This is certainly a Matryoshka doll of wrappings: - At root there is dcraw [1], which is Dave Coffin's sometimes inscrutable but massive and high-functioning C

This is certainly a Matryoshka doll of wrappings: - At root there is dcraw [1], which is Dave Coffin's sometimes inscrutable but massive and high-functioning CLI utility to read virtually any raw file from virtually any camera. - On top of this, we have LibRaw [2] which "librarizes" dcraw so it can play nice with other C programs. LibRaw is big and complicated (like dcraw) but incredibly helpful. - On top of that, there is rawkit [3] (with which I wasn't formerly familiar, and looks interesting), which provides a Python cffi interface to LibRaw. - And now we have a REPL built on top of rawkit! Somewhat perversely, I hope someone makes a CLI interface to rawkit, and then we could call it, er, dcraw? One caveat here is that dcraw and its prodigies, though amazing, do just the initial steps in tuning up a RAW file -- the demosaicing and just a few other niceties such as white balance. If you want to process the image in a sophisticated way (e.g. curves, local contrast adjustment, shadows/highlights, sharpening, masks, etc.) you'll need to switch to a different tool, such as darktable [4] or RawTherapee [5]. Or use ImageMagick, as mentioned by another commenter. Note that darktable now can be scripted via lua, which could be another source of flexibility. And also that darktable ditched LibRaw for RawSpeed [6], which is more elegant than LibRaw, as it was written from scratch as library to load RAW files (and do nothing else), rather than, like dcraw, accreted over the course of many generations of digital cameras. 1. http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/ http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/ 2. http://www.libraw.org/about http://www.libraw.org/about 3. https://rawkit.readthedocs.org/ https://rawkit.readthedocs.org/ 4. http://darktable.org/ http://darktable.org/ 5. http://rawtherapee.com/ http://rawtherapee.com/ 6. https://github.com/klauspost/rawspeed/tree/develop https://github.com/klauspost/rawspeed/tree/develop