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

Oh sweet Jesus no

[Anonymous Coward]

He opened up the code so other people could work on the GUI? This will end badly.

Re:Oh sweet Jesus no

[__aaclcg7560]

Not really. While the Mac and Windows GUI experts get into a pissing match over graphic design, the command line experts will have the interface nailed down. When the project is abandoned, the program will continue to live on forever in Linux distributions.

Re:Oh sweet Jesus no

[0100010001010011]

Exactly the problem with FOSS image programs.

GIMP was written by programmers. They add features that they think everyone wants and implements them the way think think is best.

Photoshop was started by photographers. People that wanted to do stuff digitally. It wasn't until I started going through my dad's old photography books that I understood what 1/2 of the tools were and why they were named.

You FOSS zealots can keep on about GIMP, I'll keep getting work done in Photoshop.

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:Oh sweet Jesus no

[Pulzar]

Great, so you are saying I have to be a photography expert before I can even start to understand the names of things in photoshop. That seems much better.

Why is that a bad thing? If you're going to be fine-tuning and editing photos, you should know what you're doing. If you don't, well, there's always "auto levels" or "auto color" menu options to use, and off you go. For those that do know what they're doing, more advanced tools are available and are called what you expect them to be called.

Re:Oh sweet Jesus no

[im_thatoneguy]

Great, so you are saying I have to be a photography expert before I can even start to understand the names of things in photoshop. That seems much better.

Yes. That's exactly what we're saying. Just like you have to be a "Compute Expert" and understand what "Mouse" or "Keyboard" is and that a "CD-ROM" goes into the "Tray" or that you need to "Double-Click" on an "Icon" in order to run a program.

Every area has its own vocabulary. Often the names for things are throwbacks to decades or centuries earlier. In the case of photography you can take something like "exposure". In Photoshop exposure has no meaning unless you understand the photographic concept. Similarly in Photoshop the word "Dodge" means nothing unless you understand it from the photographic concept of "dodging" which involves blocking the light of the print in an area and reducing the exposure. Similarly "burning" means selectively extending the exposure to a region of your print. Burn means nothing when you're talking about pixels, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it optically. There are many ways to brighten or darken an image. In the case of Dodge and Burn as an example though you're talking about a very specific type of brightening and darkening.

dcraw

[characterZer0]

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.

Only?

[Xabraxas]

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.

RAW conversion for GIMP?

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

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.

Re:RAW conversion for GIMP?

[yankpop]

Might GIMP soon include RAW conversion? I sure hope so.

It already does, via UFRaw and Rawstudio, and maybe others.

Re:RAW conversion for GIMP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for this post! I read the web page, and part of the forums and still never understood that the goddamned program was good for. This is all too common in open source.

Folks- if you're going to put your code out there, then tell the world what the hell it does and what it's good for- not that you've improved the frobulation, and rejiggered the comblastictor.

grumpy

Re:RAW conversion for GIMP?

[EvanED]

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.

IMO, the conversion from RAW -> JPEG being done better than on the camera chip is by far the least compelling reason to shoot RAW, especially with Canons (where the on-camera processor already does a really job). 99% of people would never be able to tell the difference between the two processing options, even on a properly calibrated screen.

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.)

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.

Re:The only free program for processing RAW?

[The End Of Days]

Well, it's the only one that calls itself the only one.

Re:Hey, Libertarians!

[selven]

Yeah, the free software troll generator is still inferior to the proprietary solutions. Sorry about that.

Just plain wrong

[syousef]

. 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.

Plug for Bibblepro

[swillden]

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.

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:Command line experts

[im_thatoneguy]

Not too much of a surprise since the reason most closed source applications have poor CLI is because they just don't care about it.

When all you have is a CLI it better work. When a CLI is just a bonus feature to enable specific workflows and batch operations then the CLI is usually minimal.

Re:Command line experts

[Eudial]

Yes the difference is blatantly obvious. 10 people on earth can use Unix and Windows has engulfed the world.

So you're saying because a million lemmings run off a cliff, that's the best thing to do?