RawTherapee

RawTherapee develops raw photographs across Linux, Windows and macOS, released as libre software under version 3 of the GNU General Public License. It is notable for the depth of control it hands the user over demosaicing and the rest of the development process, precisely the stage most editors decide on your behalf.

The program is written mostly in C++ with a GTK+ front end. Raw files are read through a patched version of dcraw, extended by an in-house solution that adds high quality support for camera models dcraw does not cover and improves accuracy on some it already handles.

A few things are worth knowing before installing it.

• Formats: raw files from a broad range of digital cameras, plus HDR DNG, JPEG, TIFF and PNG.
• Audience: enthusiast newcomers wanting to understand how digital imaging works, through to semi-professional photographers.
• Documentation: RawPedia is the project's own manual, and reading it is part of the deal, since concepts such as color balance are assumed to be looked up elsewhere.
• Not included: digital asset management, printing and uploading are out of scope, left to specialized software that already does them well.
• Building: RawPedia carries per-platform instructions and the dependency list for each operating system.

Binaries and source tarballs are published on the project website, and discussion happens on the pixls.us forum. Professionals can work with it in complete freedom, but should expect to pair it with other tools for the peripheral parts of a workflow.