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