Dawn
Dawn is a multiplatform colour-managed image browser, with very high standards for fidelity and responsivity.
See Why you need a better image viewer if you don’t get this.
Design-wise, the project is an amalgamation of older efforts and desires. Right now, we’ve mostly reached our first milestone, and we’re mostly cleaning up after rapid development before we can afford to continue making large steps.
Features
We care about
-
Wide-gamut, high bit depth SDR: 10-bit displays in Adobe RGB or Display P3.
-
16-bit internal precision in order to minimise quantisation errors.
-
Gamma-correct scaling: see below for a test that your iPhone fails.
-
Good scaling: GIMP’s NoHalo is an awesome compromise for upscaling of both photos and man-made images.
-
Loading as much as we can from any file format at the best possible quality: multi-page TIFF, 16-bit PNG, 12-bit JPEG, etc.; resolutions up to 65535 at least on one side.
-
Making good use of computing resources: exercise the GPU and all CPU cores.
-
Superb keyboard accessibility: we recognise HIGs and also have Vimium-style link hints.
-
We never silently move or modify image files.
Do it yourself
-
HDR: the project scope is huge as it is, but you’re welcome to lend a hand.
Rejected
-
Image editing: GIMP works well enough already.
-
UI animations are found to be distracting, frustrating, and even despised.
Packages
Things are in flux. Linux and macOS are currently too painful to provide portable packages for: the former needs labour, the latter money.
You can get a package with the latest development version using Arch Linux’s AUR.
Windows packages can be found here (latest ZIP, installer), and they work in Wine.
On Windows, if your account is ‘high integrity’ and you have no true Vulkan backend installed, manually rename vk_swiftshader.dll to vulkan-1.dll. You will obtain software rendering.
Building
See Building from source.
Configuration
See Configuring your system. If everything goes beautifully, the following test image will exercise your display’s true gamut, and you’ll be able to see the finer steps. The bottom row should look more like ‘linear 188’ (a popular bug).
Note that Dawn currently implements Bayer dithering, so you might not be able to distinguish an 8-bit swapchain.
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 heavy-weight.
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.
Contributing and Support
Use https://git.janouch.name/p/dawn to report any bugs, request features,
or submit pull requests. git send-email is tolerated. If you want to discuss
the project, feel free to join at ircs://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.
Bitcoin donations are accepted at: 12r5uEWEgcHC46xd64tt3hHt9EUvYYDHe9
License
This software is released under the terms of the MPL 2.0 license, the text of which is included within the package along with the list of authors.
With Little CMS plugins bundled in, the binary package becomes GPL-licenced.