Dear list,
the Lensfun project was started by Andrew Zabolotny in 2007 to lay the
foundation of a free and open source database for the correction of
photographic lens errors. After Lensfun did not receive any more fixes
and database updates, I more or less took over the maintenance from
Andrew in 2012. Afterwards, my main focus was to continuously integrate
the submitted profiles and database changes and to regularly release new
versions to make these changes available for the application users.
From 2012 till today a lot of changes and improvements came to the
Lensfun project. Torsten Bronger established the calibration webservice
and GitHub repo where today most of the calibration work is done by a
couple of people. He also dived deep into the maths behind the
corrections and fixed many errors and inaccuracies.
Many other people contributed fixes, lens profiles and tutorials with
instructions and scripts to facilitate the calibration process.
If we look at the number of lens profiles for each release, we can see
that there is an increasing growth and the Git master database now
nearly counts 1000 lens profiles.
0.2.6 350
0.2.7 374
0.2.8 441
0.3.0 580
0.3.1 667
0.3.2 714
Master 978
More and more image editors and even some commercial applications today
use Lensfun and its database for their processing. That's a great
achievement and underlines the importance of the project.
In 2016 I started to refactor most of the library internals as it turned
out that its structure cannot be extended, e.g. with the perspective
correction now available in the alpha release, and was really difficult
to maintain. A lot of code has been modernized and cleaned up to make
Lensfun ready for the future. But unfortunately, the time I can spent in
coding for the Lensfun project since then has decreased a lot and today
the project is more or less stalled.
However, there is still a lot of work to be done. Just to name a few
things that seem to be important to me:
1) Create a new stable release
2) Allow database lens entries that contain calibration data from
various crop factors. Lensfun then just picks the closest one for each
requested modification.
3) Move the complete project to GitHub and modernize the project
infrastructure and build system. Use Travis CI and Appveyor for testing.
4) Develop a strategy how to decouple the database from the library
source code to allow a faster release of new profiles to the user base.
There is already the lensfun-updata-data script, but this only works
reliably on Linux and not on OSX and Windows until now.
Currently, I do not have time to maintain the Lensfun project in way
that is satisfactory for myself, for the community and for the users.
This project really needs someone who takes a look at the bigger picture
and has the vision and motivation to keep the project alive and in a
good condition.
Therefore, I would like to ask the community to take over the Lensfun
project management and maintenance in the next months. I will still be
around and contribute from time to time. But to be realistic, none of
the above listed changes will happen if no one else kicks in and does
the job. Ideally, Lensfun is taken under the hood of a bigger project
with experienced developers like e.g. Darktable or Rawtherapee that
already makes use of Lensfun.
Let me know what you think and if you want to get involved!
Cheers,
Sebastian
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