Studio Time

Raw Therapee is a “raw editor” that works similarly to Adobe‘s Lightroom, Darktable and so on. Basically, it’s meant to deal with the large amount of information stored in a raw file. This allows you fine control of the photos you’ve taken of your artwork so that you can get better prints. You can make pretty landscape photos featuring full color sunsets, get appropriate skin tones in your portraits and so on as well.

The program works with several different file formats. This will allow you to screw up images in, um… “nonraw” formats as well. 🙂 Thankfully, it’s non-destructive so you can back off all of the weird little adjustments you’ve made while you were fiddling with stuff.

This thing has a scary amount of depth and a fairly high learning curve. If you do decide to use it you’re going to need the manual. Given what you can do with it… it’s probably worth learning if you deal with digital images. The program features an extensive collection of sharpening filters, noise reduction, a zillion different ways to change your brightness, contrast, gamma, color curves, etc… lens compensation, demosaicing, cropping, sizing and so on. …Most everything under the sun and a few adjustments that only come out at night. Quality is excellent… depending on just how carried away you get with the settings, of course.

Raw Therapee is free. It runs on Windows, MacOS and linux. You can use it as a basic organizer and viewer for your images and run batch processes on them. The program runs as a gimp plugin as well…