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."

Comments

Re:Oh sweet Jesus no

[Hurricane78]

When I remember how my PHBs handled GUI interfaces in the past, my guess is:
- MOAR BUTTONZ!!!!!!111one(lim (x->0) (sin(x)/x))
- Highlight this! It is important!
- Oh noes! Now everything is highlighted!... Just make it red!
- My clickiez iz 2 smal! Iz maek it huuuugeee!
- Oh noes! No spaes left on full HD! Let’s splitz, wif 1 button in every modal windowz!
- Nowz too compleecated! We needz MOAR WEEZARDZ!!!!
- Yz ur program so sloow n stoopid! Me no can use! Plz 2 fix ASAP! U SUCK! KTHXBAI!
*Original developer starts crying about... now*

P.S.: Yes, my PHBs were very similar to cats. Their behavior made no sense at all, and they ignored every advice or information you gave them. Except when it was about money. They they were all over you. The rest of the time they were outside the house until late at night, or asleep in their office.

Re:Command line experts

[Sir_Lewk]

No, and yet it seems only open source programs get it right 99% of the time.

dcraw is used by almost all raw converters

[SuperBanana]

It's not commonly known because it is just plain wrong. Photoshop and Lightroom use Adobe Camera RAW.

Adobe Camera Raw, as well as most of the other commercial software which decodes raw images, used dcraw source and probably still uses much of that code. The license for dcraw permits it, and Dave Coffin is pretty proud of that. He should be- his code is used worldwide by millions of photographers.

Google around, bud. You can find dozens of articles, as well as Dave's resume, talking about this. He lists the dozens of programs which use dcraw, too, on the dcraw homepage.

Re:dcraw is used by almost all raw converters

[tlhIngan]

Adobe Camera Raw, as well as most of the other commercial software which decodes raw images, used dcraw source and probably still uses much of that code. The license for dcraw permits it, and Dave Coffin is pretty proud of that. He should be- his code is used worldwide by millions of photographers.

No big surprise - dcraw has reverse-engineered *every* RAW file format out there, and new cameras are being added pretty quickly. (The dirty little secret of RAW files is many manufacturers make RAW file formats proprietary so there's no generic RAW file opener. That is, until dcraw came around. Hopefully things will change with the digital negative format (DNF) format which is a standardized RAW file format).

If you want to open a RAW file, dcraw will understand it. He's got a right to be proud of it. Imagine trying to create a workflow if you have a bunch of different equipment and RAW files, and have to use Nikon's tool for once, Canon's for another, Sony's for a third, etc...

Re:dcraw is used by almost all raw converters

[E-Lad]

I wouldn't be so generous in your detraction.

ACR, as it stands today, does not appear to be built around dcraw as you imply. It may at some point in the past used snippets or knowledge gleaned from dcraw and just might still today, but ACR is very much Adobe's own creation. In fact, one of the very articles you sort of point to by urging the OP to "google around" talks about this, with Thomas Knoll of Adobe essentially saying "Thanks but no thanks" W.R.T. Mr. Coffin reverse engineering the encryption in Nikon's RAW format.

I use Lightroom and PS CS4 on a daily basis, so I have ACR available and did some snooping. One thing that jumps out at me:

[daleg@iridium]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-Ins/CS4/File Formats/Camera Raw.plugin/Contents/MacOS$ strings Camera\ Raw | grep -i copyright
Copyright 2009 Adobe Systems, Inc.
Copyright 2008 Adobe Systems, Inc.
17CCopyrightMLUCTag
Copyright %4d Adobe Systems Incorporated
$$$/Private/CRaw/About/Copyright=^C ^0 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.
copyright
xmpDM:copyright
COPYRIGHT : Copyright (c) 2002-2007, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe XMP Core Copyright (c) 2002-2007, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright
tiff:Copyright
Copyright (c) 1998 Hewlett-Packard Company
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright (c) Eastman Kodak Company, 1999, all rights reserved.
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 2005 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 2006 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright (c) 1998 Hewlett-Packard Company
Copyright 2000 Adobe Systems, Inc.
13CCopyrightTag

While probably not definitive, I would expect to see a salutation to Mr. Coffin and dcraw in there if there were dcraw bits present. There is one other binary installed with ACR, a library by the name of NkMiniLib.dylib. Given the name I would suppose this is a library containing the properly-licensed smarts required for ACR to decrypt Nikon NEF files. I admit that this is a hunch on my part, but I think it's a good one given the known circumstances around Nikon as a company and its RAW format - Nikon would rather you buy their Capture NX 2 software for RAW file manipulation. I can only imagine how much Adobe paid or pays for licensing the ability to do this in ACR (and by extension - in Lightroom and Photoshop.)

It is also well-known that Adobe's ACR team creates the profiles that plug into ACR for each camera, they don't lift them from dcraw. It's likely they get samples from manufacturers in advance or soon after a camera's release to divine the profile themselves for release in a future version of ACR.

So color me not convinced, regardless of what Mr. Coffin might put on his resume. In the course of "googling around" I cannot find one authoritative bit of info linking ACR to dcraw. ACR as it stands today doesn't appear to have a whiff of dcraw in it judging from some minor binary snooping... so until proven otherwise, I'd say that millions of photographers wordwide do not use his code as you might claim.

Re:RAW conversion for GIMP?

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

The real reason to shoot RAW is the world of post-processing options that shooting RAW presents you. Because of the 12 bits of color depth you have more latitude with playing with the exposure controls; if you make sure that you don't overexpose anything (i.e. you "expose for the highlights") you can compress the dynamic range a bit to bring out more detail in the dark areas. Because white balance hasn't been applied yet, you can change white balance post-processing losslessly. (There's software that will give you white-balance controls over JPEG pictures in a similar manner, but it's lossy.)

Agreed. You've added more detail than I did, when I said "the JPEG file has less data (8-bit vs. 12 to 14 bit RAW) and suffers when heavy post processing is applied."

I have a habit of describing how a watch works when people simply want to know the time. Overcompensating, I left out lots of detail. Perhaps I oversimplified.

But 16-bit-per-pixel (actually 3x16bpp=48bpp) editing is not lossless. Generally the loss of quality is not visible, but not in all cases. But as you point out, its WAY better then 24bit (3x8bit) JPEGs.