RawTherapee 3.0 alpha 1 screenshot |
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| Developer(s) | Gábor Horváth and an open source dev team |
| Stable release | 3.0.1 / July 26, 2011 |
| Preview release | 4.0.2.2 (development version 4.0.2, revision 2) / daily[1] |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Type | Raw image processing |
| License | proprietary (up to version 2.4.1) GPLv3 (as of version 3.0 alpha 1) |
| Website | www.rawtherapee.com |
RawTherapee is a cross-platform raw image processing application, recently released under the GPLv3. It is written in C++ using a GTK+ front-end and dcraw by Gábor Horváth of Budapest, Hungary. It is notable in that it was one of the first raw converters available for Linux with a reasonably usable GUI, and for the control it gives the user over the demosaicing process. The name used to stand for "The Experimental Raw Photo Editor", however that acronym has been dropped, and RawTherapee is now a full name in itself.[2]
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RawTherapee involves the concept of non-destructive editing, similar to that of some other raw conversion software. Adjustments made by a user are not applied immediately to the image, but the parameters are saved to a separate settings file (however, the user can see all effects of adjustments in the preview window). Actual adjustments to image are made during the export (or 'save' in terms of RawTherapee) process.
All the internal processing is done in 16 bits/channel color resolution.
RawTherapee can work with both raw files from digital cameras and usual images.
While reading raw files it relies on the dcraw code, but only for parsing formats, not for processing. Thus, RawTherapee supports all the formats supported by dcraw.
Additionally, RawTherapee supports the following image formats:
RawTherapee provides the user with a file browser, which shows thumbnails of images along with brief shooting info. The browser includes 5-star rating, flagging, and an EXIF-based filter.
While the image is opened for editing, the user is provided with a preview window with pan and zoom capabilities. A color histogram is also present offering linear and logarithmic scales, and separate R, G, B and L channels. All adjustments are reflected in the history queue and the user can revert any of the changes at any time. There is also the possibility of taking multiple snapshots of the history queue, allowing for various versions of the image being shown, however these snapshots are not written to the sidecar file and are subsequently lost once the photo has been closed.
Output format can be selected from:
The latest version marked as stable was 2.4.1 released in September 2009. Since then RawTherapee has become open source (it was closed before 2010) and a number of developers have joined the project. As a result of this, version 2.4.1 is very outdated[3], and although the latest builds offer numerous new features[4], they are not officially marked as stable, although numerous users have reported that some branches of the program are stable under Linux and Mac. The Windows builds are more prone to crashes.
This new series is now on the development cycle. Currently version 3.0 alpha 2 is feature frozen and undergoing stabilization. It is not production ready yet, as the sidecar file PP3 files of the current alpha version might not be compatible with the final 3.0 version, but users are encouraged to try the latest version as it has had a complete code overhaul since version 2.4.1 and offers many new features. Extensive testing and reporting bugs in the RawTherapee forum or on the RawTherapee Google Code page will help the development team in releasing a more stable final version.
This version incorporates some major changes:
This new version is the most actively developed version. It incorporates some major changes:
Because of the higher RAM requirements the 4.0 version is still released for 32bit operating systems, but 64bit versions are highly recommended for stability.
RawTherapee is available for Linux (32 and 64-bit), Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and Mac OS X (32-bit, x86).[5]