The majority of Raw photo editors charge regular membership fees or demand customers to buy user licences, which can run into the hundreds of dollars. With the free alternative RawTherapee, photographers may edit Raw files from a variety of cameras on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Version 5.9 of the free software RawTherapee has just been released. The significant update was issued more than two years after version 5.8. The latest release’s many new features and enhanced camera compatibility. The Spot Removal tool, which can be found in the Details page of the app, allows you to remove dust particles and other minute items from your photographs. The Haze Removal tool has also received a new saturation slider.
Temperature correlation is a new automatic white balancing technique found in the Color tab. The former auto white balance feature is still available but now goes by the moniker “RGB grey.” The Film Negative tool has been enhanced, and now supports photographs that are not in raw format.
Some updates have been made to the Raw tab of the software, including the addition of a Pre-process White Balance tool. The user can utilise this tool to decide whether channels should be automatically balanced by the app or whether the values the camera captured at the moment of capture should be used in their place. In addition to a Pixel Shift demosaicing approach that enables an average of all frames to handle motion over many frames, the Demosaicing tool now includes new dual-demosaicing methods.
The app’s non-destructive 32-bit (floating point) processing engine and contemporary demosaicing methods are used for raw image editing. DNG files with a high dynamic range can also be edited. The program offers flat field correction, hot/dead pixel correction, multiple-frame Raw files, dark frame subtraction, and pixel-shift compositing with automatic ghost masking.
There is an Advanced tab in the app for detailed photo editing. The software has tools for more experienced users, such as a Color Appearance & Lighting tool, formerly known as CIECAMO2, that includes CAM16, even if many settings are simple enough for beginners to understand. With this feature, users can modify an image’s colours so that they better correspond to how people typically perceive colour. There have been enhancements made to the Wavelet Levels tool.
Better local adjustment support has been added in RawTherapee 5.9. The Local tab now includes a Local Adjustments tool that enables users to carry out a variety of actions inside an area of the image that is defined by geometry or colour.
Additional enhancements include the option to resize an image by its long or short edge, a new Perspective Correction tool (Transform tab) that allows for automatic perspective correction, an improved UI theme that makes it easier to see which tools are in use, and a “centred square” crop guide made for working on images intended for use on social media.
Raw formats and colour profiles are now supported by a large number of cameras, including those made by Canon, Fujifilm, Hasselblad, Leica, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Panasonic, Ricoh, Sigma, and Sony.
Now available for Linux and Windows is RawTherapee 5.9. The macOS variant is not yet accessible. Any photo editor might have a learning curve, but RawTherapee offers a comprehensive user guide to assist photographers of all skill levels in getting the most out of their Raw photographs.
