Ansel Co-Op
@Ansel

Ansel is an open-source raw photo editor for artists — a 2022 fork of darktable that keeps the imaging science and rewrites the GUI (less than 30% of the code shared with darktable 4.0, less than 25% with 5.6).

This team is the canonical way to support Ansel and its infrastructure. Its members are the people who do the work, and the money is split among them by public takes. It pays for:

• the editor (ansel, GPL-3.0), with nightly builds for Linux, Windows and macOS,
• the documentation in 10 languages and the website in 9 — ansel.photos, whose domain is paid from here,
• Chantal, the search engine indexing 47,000 pages of Ansel and photography documentation, answering ~1,100 questions a month, free, no account (hosted by Aurélien Pierre for now),
• VirtualSecretary, Chantal Python backend: web crawler, natural language processing and search index,
• LensSerious, an high-performance port of LensFun database of lens correction profiles, reimplemented in optimised C and OpenCL code,
• ansel-denoise, a denoising UNET neural network trained on raw photographs contributed by the community, whose trained models are used in Ansel's raw denoise (AI) module. It is one of the very few denoising AI able to work before demosaicing, ensuring demosaicing will not worsen the noise,
• the unglamorous part: servers, the build and test infrastructure, a crawler running 24/7, and the AI subscriptions (Claude) used for development and documentation.

The ultimate goal is a co-operative in which the users actually own the project — where contributing buys a share of the house and a voice in its choices, not a product. Until that legal structure exists, this Liberapay team is what keeps the boat afloat.

Everything the project makes is free and stays free — no rewards, nothing to unlock. If Ansel or its documentation serves you, this is where its bills get paid.