; up to 65535 pixels per side.
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Making good use of computing resources, exercising the GPU and all CPU cores.
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Superb keyboard accessibility: we recognise HIGs and also have Vimium-style link hints.
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We never silently move or modify image files.
Rejected
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Image editing: GIMP works well enough already. Though we include a lossless JPEG cropper utility.
Packages
Stable releases are hosted on GitHub, the same selection as below.
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Development Linux Flatpak, Arch Linux AUR.
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Development Windows ZIP, Windows installer; note that Wine is partly incompatible.
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Development unsigned Apple Silicon macOS ZIP, macOS disk image may need
xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine …. Notarisation would cost us $99 a year.
On Windows, if you run the application with a high integrity level and you have no true Vulkan backend installed, it may not initialise. Manually rename vk_swiftshader.dll to vulkan-1.dll. You will obtain software rendering.
Building
See Building from source.
User documentation
Open the user guide by pressing F1 (Linux, Windows) or Command-? (macOS) in the application. This includes a necessary section on system configuration.
Test image
When zoomed in, you should be able to see the finer steps. When zoomed out, the bottom row should look more like ‘linear 188’, not ‘sRGB 128’.
Competition
The macOS Preview.app is excellent at what it does, if limited in scope: it effortlessly handles wide gamuts, high bit depth, and gamma-correct scaling.
Electron-based viewers like Light Matter are promising in that browser engines typically handle things well, at the cost of being rather heavyweight.
digiKam must be mentioned, as it covers a lot of the advanced features of this project. Sadly, it’s obviously been designed by programmers, and the programmer behind Dawn can’t make heads or tails of the UI.
Acknowledgments
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Darrell R. Commander for libjpeg-turbo
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Marti Maria for Little CMS
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Nigel Tao for Wuffs
Contributing and support
Use https://git.janouch.name/p/dawn to report any bugs, request features,
or submit pull requests. The lead developer also accepts git send-email.
If you want to discuss the project, feel free to join at
ircs://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.
Bitcoin donations are accepted at: 12r5uEWEgcHC46xd64tt3hHt9EUvYYDHe9
Licence
This software is released under the terms of the MPL 2.0 licence, the text of which is included within the package along with the list of authors.
Based on what’s bundled and linked, the binary package may become restricted by variants of GPL.