RawTherapee is a powerful, cross-platform raw photo processing program, released under the GNU General Public License Version 3. It is written in C++ using a GTK+ front-end and a patched version of dcraw for reading raw files. It is notable for the advanced control it gives the user over the demosaicing and developing process.
Target audience and feature set
Rawtherapee is a free software (as in free beer) aimed at developing raw files from a broad range of camera (all files than can be decoded by dcraw from Dave Coffin), but can also edit standard image files (jpeg, png, tiff) and some HDR files. The targeted user base ranges from the enthusiast photographer with some basic technical knowledge in color science (it's not mandatory, but it's better if you e.g. know what a color profile is) to semi-professional users.
Of course, professionals can use RawTherapee (for free) too, but will probably lack some peripheral features like Digital Assets Management, printing, uploading, etc. RawTherapee is not and probably will not be an all-in-one software in the foreseeable future. But the Open Source community is sufficiently developed now to offer you all that missing peripheral features.
The general feature set includes :
- basic file handling (move, delete, review, ranking, tagging) through thumnails
- image editing through 32 bits floating points filters (called Tools) that affect the whole image uniformly (by opposition to local editing, which is planned but still on the TODO list)
- export to standard 8 bits image file, with possibility to automatically load the resulting image in you favorite image editor for local adjustment
Links
Website: http://rawtherapee.com/
Official documentation: http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/
Download RawTherapee: http://rawtherapee.com/downloads
Download source code tarballs: http://rawtherapee.com/shared/source/
Source code documentation: http://michaelezra.com/projects/rt/documentation/
Git handbook: http://git-scm.com/book/en/
Compilation, branches and Git
Refer to RawPedia for a detailed explanation of how to get the necessary dependencies and how to compile RawTherapee.
Linux: http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Linux