RawTherapee
Raw photo processing software with advanced control over demosaicing. Ideal for newcomers, semi-professionals, and professionals. Supports HDR DNGs, JPGs, and TIFFs, with in-house enhancements for some camera models. Open-source, lacks digital asset management.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application types
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- BSD
- Snapcraft
- Flathub
- PortableApps.com
- Flatpak
Features
Properties
- Privacy focused
Features
- RAW Photo Editors
- Image Optimizer
- Non Destructive Editing
- Raw converter
- Dark Mode
- Multiple languages
- Ad-free
- Image Processing
- Works Offline
- No registration required
- Batch Rename Files
- Hardware Accelerated
- Live Preview
- Batch Editing
- Drawing Tablet Support
- Pressure Sensitivity
- No Tracking
- WYSIWYG Support
- File Tagging
- Portable
- Curve Manipulation
- Color Picker
- Batch processing
- Batch conversion
- Tagging
Tags
RawTherapee News & Activities
Recent News
- POX published news article about RawTherapee
RAW image editor RawTherapee 5.12 improves color tools, camera compatibility, and moreRawTherapee 5.12 introduces new capabilities aimed at photographers seeking advanced raw editing op...
- POX published news article about RawTherapee
RawTherapee 5.11 released with HiDPI support, extanded compatibility and many improvementsRawTherapee, a widely-used cross-platform RAW image processing software, has released version 5.11,...
- POX published news article about RawTherapee
RawTherapee 5.10 unveiled with many improvements, enhanced metadata handling, and moreRawTherapee, the cross-platform raw image processing program, has unveiled version 5.10, a signific...
Recent activities
Maoholguin added RawTherapee as alternative to Affinity
vasilis_evag added RawTherapee as alternative to Photonest Plus
hoi-lau added RawTherapee as alternative to VisualGPT
POX added RawTherapee as alternative to RapidRAW- robogena liked RawTherapee
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What is RawTherapee?
RawTherapee is a powerful, cross-platform raw photo processing program. It is written mostly in C++ using a GTK+ front-end. It uses a patched version of dcraw for reading raw files, with an in-house solution which adds the highest quality support for certain camera models unsupported by dcraw and enhances the accuracy of certain raw files already supported by dcraw. It is notable for the advanced control it gives the user over the demosaicing and development process.
RawTherapee is designed for developing raw files from a broad range of digital cameras, as well as HDR DNG files and non-raw image formats (JPEG, TIFF and PNG). The target audience ranges from enthusiast newcomers who wish to broaden their understanding of how digital imaging works to semi-professional photographers. Knowledge in color science is not compulsory, but it is recommended that you are eager to learn and ready to read our documentation (RawPedia) as well as look up basic concepts which lie outside the scope of RawPedia, such as color balance, elsewhere.
Of course, professionals may use RawTherapee too while enjoying complete freedom, but will probably lack some peripheral features such as Digital Asset Management, printing, uploading, etc. RawTherapee is not aimed at being an inclusive all-in-one program, and the open-source community is sufficiently developed by now to offer all those peripheral features in other specialized software.







Comments and Reviews
Because of this software, I can completely give up windows and go to my favourite Ubuntu. And I do not need to pay for Lightroom!
Unstable on both Debian and Mint. Decide to abandon editing an image so you double-click on another image to edit it and boom, the app goes away. Even while it's running, the user interface is excruciatingly complex. Someone wanted a particular method of sharpening but another two people wanted their own favorite ways so there are many methods to accomplish things...so many that you have to wade through a wasteland of detritus just to get your photo presentable. This is what you get when you have an open-source community contributing to an app; everyone gets to have their own favorite and a reasonably advanced user is dumped into a technology rabbit-hole. I'll stick with Lightroom...
It's like driving a manual transmission car, full control, but you need to know how to drive it. The processing profiles can apply parameters «selectively», and can be manually edited using a plain text editor. Very useful when you have lots of photos to batch edit. Interaction performance when switching photos could be improved with better caching techniques.
A worthy free alternative to Lightroom.
I, as an amateur photographer, use rawtherapee to process photos in conjunction with hugin and digikam. It have wide choice demosaicing algorithms, even "Pixel Shift" for Pentax cameras, what was useful for me. Interface clean and comprehensible, but this application not for beginners in photoprocessing.
I'm used to work in Darktable, but it did not work very well on my newly bought laptop. I was forced to look for options and tried RawTherapee out. Right now I'm really impressed and I might never switch back to Darktable.
I have tried darktable and I didn't like it's management. The only drawback is that is is quite slow, which is probably because my computer is quite slow.
sadly it does not run on OS X Lion (10.7) at the moment, eagerly awaiting updates.