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Raw Therapee 3 Is Now Free Software
kantier writes "The only (as far as I know) usable and free (as in beer) program for processing RAW photos outside Windows or OS X is now also free as in freedom. From version 3 onwards, the code is licensed under the GPL v3. The main developer's reasons for opening up the program are a lack of time/resources for full dedication, and a lack of interest in some parts of the program (likes to fiddle with image-processing algorithms, not so much the GUI part) — so the F/OSS model seems to be a perfect fit for this project."
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
GPLv2
There is a gimp plugin that provides a very nice front end for it.
They've been in Debian for years.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The only (as far as I know) usable and free (as in beer) program for processing RAW photos outside Windows or OS X... DigiKam was the only one I knew about for AGES before I heard of Raw Therapee.
What about rawstudio and ufraw? I have used all three and I can say that while I like the features that rawtherapee has I like it the least overall. Everything is so slow that working on a RAW image takes forever. Rawstudio has the least amount of features but is very fast and the SVN version has added a few very important features. It is currently my favorite. UFRaw is nice but the interface isn't as clean as rawstudio and there is no batch processing. Every image has to be opened separately.
Time makes more converts than reason
Great news. For those who don't know, a digital camera's sensor is actually a monochrome sensor. It is not a true color sensor (except for Sigma cameras). Each seperate sensor cell (sensel) has a colored filter placed over it. So the color is actually calculated by compariing each sensel's value with the adjacent sensels. Thus the demosaic process is very important.
All digital cameras have a built-in processor that processes the raw data the creates a JPEG file. But the JPEG file has less data (8-bit vs. 12 to 14 bit RAW) and suffers when heavy post processing is applied. Thus most pros shoot in raw, as you can image PhotoShop, Lightroom, Aperture and others can do a much better job than the built-in processor.
The availability of a RAW converter for Linux is a big deal. Without it, Linux is very limited it its usefulness to photographers.
Might GIMP soon include RAW conversion? I sure hope so.
Place nail here >+
Well, it's the only one that calls itself the only one.
RAWTherapee uses dcraw under the hood.
Changes to the underlying version of dcraw are referenced in the version history on the project website's front page
http://www.rawtherapee.com/
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
No, I called it the only one, thinking I was right (when I wrote that)
. It is not commonly known, but dcraw is the basis of the decoding engines of almost all raw converter software (including Photoshop, LightZone, RawShooter, etc.).
It's not commonly known because it is just plain wrong. Photoshop and Lightroom use Adobe Camera RAW.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Bibblepro is a great commercial RAW converter that runs quite well on Linux. I've been using it for several years and really like both the job it does and the options it gives for structuring your workflow.
Not to detract from this new open source tool (which I look forward to trying out), but I like to point out that there is at least one really high quality tool for Linux users already.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
For the record, it's DNG, not DNF.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.