RawTherapee icon
RawTherapee icon

RawTherapee

 225 likes

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.

RawTherapee screenshot 1

License model

  • FreeOpen Source

Country of Origin

  • US flagUnited States

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • BSD
  • Snapcraft
  • Flathub
  • PortableApps.com
  • Flatpak
4.1 / 5 Avg rating (9)
225likes
7comments

Features

Suggest and vote on features

Properties

  1.  Privacy focused

Features

  1.  RAW Photo Editors
  2.  Image Optimizer
  3.  Non Destructive Editing
  4.  Raw converter
  5.  Dark Mode
  6.  Multiple languages
  7.  Ad-free
  8.  Image Processing
  9.  Works Offline
  10.  No registration required
  11.  Batch Rename Files
  12.  File Tagging
  13.  WYSIWYG Support
  14.  Drawing Tablet Support
  15.  Hardware Accelerated
  16.  Live Preview
  17.  Pressure Sensitivity
  18.  No Tracking
  19.  Batch Editing
  20.  Portable
  21.  Batch conversion
  22.  Color Picker
  23.  Batch processing
  24.  Curve Manipulation
  25.  Tagging

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Comments and Reviews

   
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Top Positive Comment
KinLiHK
Sep 18, 2016
2

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!

Top Negative Comment
BJ
Jan 31, 2023
-1

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...

axcqhsbsadoukciozt
Jul 17, 2020
0

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.

Andrew
Jul 3, 2019
2

A worthy free alternative to Lightroom.

Andrew
Jul 3, 2019
0

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.

EmasXP
Jul 3, 2014
1

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.

declanmarks
Jul 21, 2016

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.

DXM
Jun 29, 2012
-6

sadly it does not run on OS X Lion (10.7) at the moment, eagerly awaiting updates.

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.

RawTherapee information

Our users have written 7 comments and reviews about RawTherapee, and it has gotten 225 likes

RawTherapee was added to AlternativeTo by Vonchilliman on Apr 22, 2009 and this page was last updated Feb 4, 2025.